the icon from the wall and placed it in the case he’d brought with them. It was only about a foot and a half long by a foot wide. He secured the icon, placed the protective layers over it, then strapped the case onto his back.
“Okay, we better go.”
He was focused now. All he was thinking about was securing the prize and returning it to the client. He wasn’t seeing the larger puzzle, but he would. Soon.
“Right.” Tenzin turned, pressed her hands together, and bowed toward Kali Ma. Then she reached into her pocket and took out the only offering she’d brought, a lime-flavored candy she’d grabbed from Gavin’s club the night before. She placed the candy on the altar, murmured a mantra, and bowed once more.
Ben was frowning. “What are you doing?”
“I’ll explain later.” She pushed the panel open and walked into the baroque chapel. “Come on. Radu is waiting.”
Ben sat in his room in Budapest, drinking a glass of blood-wine and staring at the icon he’d stolen from a human thief to give to a vampire one.
All’s fair in love and war.
And art theft. Ben was fine with that. Farkas was a well-known thief, and he’d left his house unprotected. He couldn’t be surprised that decades of privacy, layers of aliases, and dense Hungarian bureaucracy had not been enough to protect him.
Nope.
Something else was bugging him. It wasn’t only Tenzin’s odd reaction in Farkas’s chapel. It wasn’t the eclectic mix of deities in the worship space. It was the house itself.
Which vampire designed it? Was it a coincidence? Had Gergo Farkas happened to buy a house that had once belonged to a vampire? It was possible. He could have found the passages after he bought the property and decided the house had belonged to a criminal or a kinky aristocrat. It might even have been why he liked the mansion in the first place.
But that didn’t explain the mirrors.
The carefully placed mirrors were the thing that was bugging him. Paranoid human or cautious vampire?
I’ll explain later.
Tenzin said that a lot, but she didn’t always follow through. What had she been looking at in the chapel? What about the triptych had caught her eye when there were so many other, more valuable, pieces of art in the house?
Why had she been so quick to leave when this was their last job and she clearly didn’t want to cut ties with him?
Because once they were finished with this, the two of them were done. Going their separate ways.
Finished.
And she seemed totally fine with it.
Ben rose and walked to her room. Tenzin was hiding something, and he was going to find out what it was.
He knocked on the door.
Tenzin opened it, and her lips were pale.
Ben frowned. “Have you not been eating?”
She shrugged. “I forgot.”
“Tenzin—”
“I don’t get hungry like you do, Benjamin. It’s not the same for me.”
“When was the last time you drank anything fresh? There’s a pub two floors below this with donors.”
Her eyebrow went up. “Are you my mother?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Fine. Forget I said anything.”
“Okay.” She started to close the door, and he stopped it with his foot. It was so easy to fall into familiar bickering patterns with her, he’d almost forgotten why he came.
“I didn’t come to nag you about eating regularly.”
“Good.” She tried to close the door again, but he didn’t move. “Why did you come?”
To seduce you, strip off your clothes, and make you drink from my neck.
Nope. Bad idea. That was not why he was there.
He cleared his throat. “It’s later.”
“And?”
“There was something going on at the house earlier when we found the icon. You said you’d explain later.”
She frowned; then her eyes lit in awareness. “Ah. Yes. I have been reflecting on that.”
“Thinking instead of reacting?”
“Yes.” She raised a finger. “Exactly. Thinking instead of reacting. And I think…”
He waited for longer than he usually would. “Yes?”
“I think I’m not going to tell you after all.” She pursed her lips and nodded. “Yes.”
And just like that, she’d pissed him off again. “So there’s definitely something else going on? Something I’m not seeing?”
She nodded again. “Yes.”
“Possibly the thing about this job that was throwing you off to begin with?”
“Yes! That’s probably what it was. Good catch.”
“But you’re not going to tell me.”
“No.”
“Even though we’re partners.”
She pointed down the hall toward his room. “You have Radu’s icon, so we’re not partners anymore.”
Ben blinked in surprise and felt his heart give a quiet thunk.