Danny hummed thoughtfully, and the rest of the group waited. Hunter knew how to keep his body still, but his eyes moved restlessly from face to face, assessing.
Chuck Calder’s big frame took up most of a large stuffed chair. He slouched, legs out and crossed at the ankles, as though he couldn’t think of anything more relaxing than tracking down a mobster to make him stop trafficking in stolen jewels, and his green eyes—a complement to the dark red-brown of his hair—crinkled up in the corners to prove it. Chuck had been in the military—and he’d been a getaway driver and safecracker once he got out of it. Not much bothered Chuck, but he did love a good chase.
Josh Salinger, audio-visual whiz kid, competent actor and dancer, and college dropout, sat on the arm of the couch next to Uncle Danny, arms crossed, a look of still concentration on his pale, almost pixieish face. Josh had been born into the grift, as it were. Felix and Danny had been scoping out the Dormer mansion in Rome for a way to give payback to Hiram Dormer, who was a raping, coercive bastard. In the middle of the grift, Hiram’s daughter—Josh’s mother, Julia—had begged for their help, con men or not. In the end, Julia had married Felix as a way to keep herself and her child safe from her abusive millionaire father, and Felix and Danny had agreed to it because they wanted to protect Julia. For the three of them, hiding the relationship between Felix and Danny from her father, as well as keeping Josh and Julia in a little bubble of safety, had proved to be con-man graduate school for all involved—Josh included.
Stirling Christopher, computer hacker and AV-set theater designer, sat on the floor under the wet bar, arms wrapped around his knees, gray-green eyes focused intensely on the people doing the talking. If someone was to accidentally look at him—and most of the crew tried to avoid that because they knew attention made Stirling uncomfortable in a crowd situation—he would have turned his face away. His skin was pale brown, and he liked to wear black. That meant he blended into the shadows even more seamlessly than Hunter did, which made Hunter a tad jealous. He would have given a lot for Stirling’s level of invisibility.
Just as Hunter had the thought, he saw Danny catch Stirling’s eye and wink before looking off into the distance again. A shy smile flirted on Stirling’s lean mouth, and Hunter’s chest warmed a little. That was Danny’s greatest gift—making people feel good. Hunter had seen him use it to get a mark to walk right into a box the mark had crafted all by herself, but when he was using it on family, it was all about the kindness.
Stirling’s foster-sister, Molly, sat on the love seat, her long legs pulled up to her chest like Stirling’s, her riot of orange hair pulled up to her crown and left to spill down. Molly’s only disappointment in working for her brother’s crew was that every last one of the men were gay, which meant they were all competing for the same pieces of ass.
Molly was the first to admit this was not much different from theater, where she used her talents as a costume designer and performer, but she still lamented the lack of available men.
Felix Salinger and Julia Dormer sat side by side on barstools behind the couch where Danny was consoling Tabitha. Julia—as elegant, blond, and swanlike as her son was petite, dark, and pixieish—kept an ongoing silent conversation with her ex-husband, and Hunter figured that they were as close as most brothers and sisters were by now. He’d seen her act just as familiar with Danny, and he’d been a little envious of the three of them and the family they’d forged out of necessity and—even Hunter could see it—love.
Hunter had served in the military. He knew how to use weapons effectively, but his body was an even more insidious weapon. Nobody expected him to pull death out of thin air, but he had, frequently, in some of the most brutal parts of the world.
But physical violence was personal violence; nobody wanted to get too close to a man who could kill them with a shrug of his shoulders. Until Josh Salinger had recruited Hunter for this “think tank” of theirs, Hunter had always felt very much alone, even when he’d been part of a unit.
But ever since that moment in the parking garage, when Josh had looked at Hunter with that pixieish face and that sober adult attention, he had, well….
Roped him in, pretty much like the con man Josh had been raised to be.
Hunter, still raw from the loss of Paulie and still bewildered as to what Ron Pinter had been involved in that could have resulted in such a disastrous consequence, had needed that calm, that leadership.
Josh Salinger’s easy company and easy acceptance of a personal code of ethics—as opposed to one that was a little easier on the bureaucracy—had been the balm for Hunter’s soul. But he hadn’t sparked Hunter’s interest. Hunter might not have been in love with Paulie, but he’d been attached to him, and he didn’t trust easily. He’d been pretty sure that part of his life would take years to heal.
And then Josh had introduced Hunter to his friends, including his best friend since grade school, Dylan Li.
Grace.
Grace, who was, even as Tabitha spoke, swaying slightly on the couch, his sinuous, ribbon-thin body always graceful, never still.
Grace had driven Hunter absolutely batshit from that first meeting months ago. Every predator knew to keep still.
Everything that moved as much as Grace was preparing to run.
Grace was, in fact, prey.
But wily prey. If Hunter had been on the job, he doubted he would have carried out a contract on Grace yet, because the man never quit moving.
And the longer Hunter spent watching him ripple, stretch, pirouette, and vibrate his way from one side of the world to the other, the less Hunter thought he could have carried out a contract on Dylan Li period.
That wasn’t the kind of predator Hunter felt like when he was around Grace.
And now, as Hunter studied everybody in the room, he found his attention returning again and again to that lithe, dancing body. Grace’s shoulders were turned toward Tabitha, and his attention—always hard to pin down—only strayed every so often. Now and then his rippling hands made an abortive pass at her shoulder, her arm, or her hair.
He wanted to pet her.
He really cared for this girl. Not as a lover, obviously, but as a sister. As a friend. However, his attention was starting to spook her, particularly as she spoke about Sergei Kadjic and the increasingly impossible position the mobster was putting her grandfather in.
“I think,” Danny said into the ruminative quiet, “that we’re going to need more information.”
“You can’t help me?” Tabitha asked, her voice pitching on a wail that told Hunter she’d been at the breaking point, and if Grace’s offer of help didn’t pan out, she might well and truly snap.
“Of course we can!” Danny told her, glancing around the room to make sure everybody was on board.
Everybody was definitely on board. Hunter knew he, for one, was growing bored. Their last caper—or rather their first caper, the one that had reunited Felix and Danny after a ten-year separation—had been nearly two months earlier, and Chicago was not quite out of the volatile spring season that tended to put everybody’s teeth on edge.
Hunter could swear the occasional hits of bright sunshine brought out the extra-rank BO in every man he passed. That must have been it, because he hadn’t gotten laid since… well, since Paulie.