“Try it.”
His hand smoothed along my back instead, soothing, calming, healing. “The truth is that your father has no stake in this anymore,” he told me, his breath in my ear because he was bent over me, shielding me from the stares of the guards. “He lost. It may be a state with which he is unfamiliar, but it is nonetheless—”
“For the last time, I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I said, exasperated.
“Then why are you here?”
I felt like throwing his own words back at him, like telling him it was none of his damned business. But if I wanted answers, I was probably going to have to cough some up myself. And it wasn’t like there was any big secret.
“I’m freelancing on the smuggling task force. You know, the one you’re supposed to be helping with? And not because Mircea snapped his fingers. I happen to like the idea of the war ending early and the arms manufacturers dying poor.”
“And that’s all.”
“Yes! That’s all!”
Louis-Cesare frowned, and his hands stilled on my ass. “That is why you want the vampire? Because you suspect him of smuggling?”
“Well, it damn sure isn’t for the pleasure of his company!”
“Right back at you,” floated over from the duffel, which had landed by the wall.
“Why? What do you want with him?” I asked, thoroughly confused now.
“To buy back Christine!”
I blinked. Okay, that wouldn’t have been my first guess. Christine was Louis-Cesare’s former mistress, who had been kidnapped in order to blackmail him. A vampire who was accustomed to getting what he wanted had asked Louis-Cesare to stand in for him in a duel. One of his subordinates had challenged him, and if he lost the duel, he wouldn’t just lose his position, but his life.
That sort of substitution was allowable by vampire law, and Louis-Cesare had fought for other people in the past. But the man in question this time—Alejandro, head of the Latin American Senate—was known as a sadist who regularly did things that made even vampires blanch. The general consensus was that he wouldn’t be missed, and I guess Louis-Cesare agreed, because he told him to fight his own battles. So Alejandro had—by kidnapping Christine and vowing to return her only after his enemy was dead.
Unlike most vamps, Louis-Cesare seemed to have a problem with cold-blooded murder. He’d defeated Tomas, the challenger in question, but refused to kill him because the man’s only crime was trying to rid the world of a monster. So Alejandro had refused to release Christine. It was the sort of brutal politics vampire courts abound in, counting the lives that were ruined as insignificant as long as a sought-after goal was reached. I’d been burned by that sort of thing myself, and normally I’d have been sympathetic.
If it hadn’t all happened a century ago.
“That’s where you’ve been?” I demanded, squirming. He let me turn over, but didn’t get up. Which would have been nice if we didn’t have an audience of staring guards, and if I wasn’t close to livid. “We’re fighting a war and you’re off—God! She’s been missing for a century! What difference does a couple more years—”
“She doesn’t have a couple of years!”
The leader of the guards seemed to have recovered, because he put a hand on my arm. “Sir, would you like me to—”
Louis-Cesare knocked the man’s arm away. I used the moment of his distraction to get a knee in a sensitive spot and, when he flinched, roll out from under. I grabbed the bag, scrambled to my feet and fled down the hallway, in the opposite direction from the stairs. We were only two flights up, and I could do that jump easily—
Louis-Cesare grabbed the duffel’s strap and jerked, but I’d expected that. I already had a knife in hand and cut the thin nylon. He staggered back a pace, and I put my foot through the window—and almost got it blown off. “Goddamn it!”
“What is it now?” Louis-Cesare demanded.
“Cheung’s men. I thought they’d left.”
He took a quick peek out the window, prompting another volley from the vamps camped out on the sidewalk below. He shied back and rounded on the guards. “Why haven’t you cleared them out?”
“Sir!” The lead guard was beginning to show signs of stress. “The management felt that a dhampir on the premises was more of a concern than—”
“A party of mercenaries in the street, shooting out windows?”
“With all due respect, sir, they only blew out the window because they sighted her!” The vampire gave me a less than friendly look. I showed him some fang.
Louis-Cesare didn’t look much happier. He glanced at his watch. “Radu, my apologies. But I must—”
“Yes, yes, we’ll be fine. Go.” Radu waved him off.
“Running away again?” I demanded.
“I don’t have a choice.”
“Explain it to me,” I said, backing up. I put the bag between me and the wall. Ray’s big nose was stabbing me in the butt, but no way was Louis-Cesare prying it out of my hands.