That gets Rafe’s attention. I don’t talk much about my twenty years as an enforcer for the tribunal. “How long ago did you serve them?”
I cross my arms over my chest and look out the window into the snowy darkness. “Serve is not the right word, really. But I did take direction from them to hunt down particularly bad cases.” The sparkle from the rope lights dances in the windowpane, and a sigh escapes me at the simple beauty. “It was about four-hundred and fifty years ago, and my full powers had manifested about sixty years prior to that.”
“How many of them had you killed by the time you left?” My head whips back to face him. I’ve never discussed this before, and his question has caught me by surprise.
“How did you know?”
“You always get sad and distant when you talk of your past. I knew you must have left bodies behind.”
My eyes fill with moisture, but not a tear trickles down. “I killed two of the worst ancients. After I drained them, I made them crawl into the full sun when their guards weren’t around. Both looked like suicides, and I spaced them about a decade apart.”
“You’re very lucky.” He comes over, placing his arms around me in a hug. “They never connected it to the ‘Red Death’ rumor from the devastation in your first seethe?”
“No, I made sure my first name, Ceara, died with them and made myself over in the fifty years after. We’ve gone over this before, Rafe. Why bring it all up again?” I pull away from his warmth and lean back against the counter.
“You’ve never talked much about your time as an enforcer and I think it has colored your opinion of the Tribunal of Ancients.”
I snort through my nose at that one. “The tribunal is necessary, I get that. But they are not all sunshine and daisies. Believe me.”
“I do, but in a thousand years, they have done a lot of good too. Kept the worse bastards from continuing on and have worked to hide your kind from detection.”
Glancing up at the clock on the wall, I realize I’m about to be saved from discussing any more of this unpleasant topic. I push away from my position next to the sink, grabbing the phone as I go. Punching in Jonathan’s number, I wait for him to pick up while responding to Rafe. “Yeah, well, looks like they didn’t do too well with this bastard. They let him go.”
Jon answers after the third ring, recognizing my voice right away.
“I ordered breakfast for you before we head up to suite six,” I tell him. “But it’s kind of redundant now.”
“What is? Why?” Jon asks.
“’Cause we figured out who did it and why. Come on over. We’ve got a lot to fill you in on.”
I hang up, turning back to Rafe. I can see he is still unconvinced with my conspiracy theory. I know I shouldn’t dig, but I do anyway. “You’re remembering the polite faces of the tribunal members during the dealings with Ivan. One of them must have had a hidden agenda… obviously.”
“We’ll talk it over with Jon when he gets here, okay?” Brushing off my thought of a possible set-up by someone on the tribunal quite neatly, he’s becoming diplomatic as he ages. “Maybe he can see something we’ve missed.”
“It’s a moot point anyway, isn’t it? We’re going to go sniff the room out in a minute and then the rest doesn’t really matter, does it?” A smug smile hangs on my face. “The scent will match Ivan and you’ll be groveling in apology.”
There’s a knock on the entrance door to our suite. “Is that the breakfast you mentioned to Jon?” I nod and Rafe heads to get the tray. In a further attempt at diplomatic diversion, he adds, “I hope Paul added the sautéed mushrooms to the omelet again. That was heaven last time.”
By the time he sets up the table with the contents from the tray and pours out coffee from the carafe, Jon arrives at the back door. He looks fresh-faced and spectacular this morning. I’m betting he hooked up with one of his fellow employees last night when he cut out of here so early on. Good for him. It appears to have softened the tension he had last night after he stumbled on Rafe and me coming up from the basement.
Hanging up his coat, Jon turns to us, giving me a once