Page 4 of Business vs. Pleasure

All right, maybe he had a point.

“You can’t rush perfection,” he said, doing his best to keep his voice level as he perused the selection of firearms next to his pocket squares. It seemed like something small and sleek was called for, especially given that the odds of finding whoever had infiltrated their defenses to be in good health were low. Exceedingly so, in fact.

“I can handle this myself, if you’d rather stay here.”

Oh, you’d love that, wouldn’t you?!

“No need,” he said, grabbing his pretty little Beretta 21A and checking it over before pocketing it. A gun this small could live in even the tightest pair of pants, and what it lacked in stopping power was made up for with accuracy. They might have retired, but that didn’t mean August slacked off when it came to range time. He’d learned to compensate for a hell of a lot of injuries over the years, and he wasn’t about to lose his hard-earned form now.

He added a few subtle, elegant knives to the ensemble, then turned and walked out of the closet at a brisk pace, forcing Ricardo to keep up. His husband was, as expected, dressed like a fanatic Blaugrana in red and blue, but he held a customized Sig-Sauer MPX submachine gun in a comfortable two-handed grip.

The nerve of him. “Worried about an invasion?” August asked as he headed for the elevator that would take them downstairs into the Labyrinth.

“You have your preferences, I have mine.”

Yes, and perhaps they didn’t align as perfectly as August had once thought.

Or maybe they do, and you just don’t want to admit that he might be right.

No, nuh-uh, nope, the voice of reason had no place in his brain right now. August wasn’t done being mad about this. He resisted the urge to shift on his feet as he pressed the button for the elevator. The transition from the soft surfaces in their bedroom to the marble hallways was always rough; maybe he ought to give in and resurface the damn things like Ricardo had wanted in the first place.

Hmph. Home improvements could wait. First, they had an intruder to find.

One of the best things about moving to Malta, in August’s opinion, was getting to build something for themselves from scratch. No HOA to appease, few zoning requirements to worry about, just taking their little slice of paradise and turning it into the castle he’d always secretly dreamed of living in, complete with moat and labyrinth.

Fine, maybe the moat was only half full at high tide, and maybe the labyrinth was less of a home to monsters and more of a home to a series of ugly traps that got more lethal the deeper someone got, but that was close enough for August.

The fun thing about the labyrinth was that it appeared to be the easy way to get into the house. Everything aboveground was one step back from a bunker, from visible turrets packing heat to specially designed windows impenetrable to not only bullets but half a dozen surveillance techniques. There was no outdoor tennis court, no open-air pool for lounging by, no topiary garden where kids could play hide and seek. Just the castle, large and imposing, and the rocky grounds around it leading to a beach in one direction and a set of ruins in the other.

They weren’t allowed to fuck with the ruins, and August hadn’t. He hadn’t! He’d merely made it appear like he’d fucked with them, like he’d linked a natural tunnel from the millennium-old temple complex to a back way in and out of their place. It wasn’t his fault that people didn’t dig a little deeper and figure out that no, that tunnel system was all theirs, and thanks to the beauty of modern technology they could trap, knock out, and electrocute someone in the same hundred-foot stretch of winding tunnel depending on how deep they’d penetrated.

Exactly two people had tried to infiltrate their place over the past few years, but both had gotten stopped in the trap zone, one by a simple metal grate and another by a pit trap. No one had gotten as far as being gassed unconscious.

And yet this fellow…

“Damn.” August stared at the scene on the security camera at the base of the elevator. That guy was dead as hell. He was so dead he was still smoking, which wasn’t supposed to happen at this voltage. “Maybe I need to turn the power down.”

“He was determined,” Ricardo said from where he was reviewing the man’s progress past the tunnel entrance. He froze a few of the scenes for August to catch up with. “And he knew what he was heading into.”

So he did. The man had deftly avoided both the initial traps and had a mask on to take care of the gas exposure. He’d known which way to turn to head toward the real route to the house, too, not a given when August had doubled down on the term “labyrinth.” He’d made it all the way to the near-invisible tripwires that triggered the low-level electric shocks, which he’d evaded, son of a bitch, and then…

Well, he hadn’t evaded the laser tripwires. Watching the man take a pair of high-powered taser bolts to the neck and convulse until his body gave up was satisfying but worrying. He shouldn’t have made it that far in. “Do you think someone talked to our architects?”

“Even if they found one, we had five of them,” Ricardo said. “And none of them knew the others.”

“Hmm. Bribed the construction crew?”

“Again, we used three, and this last intersection we built ourselves, remember?”

Oh, August remembered. It had been hellish, the sort of work he loathed, but by the end of it they’d had a lovely, secure house all to themselves, so it had been worth it.

But maybe it wasn’t. “We need to figure out who this person is.” And whether he’d brought backup.

“I’ll handle it.”

August glared at Ricardo. “The hell you’ll handle it on your own.”

“The hell I’m going to let you drag a body out of the tunnel when you’ve been on your feet for most of the day,” Ricardo snapped right back. “You go look for his car, I’ll take care of him. Unless you want a local to find his car and probably get themselves blown up trying to open it?”