Page 3 of Rapture's Edge (Night Prowler 3)
The creak of leather shoes.
For a split second her heart stopped beating. It started up again and took off at a thundering gallop.
She wasn’t alone. Someone was here.
Eliana didn’t even have time to turn before the darkness was sundered by a dozen wide yellow beams of light, aimed at her back. The soaring wall in front of her was bathed in brilliance, and the row of gilt frames caught the light and reflected it back in blinding glints of gold. She whirled around with one hand raised to shield her eyes, and just before she heard the loud report, in the infinitesimal second between the sting of gunpowder in the back of her throat, the flash of dazzling white and the pain that ripped through her bare calf, sending a flare of agony through her entire body, she heard a male voice shout something in French.
She crumpled to the floor. Blinded by the lights, unable to run or stand or even breathe, Eliana watched in horror as a dozen armed gendarmes ran crouched from hiding places on either side of the long corridor.
Police. Humans.
She touched her calf, felt the wound there, a ragged, wet slice through skin and muscle. She raised her hand, and for a suspended, horrible moment she stared down at it, slick with blood, her mind wiped utterly blank.
The male voice came again, still shouting at her in frenzied French, and she realized what he’d said before. A cliché she’d heard a dozen times in the American movies she loved, the old Westerns where it was easy to tell who the bad guys were because they always wore the black hats.
He’d shouted, “Stop or we’ll shoot!”
As she watched the booted knot of armed gendarmes creep closer—guns drawn, eyes rabid—to where she crouched naked and bleeding on the floor beneath the Degas, Eliana had the brief, ironic thought that he’d gotten that perfectly backward.
Seven days earlier
For the fourth time in as many weeks, the police paid a visit to Gregor MacGregor.
They had their reasons, of course. He wasn’t what could be called a good man—he wasn’t the worst, either—but he was an excellent businessman, and the type of business he specialized in never failed to attract the scrutiny of the authorities. Women, weapons, drugs, or thugs, Gregor could satisfy nearly every nefarious desire of his well-heeled clientele, and it had made him outrageously wealthy.
He managed his various business enterprises from the plush confines of a black leather recliner situated behind a massive, gleaming desk in an office on the top floor of a high-rise he owned in central Paris that housed a nightclub and a bordello, among other things. The police knew about the nightclub but not the bordello; only the very rich could afford to step beyond the opulent gold leaf doors that led to the garden of delights hidden deep in the bowels of the building, and they weren’t inclined to talk.
Because Gregor had been subjected to these impromptu visits by the police on dozens of occasions, he was more irritated than worried. They never found anything incriminating; he was much too careful for that.
What bothered him about this particular visit, however, was the man who sat in a shadowed corner of the office on his custom Louis Vuitton silk divan, smoking a cigarette, watching him with hawklike intensity from blue eyes as clear and cold as an arctic sky. Wearing a black suit, black oxfords, and no watch or rings or adornment of any kind except a pair of small round spectacles, he’d never accompanied the police on any of their other surprise visits, and something about this man didn’t sit right.
Gregor had grown up in the dodgy end of Edinburgh to impoverished parents who had eight children in quick succession until his father disappeared—fled, more like—and he’d been forced to survive as best he could. By the time he was ten years old, he’d committed nearly every crime imaginable and was well acquainted with all manner of thieves and cutthroats.
So he knew a soulless bastard when he saw one.
Gregor turned his attention back to the man seated across the desk from him. Tall, impeccably dressed, and utterly French, he was the chief of police’s right-hand man, and a royal pain in Gregor’s ass. “This is bordering on harassment, Édoard. I’m a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen of this country. I tolerate it because I’ve got nothing to hide, but if you keep up these witch hunts, I’ll call my lawyer.”
The blandly handsome Édoard smiled, revealing a row of perfectly straight, white teeth, a little too big for his mouth, like Chiclets. “Tax-paying, I’ll give you. We’ve already looked into that. Law-abiding, however…” The Chiclet smile grew mocking. “You and I both know that’s a stretch.”
They stared at each other. Behind him on the divan, the blue-eyed man lifted his chin and, like the fire-breathing red dragon on the MacGregor family coat of arms, exhaled a long, gray plume of smoke.
Flanking either side of Édoard’s chair were two standing gendarmes, glancing around his luxurious office in obvious envy. Gregor wondered why Édoard never brought the same men twice. Maybe he hoped new recruits would see something the old ones hadn’t?
“What do you want?” His Scottish accent still added faint music to his speech, even after two decades in France, but its charm was lost on Édoard, whose smile never wavered.
“We’re looking for a thief. An art thief, to be specific.” His gaze flickered to the oil painting hanging on the wall behind Gregor’s head. It was large and abstract; Picasso in his blue period. Original. “I understand you’re well connected in the art community.”
A laughable understatement. Art was a small and insular community, and he was both a dealer and a collector. Some of the deals were even legitimate. But to Édoard he only said, “This La Chatte I keep reading about in the press?”
“The very same.”
Gregor shook his head. “Don’t know him. Can’t help you there.”
“You do realize, MacGregor,” said Édoard, his voice slightly lower than before, “I can make life much more difficult for you than I have. I can have men in here every night. I can have your every move watched. I can crawl right up your ass and plant a flag there if I like, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. So please, take a moment to think it over.” He paused, and that slick smile stayed affixed to his face as if it were carved on. “Perhaps you’ve overheard something in your travels. Perhaps there’s someone you don’t particularly like who might have some interesting news for us. Perhaps there might even be something you’d like to”—his brows lifted, hopeful—“confess. Even the smallest tidbit of information will do wonders for my general sense of leniency. You do enjoy all your expensive toys, don’t you?”
His gaze slid to the Picasso. “You wouldn’t want your art collection and your penthouse and your nightclub and your Ferrari to suddenly be seized by the government due to a paperwork error, would you? An unfortunate mix-up that would certainly take months, possibly years to untangle?”
Like a snake, anger unfurled in a slick, cold coil in Gregor’s stomach. A reptilian slither that wound its way up through his gut and into his chest until his lungs were constricted, it was as familiar as his own face in a mirror. With it came the equally familiar, nearly overwhelming urge to beat something to a bloody, unrecognizable pulp.
