Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games #2)(65)

I hate to admit it, but that’s a smart move. If that pay phone were located and put under surveillance, you’d have dozens of suspects to follow…and dozens more the day after that. And on and on. It would be a logistical nightmare.

O’Doul slowly lets out a breath. “So someone has been paid to answer that phone when it rings, and then relay any messages to S?ren.”

Tabby nods. “And there are probably several more someones in between who know nothing of the links in the chain beyond the one past themselves. And before the call even got to that pay phone, it was bounced through different telecommunications satellites in different countries and the encryption changed an infinite number of times before finally reaching its destination. I told you there would be layer after layer of obfuscation. His paranoia is almost as big as his ego.”

“What did you say when he picked up the phone?” My voice is rough.

When Tabby turns her head and our eyes meet, I’m startled by how wide her pupils are dilated. It almost looks as if she’s recently ingested drugs.

“I said to tell the master that hell has frozen over.”

We stare at each other. The moment stretches out. I feel like I’m on the verge of understanding something important, something I’ve been missing that’s the key to this entire mystery, when a distinct electronic ring comes through Chan’s computer speakers.

Because we’re looking right at each other, I see clearly how all the blood promptly drains from Tabby’s face, turning it white as stone.

“It’s him,” she whispers.

She’s terrified.

Operating on pure instinct, I stride over to her, kneel beside her chair, take her hand, and squeeze it.

She squeezes back, hard.

“Answer it,” says O’Doul.

Chan taps a single key on the keyboard, and the ringing stops. There’s dead silence.

No, not dead, I think, listening. This silence has a weight and a temperature, an actual presence, like it’s alive. It takes a lot to rattle me—I’ve seen men trying to hold their bloody intestines in their mangled stomachs after being savaged by a grenade—but the texture of this silence makes my skin crawl.

Faintly, Tabby says hello.

The awful silence breaks with the sound of a low exhalation, and then a single word, murmured like a prayer.

“Tabitha.”

Tabby’s arms break out in gooseflesh. Her eyes close. She stops breathing.

I watch all that with impotent rage, not understanding what the hell is happening, only that I want it to stop. Now. I squeeze her hand again, but hers has turned limp and clammy in mine.

Perfectly still, Tabby sits. The air crackles with electricity.

“You’ve made me wait,” says S?ren, “a very long time.”

His voice has the quality of a lullaby, soft and stroking, meant to soothe. It carries a faint and indefinable accent. Not British, but something equally refined. Aristocratic. Somehow it reminds me of winter snowfall, when the air is sharp and cold and everything is blanketed in powdery white.

Snow. Beautiful, frozen, and deadly if you stay out in it too long.

“But how do I know it’s really you?” he muses. Soft tapping, like fingers drumming on a hard surface. “What could convince me?”

A change comes over Tabby’s face. A flash of emotion disfigures it momentarily, as if a terrible memory has reared its head.

“I have a little black box inside my head. Inside the box are monsters.”

She says, “I still have the dagger, if you’d like me to take a picture and send it to you. I’ll focus up close on all the dried blood.”

Her tone is flat and hard, edged with fury. Abruptly I understand that I was wrong before. Tabby wasn’t terrified. It wasn’t fear that made her face go white, her body stiffen.

It was hate.

She hates him. She hates him so much, she’s shaking with it, breathless from it, frozen in place from the sheer enormity of the feeling.

And now we’ve got a bloody dagger to add to all the other weirdness. How f*cking Shakespearean.

Whatever the meaning of the dagger, the mention of it makes S?ren laugh. It’s a ridiculously self-satisfied sound, low and infinitely pleased, and also pleasing. This dickhead has a voice as pretty as his face.

God, I’m really going to enjoy mangling both.

“Oh pet,” S?ren says warmly, “I’ve missed you.” A shade of melancholy sneaks into his cultured voice. “I’ve missed you so much.”

A shudder runs through Tabby’s body. She opens her eyes and stares at Chan’s computer monitor as if she’d like to tear it to pieces with her teeth. “Really? No other gullible minions to mold in your despicable image?”

S?ren’s gentle sigh sounds perversely intimate, like he might be stroking himself, aroused by the sound of her anger. “Yes, of course, but none of them could ever compare to you. My fierce little krijger. My liefde.”

Whatever those words mean, they really piss her off. Color burns over her pale cheeks. Veins standing out on her neck, she leans forward in her chair and says through clenched teeth, “I was never yours.”

“On the contrary, liefde. You always were…and still are.”

“You’re wrong!”

“Am I? Well, that would be a first. Tell me, do you have a family? A husband? Children? Any connection to another human being that could be considered intimate?” He waits for a only a beat before answering his own question, smug as shit. “Of course you don’t. And you never will. And—please be honest with me, you know I’ll know if you’re lying—why is that?”