Edge Of Oblivion

48

He stood carefully, balancing his weight over his bent knees. His back protested with a sharp, stabbing ache, but it was tolerable, less than when he had first sat up. He was alive, if not perfectly well. . But no matter the injury, he’d heal quickly. If he wasn’t dead, he’d be fine within days.

He crossed the room, found the black pants and shirt that had been left folded on a chair, and pulled them on carefully with gritted teeth. His weapons were laid out in a neat row on the top of the plain dresser, and he smiled as he donned those as well, strapping the knives around his waist and ankles. He pulled on a pair of new black boots, size fifteen, government issue, and laced up the ties.

Then he walked out the door and went to find her.

The safe house—one of dozens the Syndicate kept in every major city across the globe—was a refurbished villa in the hilly and moderately affluent Aventine section of Rome. It boasted 360-degree views of the city and over ten thousand square feet of living space, the vast majority of it underground. From the street, it was a modest turn-of-the-century affair of brick and mortar surrounded by a tall iron fence, with gardens and trees and a bearded, chubby lawn gnome by the front gate whose pointed red hat had long ago faded to pink, and a security system to rival that of Fort Knox.

The bedrooms and lounging area were on the bottom floor, the kitchen, dining area, and media rooms on the second floor, the gym and training center on the first floor belowground. Aboveground it was simply a house. A beautifully decorated, unoccupied house, because no one ever ate or slept or lived there. Aboveground was all for show. Once you descended beyond the reinforced lead door to the “basement,” you entered another world.

He walked past six unoccupied bedrooms and found himself alone. A staircase twisted up to the main room, which was a large, open space decorated in dark charcoals and brown and beige without a hint of feminine softness. Beyond it were the dining room and kitchen—modern and masculine as the rest of the belowground areas—and as soon as he reached the top step of the stairs, he heard Mateo’s gravel-rough voice drifting in from that direction.

“I can’t take it much longer, T.”

There came an agitated grunt, then the sound of boots pacing back and forth over tile. “You can’t! I feel like I’m gonna crawl right out of my f*****g skin.”

“If he doesn’t wake up soon, we’ll have to leave Bartleby here with him and come back when it passes.”

Xander froze, listening.

“How much longer we got?”

“Three days minus sixteen hours,” muttered Mateo. “And counting.”

Groans. “Jesus Christ.”

He waited, but they didn’t say more. Curiosity got the better of him, and he made his way silently to the kitchen, where he stood there in the doorway, unnoticed, looking them over.

His boys. His brothers, in heart if not in Blood.

They were assassins like him—collectively referred to as the Syndicate by the rest of their kind—and like him they were disgraced sons of powerful males who’d been handed over as children to the brutal tutelage of the capoeira master Karyo, a human the Manaus colony kept on retainer because he was both a perfect killing machine and perfectly tight-lipped about his “unique” students and their kin, who paid so handsomely for his silence. It was either study under Karyo or be tossed into the Drowning Well; bringing shame to one’s family name was not well tolerated by his kind, and at least the Academy offered a chance to save face.

It offered their fathers a chance to save face. The young boys who would become the hardened killers of the Syndicate never gave a s**t about things like that.

Mateo was the son of a duke, of the Grandes do Imperio—Great Ones of the Empire. At six years old he’d called his pompous father a cachorro puto—dog fucker—in front of the entire Manaus Assembly. He now leaned against the counter by the sink, muscled arms crossed over his chest, chewing his lower lip.

Tomás, eldest son of the colony’s Matchmaker, had burned his family’s home to the ground when he was eight in a fit of rage after his father had spanked his bare ass in the middle of Sunday church services when he wouldn’t stop squirming in the pew. He sat at the big square wood table with one knee jumping up and down beneath it, his head bent over, hands clasped over the back of his neck.

Julian, a giant skull-crusher of a male with shaggy dark hair who always drove the getaway car no matter the job, had stolen apples from a neighbor’s tree. He sat hunched over a bowl of pasta at the table, mechanically shoveling it into his mouth with a blank-eyed stare as if he didn’t even know he was eating.

And he, Xander, had simply been born to the wrong woman.

They had trained together in Brazil since boyhood in the fine arts of murder and mayhem, until his three adopted brothers had gone into the American military as spies of sorts and he had gone slowly insane.

They were the only three souls in the world he trusted with his life. They knew all his secrets and he knew all theirs, and if anything was finer than that, he hadn’t seen it.

“Boys,” he said.