While he’d sure as hell rather be surrounded by his tech equipment at the command center, Trygg couldn’t find much to object to as he followed Sia up an exterior staircase to a private third-floor entrance of the house. As irritated as he was after her power play in the car just now—not to mention her earlier act of defiance that had rattled him more than he cared to admit, even to himself—it was hard to think about much else except the rhythmic sway of her hips as she mounted the old iron steps.
Very hard.
Her long, elegant spine and firm backside were a temptation that stoked a growing heat inside him as he stalked up the climb behind her. Everything male in him burned with desire. Everything Breed in him hungered for her too. If she chanced a look over her shoulder, it would be damn close to impossible to hide the amber lighting his irises or the press of his sharp fangs as they filled his mouth.
Letting her win just now was a mistake he already regretted, but that’s where her control was going to end. He’d go inside as she insisted and they’d do a cursory look through the rest of the items they’d brought with them. He would point out something or other so she’d have a bone to chew on, then he’d take everything back to the command center and dig into the meat of the scant evidence alone.
The way he preferred to operate.
He scowled at her when they reached the top of the stairs. “Is this the way you sneak in all the men you bring home with you?”
“Only the surly ones.” Her blonde brow arched over her long-lashed eyes. “And to answer the question you really want to ask, I’ve never brought anyone up here before.”
He didn’t want to ask that, so why did her answer give him such a healthy stab of satisfaction?
“Come in.” She opened the door into a cramped, one-room attic apartment. Trygg stepped inside, feeling like a giant in a dollhouse. The decor was aged and modest, the rug covering rustic wood floors threadbare. An upholstered chair and mirrored dresser stood on one side of the room. On the other was a narrow bed.
Sia walked over and sat on the edge of it, dumping the evidence envelope onto the coverlet. When Trygg didn’t budge, she looked at him expectedly. “Are you going to stand over there the whole time? Sit down, Trygg.” Her mouth twisted with amusement. “I’m not going to bite you.”
Christ.
Just the thought made his cock buck against his zipper. Was the heat on in the room? Suddenly he was too warm, the confined space seeming as tight as a cell. He swiped the skullcap from his head and shrugged out of his leather jacket, setting both on the cushioned chair as he walked over to the bed and sat down beside Sia.
She was already engrossed in the phone once more, paging through the call history and text threads. “Only a few of her messages are recent. It’s as if she cut off most of her other ties about a year ago. Oh. What’s this one? There’s no name attached to the text, just an odd number.”
Trygg glanced at the screen. “The phone number it came from has a block on it. People use them when they don’t want to be identified.”
Sia looked at him pointedly. “This is the only person Rosa communicated with on a regular basis in the past three months. And look—most of these texts came in five days ago. Trygg, Rosa showed up at the shelter two days later.”
He leaned closer. “Let me see those texts.”
She gave him the phone and he scrolled through the conversation thread. “It’s a male. She’s careful not to use his name, but she’s talking to him about their baby. Sounds like he could be married to someone else.”
Sia scoffed. “What a prince.”
“A lot of these messages are idle chat.” Trygg’s jaw tensed as he skimmed a few of the more explicit comments. He was already having enough trouble staying focused on the task at hand with Sia sitting close enough that he could feel the warmth of her body, her sweet scent filling his head with all kinds of dangerous ideas. He cleared his throat and kept scrolling. “A couple of months ago, Rosa thanks him for a gift he gave their daughter, says it’s the child’s favorite thing. That she can’t go to sleep without it. There’s a gap in dates between that text and the next one. He’s telling her there’s a problem on his end and he needs to lay low for a while.”
“I’ll bet,” Sia interjected. “A problem with the wife?”
Trygg smirked and scrolled through a few more messages. “He doesn’t elaborate. The next time he contacts her is five days ago. He tells her he’s leaving Rome the next day. She’s upset, doesn’t understand what’s going on. He doesn’t say, just urges her to take the child and go somewhere else too.”
“She didn’t take his advice,” Sia murmured grimly. “Rosa stayed, and now she’s dead.”
Trygg nodded. “Which seems to suggest she had no idea about the trouble this man of hers was in. Or that he’d somehow put her into it too.”
“The poor girl. She deserved better than that. Better than him.”
“What about photos?” Trygg asked.
Sia shrugged. “The only one I saw was on the home screen.”
Trygg made a quick check of the galleries. “Everything’s been deleted. Or has it?”
With a few taps and swipes and hardware overrides, he managed to break open the cache of deleted photos. Just as he suspected, the majority of the images were ones of Rosa, some with her baby, some of them intimate, meant for her lover’s eyes only. He ignored those few out of respect, and because he was searching for something specific.
And there it was.
A selfie she had taken in a sun-filled park. Rosa was pregnant, and seated beside her was a man. He looked a bit old for her, with gray at his temples and shadows under his eyes.
Trygg peered at the human male, zooming in on his face. “Holy shit.”
Sia leaned closer. “What is it?”
“I’ve seen him before.” He grabbed his own phone and pulled up a search browser. The news article he was looking for filled his screen. He showed it to Sia.
She glanced at the story and the accompanying photos, then read the Italian headline aloud. “Body of Gianni Tiaggi, Special Investigator for the Guardia di Finanza, recovered from the Tevere near the Vatican on Sunday morning.” She looked at Trygg, her lovely face drawn in shock. “Santino had him killed?”
“Considering that the Guardia di Finanza is the agency in charge of investigating international drug trafficking, there’s no doubt that Santino had him dealt with. Now we need to figure out what Tiaggi did to cross him, or what he might’ve had on the bastard that was damaging enough for Santino to have him killed. Maybe that something ended up in Rosa’s possession. If it did, she probably didn’t even realize she had it.”
“What kind of man would jeopardize the mother of his own child like that?”
“A desperate one.” Trygg picked up the gold locket. “Didn’t you say Rosa was always wearing this?”
“I never saw her without it on.”
He tried to open the delicate piece of jewelry, but struggled. His hands were too big, his fingers more accustomed to weapons and technology than fragile, feminine things.
Sia reached for it, her soft touch brushing his knuckles. “Here, let me do that.”
Sitting next to her so closely on the narrow mattress was its own kind of hell. Now that she had pressed up even tighter to him as she worked on the locket, it was all he could do to resist reaching out to smooth his fingers through the loose cascade of her platinum hair. She smelled like citrus and fresh sea air, and her body’s warmth radiated against him like the heat of the sun. His mouth watered as he breathed her in, his fangs throbbing as they slid out of his gums behind his closed mouth.
“Got it,” she blurted, glancing up with a smile as she held the tiny photo frame open to him.
The image was a close-up of the baby’s sleeping face, her tiny fist resting against her cheek and wrapped tight around the edge of a pink blanket.
“She’s such a sweet child,” Sia murmured, gazing at the picture. “It breaks my heart to think of how much she’s been through in her short little life.”
Hearing the sadness in her voice, Trygg wondered if Tamisia had ever wanted children of her own. Before he could stop himself, a shocking mental fantasy came to life in his head. He and Sia making love. Him planting his seed inside her while he sank his fangs into her creamy throat.
Fuck.
Arousal surged through him, instant and uncontrollable. The erection he’d been fighting all night raged to life, making him shift in discomfort on the bed. He cleared his throat, but nothing could mask the rough edge of his voice.
“Take the photo out, Sia. Maybe there’s something behind it.”
She nodded and went to work, gently prying it out with her fingernail. She shook her head. “Nothing. Just a photo in a locket. Dammit!”
“We’ll find it,” he assured her, but he had to admit his own disappointment too. “I’ll bring these things back to the command center and the Order will take care of the rest, Sia. Then you can let all of this ugliness go and get on with your life.”
Nothing could’ve prepared him for her bleak, haunted expression or what it did to him inside. “Life as I knew it ended six weeks ago, when my inaction caused the death of a friend and beloved husband and father. I won’t stand by and let bad things happen ever again. If I’m willing to do that after everything I’ve lost, then I should have refused my banishment and begged the colony to kill me.”
He let her rant, sensing she needed it. She wasn’t a woman to lose control, and the fact that she felt safe enough to do so with him moved him more deeply than he cared to admit.
“Do you miss it? Your old life with your people.”
“Every day.” She smiled sadly. “But it doesn’t matter. I can never go back and I’ll never be able to redeem myself to the colony, so I must do it here. I have to do something purposeful with this new life—for myself as much as I want to show my people that I’m not the awful person they believe me to be. I need to prove that I have honor, that I’m worth something.”
“You don’t have to prove a damn thing to anyone, Sia. You are all of those things already.”
She gave him a humorless laugh. “Flattery from you?”
He shook his head. “The truth. I’m just telling you what I see.”
Her eyes softened as she looked at him. Before he realized it, her fingers came to light gently on his face, tracing his hideous scar and clamped jaw. “Do you want to know what I see? You are everything I didn’t expect. A brave warrior. A man of deep honor and conviction. I see someone who’s been hurt very badly and not only survived, but emerged stronger.” She stroked his ruined cheek, tender light shining in her eyes. “What did you survive, Trygg? I know your early life was hard. I’ve heard something about the program you were in—a Hunter, isn’t that what you were called?”
“Yes, that’s what we were called.” He exhaled sharply, but allowed her touch to linger on him for a moment before moving away from her warmth. “What we were was killers. Held like prisoners, treated like animals. Worse than animals. We had one purpose from the time we were born, and that was to deliver death on our master’s command.”
Sia listened, unflinching. But when she spoke it was with a soft, careful voice. “Why did you stay?”
That answer was as simple as it was final. “I didn’t know any other life. None of us did. Even if we had, there was no chance for us to seek it out. If we tried to run, we died. If we disobeyed or showed the slightest defiance or regret during our training, we died.”
“But even as children, you and the others must have been strong. Was there no way to overtake this madman and save yourselves?”
“Dragos planned for that possibility. Every boy in the program was fitted with an unbreakable ultraviolet collar that would detonate if tampered with…or whenever Dragos ordered our termination.” Trygg’s hand came up to his neck in reflex. “Sometimes I swear I can still feel the cold black polymer against my skin.”
Sia’s gaze lowered, her breath escaping on a shallow sigh. “He sounds like the worst kind of monster.”
“He was,” Trygg agreed, recalling too many of the faces of his brothers in the program, many of whom had served as horrific lessons to Trygg and the other boys that there was no escaping Dragos or the UV noose he’d fitted them with as soon as they could walk. “Dragos trained us to be monsters too. He trained us well.”
Sia said nothing for a long moment. “And it was the Order who finally freed you?”
He nodded. “I owe them my life. I’d lay it down for any one of my warrior brethren.”
“That kind of loyalty is a rare gift,” she murmured, her expression distant and regretful, as if she hadn’t ever seen that kind of faith in anyone herself. “How did they save you, Trygg?”
“When they defeated Dragos, an Order warrior named Gideon found a way to remotely disable the lock codes on the Hunters still in the lab. Like me, most of them were young boys. I was fourteen.”
“So, did you join the Order immediately?”
“No. I made my own way in the States for a while. It wasn’t until I arrived in Italy that I sought out the Order and offered my life in service to them.”
He chose to stop there, telling his history with an utter lack of inflection, precisely how the program had taught him to be. No emotions. No need for care or affection. Just cold, machine-like efficiency. No Hunter came out of the program without a heart as cold and sharp as a blade.
If he didn’t watch himself, a woman like Tamisia could smooth those sharp edges.
Make him weak.
Hell, she already was. How else could he explain the fact that he had let her hijack his mission tonight? Now he was sitting on her bed with an envelope of evidence spread out before him and questions badly in need of answers, yet all he could think about was the pleasure of Sia’s touch. Her expressive, sky-blue eyes filled with tender emotion…and desire.
“What happened to the Hunters who were freed?”
He shrugged his shoulder. “I’m only aware of a handful. One of them, named Scythe, lives with his mate Chiara here in Italy.”
“Is he as big and grumbly as you?” Sia asked, her pretty mouth curving.
Trygg chuckled. “He was. Chiara has gentled him somewhat, but I’m sure my half-brother is still a pain in her ass.”
Sia laughed. She gazed at him, tilting her head in amusement. “And is Scythe as handsome as you?”
Trygg felt his face harden into a stony mask. “Don’t play me, Tamisia.” His low voice came out like a lash. “I’m well aware of the way I look, and I’m not as easily fooled as the men fawning at your feet back at the JUSTIS station.”
“I’m not playing you.” She sounded utterly sincere, even stung. “Do you think the scar makes you ugly? It doesn’t. Not to me. Only someone’s actions can make them ugly, Trygg.”
He took no comfort in that opinion. “Then if you knew everything I’ve done in my life, you’d think I was hideous.”
“So tell me, Trygg. Why not let me decide for myself?”
He turned his head on a curse. “I didn’t come up here to talk about me.”
“Then why did you come?” Her fingers were at his chin, drawing his gaze back to her. “You could’ve just as easily taken that envelope out of my hands. You could have walked away tonight like you threatened to do, but you didn’t. Why not?”
It took more control than he thought possible not to yank away from her light grasp and head for the door. But that would only confirm his worst fear—that this woman was getting under his skin. That she was getting perilously close to his heart.
“Don’t push me, Sia.”
She shook her head. “I think a push is exactly what you need.”
Without warning, she took his mouth in a hard, hot kiss.