She stopped breathing to make sure nothing shifted.
This was…all wrong. There was a wave pattern to what was inside the house: What furniture she could see was subtly undulating.
Dropping the high-powered lenses, she looked around, wondering if maybe her eyes were the problem.
Nope. All the pine trees in the forest were behaving appropriately, standing still, their branches unmoving in the cold air. And when she put the magnifiers up again, she traced the rooftop of the house and the contours of the stone chimneys.
All were utterly inanimate.
Back to the glass.
Inhaling deep, she held the oxygen in her lungs and balanced against the nearest birch trunk to give her body extra stability.
Something continued to be off. The frames of those sliding glass doors and the lines of the porches and everything about the house? Static and solid. The interiors, however, seemed…pixilated somehow, like a composite image had been created to make things appear as if there were furniture…and that image had been superimposed on something like a curtain…that happened to be subjected to a soft current of air.
This was going to be a more interesting project than she’d assumed. Reporting on the activities of this business associate of a “friend” of hers had not exactly lit a fire under her ass. She much preferred greater challenges.
But maybe there was more to this than first appeared.
After all, camouflage meant you were hiding something—and she’d made a career out of taking things from people that they wanted to keep: Secrets. Items of value. Information. Documents.
The vocabulary used to define the nouns was irrelevant to her. The act of penetrating a locked house or car or safe or briefcase and extracting what she was after was what mattered.
She was a hunter.
And the man in that house, whoever he was, was her prey.
TEN
Blay had no business getting near a hand weight, much less the kind of iron that was down in the training center’s gym. Hammering back that port on an empty stomach had made him fuzzy and uncoordinated. But he had to have some kind of a direction…a plan, a destination to drag his sorry ass to. Anything other than going up to his room, sitting on that bed again, and starting the day in the same way he’d started the night—smoking and staring off into space.
Probably with a lot more port added in.
Stepping out of the underground tunnel, he walked through the office and pushed the glass door open.
As he went along, still drinking from a half-full glass, his mind was circling itself, wondering when all this bullcrap between him and Qhuinn was going to end. On his deathbed? God, he didn’t think he could last that long, assuming he had a normal life span ahead of him.
Maybe he needed to move out of the mansion. Before Wellsie had been killed, she and Tohr had been able to live in a house of their own. Hell, if he did that, he wouldn’t have to see Qhuinn except during meetings—and with so many people in and around the Brotherhood, it was easy to get out of eyeshot.
He’d been doing that for a while now, actually.
In fact, under that construct, the pair of them wouldn’t have to cross paths at all—John was always partnered with the guy because of the whole ahstrux nohtrum thing, and between the rotation schedule, and the way territory was divided up, he and Qhuinn never fought together except in an emergency.
Saxton could go back and forth to work—
Blay stopped dead at the entrance to the weight room. Through the glass window he saw a set of weights going up and down on the reclining squat machine, and he knew by the Nikes who it was.
Goddamn it, he couldn’t get a break.
Leaning in, he hit his head once. Twice. Three—
“You’re supposed to do reps on the machines—not on the door.”
Manny Manello’s voice was as welcome as a steel-toed kick in the ass.
Blay straightened up, and the world went wheeeeee a little—to the point that he had to surreptitiously put his free hand on the jamb just so that the balance issue didn’t show. He also tucked his nearly done drink out of sight
The doc probably wouldn’t think working out while under the influence was a good thing.
“How are you?” Blay asked, even though he didn’t really care—and that wasn’t a commentary on Payne’s hellren. He didn’t give a crap about much at the moment.
Manello’s mouth started to move and Blay passed the time watching the man’s lips form and release syllables. A moment later, a good-bye of some sort was exchanged, and then Blay was alone with the door again.
It seemed like a planker move to just stand there, and he’d told the good doctor he was going in. And besides, there were, what, twenty-five machines in the room? Plus barbells and free weights. Treadmills. StairMasters, ellipticals…plenty to go around.
I’m not in love with Layla.
With a curse, Blay pushed his way in and braced himself for an awkward oh-hey-it’s-you. Except Qhuinn didn’t even notice the arrival. Instead of going with the overhead music, the guy was wearing headphones that went all around his ears, and he’d moved over to the chin-up bar so he was facing away, into the concrete wall.
Blay stayed as far back as possible, hopping on a random machine—pecs. Whatever.
After putting down his glass and adjusting the pin on the stack of weights, he settled onto the padded seat, gripped the double handles, and started pushing out from his chest.
All he had to look at was Qhuinn.
Or maybe that was more because his eyes refused to go anywhere else.
The male was wearing a black wifebeater that put those tremendous shoulders of his on full display…and the muscles along them flexed up hard as he reached the apex of the pull, the ridges and contours those of a fighter…not a lawyer—
Blay stopped himself right there.
It was unfair to the point of nausea to make any comparison like that, ever. After the past year or so, he knew Saxton’s body nearly as well as his own, and the male was beautifully built, so lean and elegant—
Qhuinn ground out another lift, the weight of his heavy lower body straining the strength in those arms and that torso. And, thanks to his exertions, sweat had broken out all over his skin, making him glow under the lights.
The tattoo on the back of his neck shifted as he released and descended to hang from his grip, and then it was up again. And down. And up.
Blay thought about the way the male had looked as they’d turned over the Hummer: powerful, masculine…erotic.
This was not happening.
He was not, in fact, sitting here, eyeing Qhuinn like this—
Images filtered in from years past, turning his brain into a television screen. He saw Qhuinn bending over a human woman who had been laid out ass up on the edge of a flat table, his hips pumping as he fucked her, his hands locked onto her hips to hold her in place. He hadn’t had a shirt on at the time, and his shoulders had been tight, as they were now.
Hard body being used well.
There were so many pictures like that, with Qhuinn in different positions with different people, male and female. In the beginning, right after their transitions, there had been such a feeling of excitement as the two of them had gone on the hunt together—or rather, Qhuinn had gone trolling and Blay had taken whatever had been brought back. So much sex with so many people—although at that point, Blay had stuck only with the females.
Maybe because he’d known they were safe, that they didn’t “count” in so many ways.
So uncomplicated in the beginning. But sometime along the way, things had started to shift—and he’d begun to realize that as he watched Qhuinn with the randoms, he was picturing himself under that body, receiving what the guy was so good at giving. After a time, it hadn’t been some stranger’s mouth on Qhuinn’s cock; it was his own. And when those orgasms came, and they always did, he was the one taking them in. It was his hands on Qhuinn’s body, and his lips locked hard, and his legs that were spread.