Page 5 of Hero & Villain (Super Serum Billionaires #1)
Chapter Three
DAGGER
M y phone rang.
I answered it while I stood at the window of the pawnshop across from the bar where Danielle Delavigne had ducked in with her cello almost two hours ago.
I’d bought a pink rubber chicken and a set of pink golf balls while I’d been waiting for her to move. The weather was the worst Boston mix: sleet, snow, hail, and an icy rain that froze you to the bone. A day like this needed a rubber chicken, particularly a pink one.
“Hello, Clint. How can I help you?” I asked, trying to sound like I hadn’t fallen off the edge of sanity five years ago.
His elegant voice didn’t match the words. “You can take your deal and shove it up your?—”
“I can’t, actually,” I drawled, cutting him off. “It’s legally binding, as you know, because you insisted on it.” I frowned down at the felt flower corsage on the shelf that was possibly the most hideous thing I’d ever seen. This pawn shop was not accustomed to a more particular clientele. Clearly.
“Stop screwing around, James,” he ground out, voice losing its carefully cultivated apathy. “I’m getting my lawyers to call your lawyers. The deal is off, you psycho geek. You can take your pink pants and your little tech sector and—” he hung up on me before he completed that thought. Sad day.
I squeaked the chicken absentmindedly. Poor Clint, getting entangled by a kraken like Haverscorp.
He’d wanted me to help extract him, but he’d wanted to keep the granddaughter.
That’s what we call wanting to have our cake and eat it too.
You can’t eat the cake and have it, because it’s gone.
You ate it. He ate her, and now she was gone.
I frowned as I looked up to see the very same woman slide on the sidewalk in her ridiculously high heels and barely not land in a splat, beige trench fluttering.
Danielle Delavigne had an excellent sense of balance, which almost made up for the lack of sense.
Who wears shoes like that on the street during a Nor’easter, particularly when executing spy-grade evasion tactics?
If I didn’t have a tracker in the lining of her coat, it would have been quite difficult for me to find her in the trashy bar in the worst neighborhood of Boston after she’d ditched her phone and her engagement ring in the back hall of the curry place.
I waited until she was at the corner before I left the pawnshop, rubber chicken and golf balls in the pockets of my nondescript black coat.
The chicken feet stuck out of my enormous pocket.
That would ruin the bland picture I was trying to present to the world, but no one would notice in this weather.
I pulled out my phone and followed the beeping dot from a distance until the dot stopped moving. I squinted at the screen. Wasn’t that on the sidewalk near the river? Had she decided to throw herself in?
I broke into a sprint, running around the corner of Wall and stopped abruptly when I saw her opening her cello case.
Right. Some people would want to end it all when faced with financial ruin and humiliation, but not Daniela Delavigne.
If it wasn’t chocolate, it was music; her two great Achilles heels. Obsessions.
I pulled five drones out of my enormous pocket with the golf balls and directed them to move around her. In this setup, sound was essential. I dropped a small remote vehicle on the wet ground and then steered it closer to her.
When she played the first string, the sound cut through the air, drawing the attention of everyone who was hurrying to warmth and safety.
The music vibrated through the air like an electric current, demanding attention, warning of danger, while the woman herself looked like a goddess of death come to claim our souls in her high-collar beige coat.
For a moment, I forgot what I was doing, but then my drone hit a building and I went back to work.
I’d always been good with gadgets and tech and had spent the last few years really working to capture complicated footage during off-road races.
This wouldn’t be a difficult recording in spite of the weather because she wasn’t moving.
The small bot on the ground stopped behind her cello, close enough to pick up the sound beautifully. I put in an earbud and set the drones in a steady pattern while I fiddled with the audio. The bot broke into three pieces, and I moved them to different positions to get better sound.
I had to focus on what I was doing, because if I looked directly at Daniela, I forgot everything else, pulled into her raw emotions, emotions she hadn’t shown for the past two years.
I’d seen her at functions where she played the role of icy socialite, without a crack in her perfectly controlled demeanor however much the other debutantes tried to push her buttons, but here she was unravelling for the world to see.
I would make sure that they saw it, that the videography would be worthy of her performance.
The song came to a trembling conclusion while the gathering crowd held their breaths, waiting to see if she would continue. She looked up, saw the people and then smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile. Then she took off her coat.
The pale cream satin lining of her coat matched her skin as it pooled around her.
The snow swirled, melting on her bare shoulders, blowing her hair back from her slender throat and her black leather spiked corset.
I couldn’t have choreographed this better if I’d planned for weeks.
She was the goddess of death, but no one would object to her taking whatever she demanded.
She began the next song, this time sorrow and pain that made my eyes prick with tears.
She stirred emotions with her bow like a witch would stir a cauldron.
I’d heard that she was good, but this was far beyond that, into the realm of unearthly.
Britten. She was playing Britten, but not like I’d ever heard him play before.
My sister had been a cellist, but nothing like this.
Daniela made it her own, compelled and commanded the music like she did the audience.
She was brilliant, drawing emotion from me with every caress of the strings.
Stunning. She raised her head at the end of the song, and tears glittered on her dark lashes.
I got a perfect close-up shot of that expression— the vulnerability, the anguish, the emotions that a truly psychotic person couldn’t feel.
Like the first time I’d seen her on that cursed elevator.
And then it stopped. Time had also stopped when I was kissing her.
When she was kissing me. Clinging to me like she couldn’t exist without me.
In other words, she was an exceptional liar, both then and now.
The rest of the concert was a storm that made me feel things I hadn’t allowed myself to feel, not for a long time.
It was almost a desecration to capture her essence, her music, her soul, to expose her to the world, but she had chosen to lay bare her soul in this audience.
I wasn’t the only one recording the performance.
Of course, I was the only one who would have any usable copies at the end.
Their files would all be corrupt by the time they went a block away from her.
Clint was right about my being a tech geek.
Of course, I was also a billionaire with extremely good lawyers.
When she played the last song, she sat for a moment, bow held limply in her hand, eyes terrifyingly empty.
A smattering of applause broke the silence, and then the audience roared, cheering and clapping interspersed with ‘bravo’ and sharp whistles.
How many people had her concert stopped?
I picked up one hundred seventy-four cell phones, a third of which had recorded parts of her performance.
I’d already run each phone through a search engine, checking to make sure that none of them were on Haversham’s payroll.
She carefully wiped her cello down with her coat and then tucked it into the case, only then pulling the coat over her exquisite body.
Living in Las Vegas, I saw more than my share of beautiful women in very little clothing, but Daniela was in a category all her own, maybe because she was unconscious of it, maybe because she was untouchable however much you wanted to touch her.
Once she’d buttoned her coat, she pulled her cello strap over her shoulder and started off towards Toni’s basement apartment.
I wasn’t the only one who followed, but it was easy enough to grab the ones who would bother her and bother them instead.
My phone rang, and I answered it, holding the man with a record for rape and assault in a chokehold. Cell phone records could be so illuminating.
“Dirk Prescott speaking,” I said in my snottiest Boston accent.
“Haversham knows that she’s missing,” Jimmy said in his toughest.
“She’s almost at Toni’s. Is everyone in place?”
“Sure. Is that gagging I hear?”
I glanced down at the bulging eyes of the guy who was still struggling in my grip, but more feebly.
I released him, letting him slump to the ground, then picked up my pace after Daniela.
Sometimes I forgot my strength, particularly after I’d agreed to ally with Horse.
“The weather will help keep things quiet. I’ve got to get back to Vegas tonight. I’m trusting you to keep them safe.”
“I’ve got it, Mr. Prescott.”
I sighed and hung up. I was Mr. Prescott when I had to make sure that business went according to plan.
In the last five years, I’d spent a lot of time as Mr. Prescott.
I couldn’t afford to be Dirk Dagger, the wildcard who didn’t care about anything.
I cared very much about one thing: revenge.
And Daniela Delavigne was going to help me get it.