Page 24

Asher

Cade’s news went down like a lead balloon, Calisto’s tanned complexion failing to hide him going as white as a sheet. Once I’d realized how much he was struggling, I’d half carried him out of Cade’s office and lowered him to my desk chair.

He was conscious, not having gone so far as to pass out, but he was far from with it and kept listing to one side every time I took away the hand holding him up. Using my free hand, I opened up my desk drawer and pulled out part of my—no longer so—secret stash. After ripping open the wrapper with my teeth, I waved it under Calisto’s nose like the world’s most bizarre smelling salt. “Eat this,” I urged. “Sugar is good for shock.”

Calisto lifted his head, a struggle ensuing before he focused on me. “You’re offering me your chocolate,” he said weakly. “It must be love.”

“It is,” I said, in no mood to pretend the feelings weren’t there when there were far more important things going on. I toyed with the idea of feeding the chocolate to him like a baby before lifting Calisto’s hand and curling his fingers around it instead. It was enough, Calisto raising it to his mouth and nibbling on the end. “It’s my fault,” he said.

“It’s not your fault that she’s a murderous bitch who will do anything to get her own way.”

“If I’d gone with her that first night, that man, whoever he is, would still be alive.”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “Or maybe not. For all we know, he’s one of her men killed for some other reason, and she’s just seized on the opportunity to make his death useful. Someone could have killed him in a drug deal gone wrong. And if we’re going to go with it being someone’s fault for you not going with her that night, it may as well be mine.”

Calisto’s frown said he wasn’t following my reasoning. “I was the one who messed up her plans,” I pointed out. “Therefore, it’s my fault.”

“It’s not your fault,” Calisto said.

“And it’s not yours,” I repeated. “It’s no one but hers.”

Calisto took a larger bite of the chocolate bar. He looked thoughtful as he chewed and swallowed. “But she’s made a threat now. What happens when she keeps her promise and kills again tomorrow with another message for me? Then it’ll be my fault.”

“Tomorrow’s a long way away. Things will hopefully be clearer once they identify the victim and determine how he died.

Calisto took a deep breath, some color having seeped back into his cheeks. “I should think losing his head had something to do with it.” He turned the chocolate bar my way. “We should share.”

My immediate reaction was to turn down the offer. Deep down, I knew how ridiculous it was to treat my liking for chocolate, as if it was something to be ashamed of. As Calisto himself had pointed out, it was chocolate, not heroin, but I didn’t seem able to stop myself. This was Calisto, though. The man I loved. The man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

Gaze locked on his, I leaned forward and took a bite, the smile I got for it well worth breaking my self-imposed rules. Between us, we finished the chocolate in contemplative silence, Calisto staring at Cade’s now closed office door.

“Did I miss anything?” he asked once there was nothing but crumbs left in the wrapper. “After I had a funny turn, like a Victorian damsel, I mean.”

“Only Cade calling Ben and telling him to keep him informed. Ben immediately got himself put in charge of the case.”

Calisto’s brow furrowed. “Just like that?”

I shrugged. “The murder was within his jurisdiction, and he’s a homicide detective. It would either be him or one of his colleagues, and he’s got seniority over most of them. Plus, Baros knows of Ben’s link to this case. Ben probably pointed that out to him. I would think it’s a pretty useful bargaining chip.”

Calisto nodded slowly. “Yeah, I suppose. It just seems… convenient.”

“We’re due some luck,” I pointed out.

“I guess.”

I scrutinized him for a few seconds. “Are you feeling better?” The question was rhetorical when I could see he was. When he nodded, I held out my hand, and he took it. “Ready to get out of here?”

A dark shadow passed across Calisto’s face. “I can’t cope with my family right now. My mother will take one look at me, know something’s wrong, and before I know it, I’ll be wailing on her shoulder about headless corpses. That’s not a pleasant scenario for any of the parties involved, and I dare say you could do without it.” He jerked his chin at the section of wall that opened up. “Got a tent? Maybe we could live in the basement for one night.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” I said.

“Yeah?”

There was so much hope in Calisto’s brown eyes that having a solution to the problem filled me full of warmth. “I do.”

“So, as well as having a swanky house, you also have a swanky flat you just didn’t bother to mention?” Calisto said as he took himself on a guided tour of the Knightsbridge address.

“Not exactly.” At his raised eyebrow, I elaborated. “It belongs to a friend.”

“But you have a key?”

“He’s rarely in the country. I have it in case of any problems.” I located the switch for the heating and flicked it on as Calisto left the kitchen and continued on his tour. “You should ring your mother,” I called after him. “Or she’ll worry.”

“ You should call her. She’d probably prefer to hear from you.”

“I doubt that.”

“I’m not the one she constantly bakes for.”

Despite Calisto’s arguments to the contrary, a muted conversation I assumed to be with Mariana started up less than a minute later. I wondered what spin Calisto was putting on things rather than telling her the truth. Curiosity eventually got the better of me and I took a step toward the door to eavesdrop. That’s when it hit, like a truck lurching out of nowhere to slam into me. I stumbled, falling to one knee, aware there was probably pain, but too lost as the darkness swallowed me whole to register it.

The darkness didn’t last long, replaced by snatches of imagery. Calisto in front of a tower block, looking up at it with a mixture of apprehension and determination, his intention to enter it clear to me. I knew that tower block. I’d been the one to print off pictures of it as part of my extensive research on all things O’Reilly. Despite knowing I could no more control a vision than I could move objects with my mind, I willed him to walk away. Vision Calisto didn’t. He squared his shoulders and marched toward it.

The vision jumped as they were wont to do. A dark stairwell. Someone was with Calisto, but I couldn’t see who. Baxter maybe. A long corridor. Someone laughing. A stocky man with a bushy red beard mock bowing to Calisto. Smoke in the air from someone’s cigarette, hanging there like a frozen moment in time. More men. A door. A living room. Another jump.

Now Calisto was with a woman I recognized as O’Reilly, her hair tied back in her usual unflattering ponytail. She and Calisto were talking, his face as pale as it had been earlier today. I strained to hear what was being said, but the vision wouldn’t let me see it. A gun pressed to Calisto’s forehead hard enough for the barrel to leave an indentation. Not by O’Reilly, the woman maintaining her usual role as the puppet master. A dead body of a girl in the corner.

Calisto on the floor, his legs crossed and his eyes closed just as I’d found him in the bedroom a couple of days ago. No prizes for guessing what he was doing and why. A smile on O’Reilly’s face. One that said she’d finally gotten what she wanted. Another jump. Calisto lying prone on the floor with O’Reilly standing over him. There were no marks on him. No bullet holes. But neither could I see him breathing.

Panic bloomed in my chest, crushing all my internal organs as effectively as if it had been a steamroller. I tried to go to him, but of course I couldn’t because I wasn’t really there. I willed him to move, to sit up, to show me he was merely unconscious rather than dead, but that didn’t happen either.

And then there were hands on my face and someone repeating my name over and over, the sound of it like a skewer digging itself into my brain. To get them to stop, I opened my eyes. Calisto was there, his brown eyes swimming with concern. Calisto. Alive. Whole. Breathing. Here. Not lying dead on the floor of a tower block.

I grabbed him and pulled him down to the floor with me, burying my nose in his neck and breathing him in. “Hey,” he said, his voice soothing. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay. Did you slip or something? I came in here and you were on the floor and I couldn’t get you to respond to me.”

“Vision,” I said, the single word taking effort to force out.

“Oh. About me? You said those were painful, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

I separated myself from Calisto and seized him by the shoulders, so he had no choice but to look at me. “You can’t go in there! Do you hear me?”

He laughed, sobering quickly when he realized I was serious. “Go in where?”

“Go in the tower block. To see her .”

Calisto blinked. “Are you serious?”

“Deadly serious.”

He maneuvered himself round so he could lean back against the kitchen cupboard, his legs stretched out in front of him. “I think you better tell me what you saw.”

I joined him against the cupboard, relaying as much of the detail as I could while it was still fresh in my head, Calisto silent throughout and a permanent frown on his face.

A few seconds of silence followed the completion of my story, Calisto looking thoughtful. Finally, he cleared his throat. “Was I dead?”

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. I pressed a hand to my chest, my fingers splayed over my heart. “What I felt in here said you were.” Calisto gave a slow nod. “You can’t go in there,” I repeated.

“Why would I?” He climbed to his feet, and I followed his lead, Calisto opening up cupboards until he found a glass. He filled it from the tap and passed it across. I drank from it eagerly, my body feeling like a dried-out husk, and my head still throbbing from the intensity of the vision. “I mean,” he continued. “What about me, makes you think I’d ever stroll into that hornet’s nest? I might have said this afternoon that I’d grown some balls, but you should have seen that for the lie it was when I nearly passed out in Cade’s office.”

“You see dead bodies all the time,” I pointed out. “It’s your job.”

“Yeah, but they still have their heads.”

“That’s what got you?”

Calisto shrugged. “I don’t know. Either that or it was feeling responsible. I know,” he said before I could say anything. “We don’t need to have that conversation again.” He grabbed my glass and drank the last bit before refilling it with water and handing it back. “Saves dirtying another glass. But really, I can’t think of any scenario that would have me setting foot in that building. Are you sure I went in there voluntarily?”

I ran back through the vision, trying to see anything I might have missed. “You paused to look at the building. You didn’t look like you wanted to go in, but then you did. There was no one holding a gun to your head. Not at that point.”

Calisto chewed the information over for a while before shaking his head. “You’ve said yourself that your visions can be wrong. This one must be, because there’s no way in hell I would go in there of my own accord. I’m not a hero. And I never will be.”

His expression said he was telling the truth. I couldn’t shake the niggle that said things weren’t that simple. We didn’t have sex that night, Calisto not protesting when I wrapped him in my arms, anyway, and I went to sleep safe in the knowledge that for tonight at least, he wasn’t in danger.

I’d just completed my Tai Chi session when my phone rang. I snatched it up, Cade skipping any pleasantries to get right to the crux of the matter. “I just got off the phone with Ben,” he said.

A noise had me turning to see a bleary-eyed Calisto emerging from the bedroom, my phone having woken him. With no overnight bag packed, he only wore white underwear, all the bare skin on display momentarily distracting me.

“Asher?” Cade asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m here.” I smiled at Calisto and he smiled back, my heart giving a joyful little skip at the simple communication between the two of us. Maybe we could just stay here forever. I could buy it from my friend, and it could be our own personal bolt-hole. His family could keep my house. I really didn’t care as long as I got to be with Calisto, and he smiled at me like that. I’d tell Cade that I couldn’t work for him any longer. I had enough money that Calisto wouldn’t need to work, either. We could remain in our own little bubble. No O’Reilly. No complications. Just us. Visions be damned. We’d make our own future.

I wrenched myself out of the fantasy that wouldn’t happen anytime soon and probably not at all, as Calisto took a seat on the sofa and mouthed “who is it?”

“Cade,” I mouthed back, putting the phone on speaker. “Calisto is here too,” I said. “You’re on speaker.”

“Good. He should hear this. There’s been some developments on the body situation.”

“What kind of developments?” Calisto asked. “Good ones or bad ones?”

“Good ones,” Cade said. “They’ve identified him from his fingerprints as Jimmy Travers. He’s a petty criminal who, at the grand old age of twenty-eight, had already had quite a few stays inside at his majesty’s pleasure, stretching all the way back to the day after his nineteenth birthday. He only finished his latest stint for burglary a couple of months ago. The second noteworthy point is that someone killed him elsewhere. Forensic evidence showed that without a doubt once they’d finished processing the scene. Identifying him means they have an address to check out. The theory is that someone killed him there and then moved him to the canal. They found carpet fibers on his back. They’re expecting to match them to a carpet at his address. And the hope is that if he was killed there, there’ll be further forensic evidence that might link to O’Reilly.”

“Might,” I pointed out.

“Yeah,” Cade said, “But it’s better than nothing when the alternative was his fingerprints not being on the system and it taking months to identify him. I’ll take that as a win.”

“She should have chopped his hands off,” Calisto said, his own words making him look sick. “Why didn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” Cade answered. “Perhaps decapitating him had nothing to do with identification and we just assumed that. Anyway, I wanted to let you know where we were with things. I know you took the news hard yesterday, Calisto.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Calisto said. “If somebody killed somebody to send a message to you.”

“Yeah, probably,” Cade agreed.

“When are they going to the address?” I asked.

“As soon as they get clearance and have put together a team. Ben’s on standby and expecting it to happen before midday. He’s promised to keep us posted.”