Page 75 of The Wolves Come at Night
Angelie Delacroix smiled, white teeth feral in the darkness. “Thank you for not asking how I got in. That would be an insult to us both. These systems are so easy to overcome if you know how to manipulate them. I’m putting away my weapon. Would you mind doing the same?”
The voice was cultured, with a French accent and a baffling hint of humor in its tone.
“So I can trip over a wire and be blown to pieces instead? Sure.”
“I assure you, Captain Jackson, if my interest was seeing you dead, you’d be in heaven already.”
The bitch of it? The woman was right. Taylor had been lulled into complaisance by the elaborate mechanics of their new security system. She should be dead, she knew it, so what did she have to lose at this point?
“Why now?” she asked.
“We’ll get there,” Delacroix replied, drawing her legs underneath her like a cat settling in for a nap. “Sit.” Another pause. “Please.”
Taylor sat, the Glock loose in her hand. But still there. Still there.
“I need to tell you a story,” Delacroix said. “Would you like a glass of wine?”
Flowers. And yes, a bottle of white wine.
“Are you trying to seduce me?”
Angelie Delacroix’s laugh was surprisingly joyful for a woman of death. “In a way, yes, I suppose I am.” Her face shifted in the gloom, and her voice was now a bit husky. “Would you like to be seduced? You are a beautiful woman. I could make you feel things your FBI agent never imagined.”
“Thanks, no. Get to it, will you? I have other things to contemplate tonight.”
“Ah, yes. Sweet Carson. Another beautiful girl missing from your jurisdiction. One might think terrible people target your city simply to involve you in their worlds.”
Taylor was intrigued enough to ignore the slight. “You’re here about Carson? Do you know where she is?”
“As I said, I’m here to tell you a story.” Delacroix reached out and Taylor tensed for a moment then realized she was just going for the glass on the table. She took a deep sip of the wine and set the glass back with a tiny clink. God, she’d been in the house long enough to help herself to the wineglasses, too. Silent as a cat. A lucid thought. Thank God Baldwin isn’t here. While Angelie Delacroix might be extending grace to Taylor, she doubted that would go for Baldwin. His teaching gig had saved him, of this she was sure.
“I’m trusting you with my life,” Delacroix said suddenly. “Thierry says I can, and while Thierry and I have a long history, some of it very grim, as you know firsthand, I do respect him. And he respects you. So for now, I must, too.”
“I’m honored.”
“Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Captain.”
“Quit calling me that and I’ll stop being sarcastic.”
“A bargain.” She took another drink, deeper this time. Taylor sensed the woman was gearing up and was reluctant to share what she was about to.
“A story,” Delacroix said again, softly this time, and started to talk.
Forty
Some Far-Flung Locale
There were five of them. Angelie, Santiago, Richard, Alan, and Joseph Game. She was used to working with the men, and rarely had issues in the field, though Game would be just as willing to bed her as he was to work by her side. She didn’t like him, never trusted him fully, but told herself it was just his demeanor, just the way his shoulders were set, as her mother used to say when she took a dislike to a man. “The set of his shoulders tells you everything, Angelie. Whether he is kind, or brutal. Pay attention to how he holds himself when he is relaxed, and you will always know what sort of man you are dealing with.”
How she remembered this sage advice, given when she was possibly five years old after a man had leeringly accosted them in a shop in Varennes, and her mother had shooed him off with a few sharp words that made his leer turn ugly, was beyond her. She’d given up trying to remember her parents. The only images that came when she thought of them purposely were filled with blood and bone and shattered glass. Deep, corrosive fear. The sharp ping of bullets hammering into the side of their car. Her father, telling her to live.
Angelie did not dwell upon them, instead welcomed the strange unbidden memories that came with a sight, or a sound, or a smell.
The first time she’d met Joseph Game, her mind had taken her to the leering man in the store in Varennes and her mother stepping between Angelie and the brute with a snapping “asshole” in colloquial French and the man’s angry face. She looked at Game’s shoulders, how he was rounded a bit, hunched forward toward her, and identified him as a predator. So long as he wasn’t hunting her, she was fine with him on the team, especially since after one small hint that he wouldn’t mind a taste of her, she’d dealt with it so firmly and devastatingly fast he never glanced at her sideways again.
But a man like that always holds a grudge.
At first, it was little things. Retrieval times miscalculated. Backup weapons missing. Egress vehicles on the wrong street. Sloppy work, work she complained about to the rest of the crew over beers after jobs were complete, who agreed. Later, when it was clear he’d stopped worrying about retribution for pissing her off, it got more specific. A cut strap on a parachute that she only caught at the last moment. A backpack full of empty magazines when she was alone in the forest with no backup.
