MARIKA

The mortgage approval letter landed in Marika’s mail slot scarcely two days later.

She didn’t know if it was a culmination of her robust and personal threats against Quinton Reid’s person, or simply the natural conclusion of her application. She opened it with a deft slice of her shiny letter opener and skimmed it briefly before she filed it away in her desk with the other things that were too boring to bother with for long.

She had ordered Reid’s release, but she had eyes on him, to be safe.

He was…

Odd.

She had met her fair share of reckless men in her years at her father’s side. That was a hazard of the profession. The people who knew better didn’t often end up in their line of work.

Those men were less unique and remarkable than they likely thought themselves to be. The were either sort who either had enough power to back up their confidence, or too little sense to see the reality of their situation for what it was. Most, in either circumstance, ended up with short lives at the end of short leashes.

Quinton Reid was neither.

Per all of the information Mila and her men had gathered on Mari’s behalf, he was a boring, tedious pencil-pusher without a lick of sense. The kind of average that never crossed paths with someone like Mari deliberately, and who usually ducked her the moment their eyes met and they recognized something animal and hungry in the set of her scarlet smile.

He was smart enough to know better, but foolish enough to ignore those better instincts.

That was a new category.

At first, she had thought, perhaps, it was a business arrangement that Quinton Reid wanted. Greed was easy enough to deal with. She could handle that type of person. She had handled that type of person, more than once. The sort who filled the empty place behind their ribs with money and material things.

But that wasn’t it, either. He came from a well-to-do family with connections, but relied on none of them. They sat in an estate more than a thousand miles from here, none the wiser that he was now on the radar of a very impatient criminal heiress. 

Not one call to anyone about his kidnapping. Not one word to that little assistant of his. No sniveling messages home to mother begging for a chance to come home. Quinton Reid said nothing and spoke to no one.

At least, if the bugs she had installed on every inch of his home and office were anything to go by. 

He had sat in that chair at the bottom of her warehouse with the cornered expression of an animal that was exactly where it knew it would eventually end up. A beast that had been offered an out, but had refused the chance to run.

She shouldn’t have been surprised.

There had been something else behind the fear there, even in that uninspired little office of his. Something she could not help but want to cradle and observe and shape. Her father had always been uninterested in the peculiarities of other people, but she couldn’t help her curiosity.

Quinton Reid had seemed pleased.

It hadn’t been obvious. Mari may have been the only one who noticed at all, close as she was in that moment two days past to the stale smell of coffee on his breath and the set of his brow beneath those solid plastic glasses.

He may not have known either. Men were regularly dishonest with themselves. They couldn’t help it. It was why her brothers had been so spectacularly ill-suited for the mantle she had swiped from beneath their incapable noses.

But whether he knew it or not, whether he would acknowledge it or not, his pupils had gone wide and black and fathomlessly hungry the moment she issued her threat. The way he bit the corner of his lip was less panic and more…

Anticipatory.

“Send him home,” she had said. The air felt colder, then. And Mari would never admit it, but that had shaken her. She was used to the smell of fear, maybe even the snarl of naked want, but this was neither of those things. This was off. 

Quinton Reid had all the hallmarks of a rabid animal. Too eager. Too friendly. Too unafraid of the things that went bump in the night. It was too unpredictable. She didn’t need another variable in this dangerous dance she was conducting.

People in her line of work rarely ended up well when they sought out danger for danger’s sake.

And yet…

“Mila,” Marika said. It was nighttime, now. She had waited longer than she usually did to open the mail. Mari didn’t have deviations in behavior. It had left Mila uneasy and twitchy in the corner of their shared office since noontime.

“Boss,” Mila answered swiftly. She hadn’t moved in hours. “The approval letter?” 

“Yes.” 

“At least he knows to do as he’s told.” Mila shifted a little, darting a look behind her before she continued. “He is…wrong. In our observation of him, he has been entirely unaffected by the change in his personal circumstances. If anything, he’s…”

“Giddy?” Marika said. Mila nodded, firm and unsettled.

“I don’t think we should keep him close. He may have been an asset, if he had the good sense to see his situation for what it was, but…”

They shouldn’t keep him close. It was as much a statement of fact as anything else that Mila said. She rarely spoke if she was not certain of the things she was saying. Marika respected that about her. She relied on it, even.

But right now, she did not like it.

The animal was rabid, but it was fascinating, wasn’t it? In a world of tigers that ended up toothless, it dared to bare its fangs, even if they were too small to puncture.

Against her better judgment, she wanted to see it try again.

“Continue watching him,” Mari said. She tapped her nails in a long arc on the top of her desk, and kept her dark eyes narrow and looking forward. The light of her lamp was too dim to reach the edge of the room, and the shadows seemed thicker, somehow, tonight. “I don’t know what use we may have for him, yet, but we have the resources for now.”

Mila didn’t look happy. But she was a good footsoldier, and she wouldn’t disobey. It was the reason she had lived when the rest of her family hadn’t survived the purge at her father’s hand. “Yes, boss.”

Marika had been so firm for so long. She had borne the brunt of a tedious existence, forced to clean up the mess left by a family too inept to hold the crown it had been bestowed with.

She deserved a trifle to play with, didn’t she?

And what a splendid little trifle she had found.