Page 102 of Eyes in the Shadows

“Disguises,” Wes amends with a little laugh. “The easiest way to know they’re working together for sure would be just to get them together, and let them dig their own grave.”

Dimitri shakes his head and leans forward, like he’s checking something out the window of his car. “It will be difficult to draw Rossi out. He is very… comfortable. He only goes outside for the mail—everything is delivered and he works from the house office, taking calls in his underpants.”

I consider that. “So… we need to rattle him?”

“It would not hurt. He is safe in this house, he believes, but I think our original assessment is correct and he would react if provoked. Especially if he thought it was me, and he thought he could be close to catching me.”

I stand, “One second. I think I know what we can use.”

I head to the kitchen, listening to Wes and Dimitri lapse into work-adjacent conversation that isn’t more planning they’d need to catch me up on. I head to the freezer to grab the paper bag I tucked in the back of an empty drawer, and toss it on the table in front of Wes when I get back to the office.

“We’ll send him this. Taunt him.”

Wesley unrolls the bag, glances inside and calmly rolls the bag back up, just a bit more green around the gills. “Bloody hell,” he murmurs to himself, making a face.

“What is it?” Dimitri wants to know.

“You might have warned me!” Wes snaps at me, heated. It’s interesting to see; he’s normally so unflappable.

“What is it?” Dimitri repeats, louder.

“Fucking eyeballs,” Wes growls, wiping his hand on his pants, then grimacing when he realizes that if there was something on his hand, now it’s on his pants.

“Whose?” Dimitri presses, pure curiosity.

“Rossi’s fixer, from the steam room—the one who pretended to be a detective.”

“Why do you even have them?” Wes prompts, still sounding miffed.

I shrug. “He saw her in a towel.”

Dimitri smiles his approval, likely both at the bloody-yet-fitting nature of the vengeance and the idea to gift them to our favorite weapons smuggler. “This could work.”

Wes opens a drawer of his desk and grabs a container of wet wipes. “Troglodytes,” he mutters, giving his hands and then the desk in front of him a thorough scrub as I remove the bag with a laugh.

“So, we need Rossi to think Dimitri is within his grasp and we need the mayor to have a reason to seek Rossi out.” Wes starts tapping his fingers against the glass, a deep-in-thought gesture. He grimaces. “Honestly, Dimitri would be the best for that—he could play them off each other and we’d know how involved the mayor is by whether or not he recognizes him.”

“I cannot be in two places at once,” Dimitri observes.

But Wes’s eyes have narrowed and he’s staring at my jaw. “You know, you both have a bruise in almost the same exact spot…” he points to his jaw, like we needed a reminder of where.

Dimitri and I look at each other. His is a bit more advanced in healing, more of a brown than my fresh purple one. But I can see where Wes is coming from. When using distinguishing facial features to describe someone, people hardly ever think to comment on what color the bruise was, just the existence of it and its location.

And while Dimitri and I aren’t exactly twins, we do have roughly similar builds that I could pad out with a thick jacket, and a hat pulled down over our eyes would hide most of his largest scar that I don’t share…

“I think I have an idea…”

37

Eleanor

What in the holy hell and whole world…

I wake to a text from Mac, my phone buzzing on the bed next to me and scaring me out of my half-conscious snoozing with the noise that’s been so absent from my life lately. The clock tells me it’s a little after noon, so I’ve been asleep for about four hours.

Hey baby. Come to Wes’s cave when you wake up.

I set the phone face down next to me and give my whole body one of those toe-curling stretches. I can feel all the tightness in my abs and obliques and inner thighs that reminds me of exactly how I spent my early morning. And I’m very sore.

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