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"Sentinel?"
I dropped my gaze to the floor, unable to bear the pain and fury and betrayal in his. "No, Liege."
"Liege," Ethan muttered, the word rendered a joke.
"Merit has a plan," Luc put in.
Ethan looked at me, eyebrows raised, a bit of appreciative surprise in his expression.
"Sentinel?"
"Killing two birds," I reminded him. "It's too late now, the sun's nearly up, but I think I know how we can confront him without risking the rest of the vampires in the House.
We'll lure him out."
"And how will we accomplish that?"
"We offer Celina as bait."
His gaze went a little bit wicked, as if he fully condoned the manipulation. "Do what you have to do, Merit."
"That's permission?" I confirmed.
Ever so slowly, he raised his gaze to mine, then looked at me, this Master of vampires, emerald eyes glowing. "Nail him, Sentinel."
The plan set, and the sun glowing at the edge of the horizon, I returned to my room, and found my cell phone angry and blinking. Mallory had left four voice mails, each more consoling, slightly less angry, than the one before it. She seemed to have worked off some of her steam, but I couldn't say that mine had lessened. The vampire drama had focused my attention elsewhere, certainly, but it hadn't eliminated the dull current of anger. I just wasn't ready to talk to her.
And that wasn't the only thing waiting for me. I thought, at first, that the red paper on the floor of my room had slipped from the packet of mail I'd brought back from Mallory's house. But I knew there'd been no crimson envelope on the hardwood floor when I'd changed clothes a few hours ago.
It was the same envelope as the card sent to Mallory's, but this time it was addressed to me at Cadogan House. I picked it up, then lifted the heavy flap. No card inside this time, but there was something else. I upended the contents into my hand. Out came a rectangle of translucent red plastic about the size of a business card. It bore a single thin white line, the inscription RG, and a stylized fleur-de-lis.
The card in my hand, I went to the bed and sat down, then put the envelope on the comforter beside me. I flipped the card back and forth, held it up to the light, tried to read through to the reverse side. Nothing.
The envelopes had both been addressed to me - one at my old address, one at my new one. Someone had known where I'd lived and had discovered that I'd moved. Someone who wanted to give me random bits of paper and plastic? Were these supposed to be messages? Clues?
The sun rising, and my tolerance for mysteries having been exhausted for the day, I put the card on the nightstand beside my bed. I changed into pajamas - a long-sleeved, oversized Bears T-shirt - ensured that the shutter over the window was secure, and climbed into bed.
Chapter Twenty-one
YOU GIVE BITE A BAD NAME
As it tends to do, the sun set again. Showered and dressed, I stood before the conference table in the Ops Room in my Cadogan black, katana belted and at the ready, preparing to, as Ethan had put it, nail my colleague.
Nailing Peter, of course, wasn't the hard part. The hard part was going to be convincing Peter to nail whomever he'd been in league with, whether the "she" from Nick's telephone call or someone else with insider information about the Breckenridges. The setup, of course, was easy. We'd send an e-mail to one of Peter's fake addresses in the guise of the person we suspected was guiding his hand - Celina - and ask him to meet her at their "usual" location. If he took the bait, we'd confirm that Celina was the manipulator behind the scenes. We'd follow him to the rendezvous spot and, from there, take him in.
"Or that's how it's supposed to go," I told the guards, my hands sweating as I explained the plan to the vampires around the conference table. This was, I guess, my first official op as Sentinel, and there were a million ways it could go wrong.
Among other potential problems, we'd gotten access to Peter's e-mails through the service providers; it wasn't like we'd hacked directly into his accounts. So, we had no clue if Celina set up meetings with him via e-mail or, if so, what address she used. But we had a pretty good clue. Jeff, being ever resourceful, spent some of the daylight hours scrubbing the Web for data that might help us, and managed to find a cached image of Peter's e-mail directory from a few weeks ago. Although we couldn't actually read the e-mails, we noticed that one addressee looked curiously familiar: Marie Collette.
Celina's human name.
More importantly, the e-mail was dated only a week before we'd met Celina at North Pond and Ethan had confronted her about her role in the park killings. Peter and Celina had communicated, and they'd done it just before she tried to kabob Ethan.
Coincidence? Maybe. Likely not.
But even if Celina hadn't been the instigator for this newest betrayal, the fact that she and Peter had communicated increased the odds that he'd be curious enough to take the bait, especially since he'd been warned she would probably attempt to reenter Chicago. Either way, we could ensure that he was out of the House - and our vampires were out of danger - before we confronted him.
"Lindsey," Luc prompted when I'd finished my review.
She nodded. "Since Jeff couldn't get us into the existing 'Marie Collette' account, I've set up a new one using a different domain name. He's got at least six operative e-mail addresses, so it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that Celina's got more than one."
"We do what we can with what we've got," Luc said. "We just need to get him out the door. And the message?"
I clicked a button so the text displayed on the wall screen across from the conference table, then read aloud: "You've been compromised. Rendezvous point ASAP."
"We were afraid to pick a specific time since we weren't sure when he'd see the message," Juliet pointed out. "But assuming we've made the correct assumptions, and that Celina's behind this, it's not a bad plan."
Luc nodded, then looked at me. "It's your op, Sentinel. You ready?"
I thought of the betrayal in Ethan's eyes, and nodded, left hand on the handle of my katana. "Let's nail him."
Lindsey and Luc were in her SUV outside the House, an eye on Peter's own red sports car (which had been tagged by RDI with a tracking device), ready to follow Peter if he followed our plan. I stood beside the basement door, waiting impatiently for Juliet, who'd been assigned to drive both of us. Her vehicle, a black sedan, was apparently less noticeable than my orange Volvo, which Luc immediately vetoed as a surveillance car.
I heard footsteps on the stairs and stood straight, but it wasn't Juliet who appeared around the corner. Blond hair tied at the base of his neck, his body snugged into a short-sleeved black T-shirt and dark jeans, katana in a royal blue scabbard at his waist, he smiled just so, one corner of his mouth tipped up knowingly.
