Hunter pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut, but when he opened them, the murmuring was still going on over the coms. He refrained from looking at Josh’s porcelain-doll beauty again, because sadly, nothing would have changed. He would continue to be faithful as Josh’s friend, but as together and supernaturally poised as that boy was, he would never hold the fascination that Grace did for Hunter.
After an hour of relative quiet—broken only by Molly and Julia popping in from the room next door to tell them they were going shopping and by Grace’s occasional sleep monologue—Hunter saw something and stiffened.
“Josh,” he hissed. “Over there.”
Josh pulled out a pair of small binoculars, concentrated where Hunter was looking, and let out a low whistle. “That’s not the regular light, is it?”
“No, it is not.”
Artur Mikkelnokov had not drawn his blackout curtain, only the outer gauzy shade. Looking into the room from their position, they could see a small light emerging from somewhere in the suite. Was it a closet? And it was bobbing furtively through the room.
“Infrared,” Hunter rasped, and because Josh was competent as fuck, he slapped the infrared glasses into Hunter’s hand without a hiccup.
Hunter looked again and saw two distinct heat signatures in the room, one of them prone and unmoving and the other one apparently going through Artur Mikkelnokov’s suitcase.
“Grace,” Hunter said, quietly at first because it was easy to forget that he wasn’t the stealthy prowler in the room.
“Amm, ormble, dpurbble, snoorp….”
“Grace!” Hunter snapped, trying to penetrate the thickness of sleep.
“Portable bifocular finkdoodles!” Grace gasped breathlessly.
“Grace, there’s someone in Artur’s room. Don’t you two have connecting doors?”
“On it,” Grace murmured, alert just like that.
Hunter watched for a moment as Grace’s heat signature paused at the doors, and then his actual training kicked in.
“Grace, wait! What if the guy is…?” And before he could say “armed,” Grace slid through the doors.
“Shit, gun,” Grace snapped, and Hunter threw the infrared binoculars at Josh and tore out of the hotel room like a hound of hell.
A Steep and Narrow Stairway
GRACE LIKED to fancy he was a cat burglar by trade, à la Cary Grant (thank you, Josh, for making him watch To Catch a Thief when they were kids). Cat burglars were smooth. They were slick. And they didn’t do weapons. Who needed a gun when you were dead sexy and got the jewels before anyone knew they were even in a thief’s scope, right?
So seeing the gun was a shock. Enough of one that Grace didn’t look past the weapon to the person holding it. Instead he dropped into a fluid roll, ending up chest to chest with the intruder, inside their one-armed reach and too close to hit.
Then he grabbed the guy in a bear hug and yanked him backward, away from Artur and into Grace’s room.
Face-to-face, the man—definitely a man, although small and neatly built, like an acrobat or a dancer as well—had a mask on, although Grace could see flashes of pale skin around the eyes, with their big surprised eyeballs practically protruding from the eyelids and mask, colorless in the dark.
“Can’t… breathe…,” the guy choked, and Grace slammed him against the hallway wall, and again, and again, until the gun shook loose and thunked on the floor.
The sound startled them both, and Grace loosened his hold for a fraction of a second.
The intruder dove for the gun, and Grace—well, he was closer to the door than the window.
He might have tried to climb out the window.
Instead he hauled ass for the door and rocketed down the hall in his bare feet, every step a missile-fueled grand jeté.
He heard the thundering footsteps of his pursuer and dodged for the ice machine and the stairs beyond so he wouldn’t end up pinned against the elevator doors.
Hunter’s voice crackled in his ear. “Grace, can you hear me? Grace!”
“Yeah, yeah, I can hear you,” Grace muttered. He was in outstanding physical shape, and his feet were used to punishment. He could probably run down the stairs singing “Whiskey in the Jar” at the top of his lungs. “What do you want?”
“Where are you?”
“On the stairwell. He’s about two floors behind me—shit!” A shot zinged down the stairwell, plenty wide, but Grace saw plaster dust. He threw himself over the railing and hit the landing about eight feet below, continuing to run.
“Is he shooting at you?”
“You sound panicked,” Grace observed clinically. “Why do you sound panicked? I’m the one he’s shooting at!”
“Shut up and run! I’ll have the second-floor door open. Get there!”
“Great,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “Only eight more floors to go.”
“Grace!”
“Fine!”
Grace kept going, his bare feet far quieter than what sounded like a herd of elephants behind him. He passed a light switch at the seventh floor and hit Off as he ran, and, blessedly, herd-of-elephants guy decided not to shoot again.
“Six,” he murmured. “Five.” His legs weren’t strained per se, but he was feeling as though he was beginning a thoroughly satisfying workout. “Four.” For kicks, he went over another landing, wincing when he caught his toe on a rough patch of the metal stairs. Well, he was showing off.
“He still behind you?” Hunter asked in his coms.
Grace paused. The herd of elephants had slowed down a tad, and Grace could hear somebody breathing hard. Ha! That’s what you got for not having Artur Mikkelnokov as your dance master! You got weak, that’s what you got, and slow! Artur, desperate to keep Grace from spinning out into his own unpredictable head, had worked him into exhaustion for three years, until Grace had figured out what he was doing and promised very fervently that it wasn’t necessary anymore.
By then, Grace had discovered lockpicks and sneaking into people’s houses to get revenge when they were complete dicks, and he’d discovered that Josh had a very specific set of skills to help him out.
He and Josh had started supplementing the dance conservatory’s coffers with the proceeds of their little adventures, and Grace had asked Artur, very politely and respectfully, to maybe tone down the seven-day exhaustion so he could “work for the employers” who kept donating to Artur’s beloved school.
Artur, satisfied that Grace wasn’t going to self-destruct again, had agreed—and Grace had kept himself plenty fit learning how to climb elevator shafts in high-rises and BASE jumping off rooftops in Chicago.
All of that served him well now as he saw the open door and zoomed straight for it, feet flying on the roughened stairs.
“Don’t stop,” Hunter said into the coms. “Keep going back up the elevators to check on Artur.”
Grace did what he said and was halfway through the lobby when he heard a muffled grunt from Hunter, and Josh’s chortle.
“And the quarterback is toast!” Josh cried. “Oh my God—clotheslined so hard! Hunter’s binding his wrists—”