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PROLOGUE
DECEMBER
The ICU nurses were used to Monk showing up each morning without saying a word to anyone and then leaving the same way. So, like every other day of the last twenty-three, he walked past the desk silently when he went to get some dinner. Sure, it was Christmas, but he really didn’t give a shit about holidays, especially this year, with his friend in intensive care.
When he got off the elevator on the main floor, he buttoned up the pea coat that had belonged to his grandfather, put on his beanie, and pulled it down over his ears. He reached into his pockets, took out his gloves, and put the left one on first. He was about to put on the right when he felt his cell phone vibrate. He pulled it out and swiped the screen.
Look up, it said; he did.
“Hi,” said the woman who’d sent it, slowly approaching him.
“Saylor.” Given he was unable to decide whether to tell her how good it was to see her or ask her what in the hell she was doing there, he said nothing more than her name.
“Merry Christmas, Monk.”
“What are you doing here?”
“My mom, the girls, and I are spending Christmas in Annapolis again this year.”
Last year, he’d been with Saylor and her family at the same place. One of the founding partners of K19 Security Solutions, a private security and intelligence firm where he was a junior partner, had hosted a Christmas celebration. Not only had Monk been there. Onyx had too.
“How’s Onyx?” Saylor asked, as though she knew what he was thinking.
“No change.”
“I’m sorry, Monk. I was praying for a Christmas miracle.”
He eased the glove off his left hand, put them both in his pocket, and then stepped forward. He gripped Saylor’s nape with one hand, wrapped his other arm around her waist, and kissed her. It wasn’t a chaste kiss. He didn’t waste time with shit like that. Not with her. He tightened his hold so Saylor’s body was flush with his and deepened their kiss.
He pulled back and looked in her eyes. “I’m sorry—”
She put her fingertips on his lips. “Don’t.”
No one was ever as easy on him as Saylor. And no one deserved to be hard on him more than she did.
“Where were you going?”
“Dinner.”
She tucked her arm in his. “Good. I’m hungry.”
His loft was a ten-minute walk from the hospital. If he were alone, he’d stop and eat somewhere on the way.
“It’s cold.”
“I’m okay to walk,” she told him, snuggling up against him when they went outside.
In the almost year and a half since he’d met Saylor, they’d been apart far more than together, and yet she was able to read him like no one else ever had. Two words, and she knew what he was asking. It always surprised him, but it shouldn’t.
“THIS IS NICE,” she said when he opened the door to his loft and invited her in.
Monk nodded. He’d gotten the three-bedroom unit because he wanted to be on the top floor of the building, and he wanted a view. He didn’t care about it being too big for him or about the price.
When the listing agent offered to throw in the staging furniture for a nominal fee, he took her up on it. Everything else in it, he’d ordered online. He didn’t have time to shop, not that he would’ve anyway. He spent every day at George Washington University Hospital, waiting for his friend to come out of the coma he’d been in since surviving a plane crash almost a month ago.
He took Saylor’s coat and hung it in the closet with his and then walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. He kept it well-stocked, again by ordering online and having the groceries delivered.
Saylor came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. “When did you last eat?” she asked.
“Lunch. You said you we
re hungry.”
“I can wait.”
Monk closed the refrigerator door and led her into the master bedroom.
—:—
Sex with Monk had always been incendiary. From the first time and every time since. Saylor had never been with another man who lit her on fire the way Monk did. It was as though an electrical current ran from every part of his body and traveled directly through her bloodstream whenever and however he touched her.
Saylor watched as he undressed, like she always did. There was no pretense with this man as he unbuttoned his white dress shirt, revealing so much that she didn’t know where to look first.
Around his thick neck, he wore four chains, each increasing in length. The first was an Aztec medallion on a thin piece of leather. She walked closer and fingered it, remembering the first time he’d explained its meaning.
“It’s a tonalpohualli,” he’d said. “It’s a divination tool, keeping the delicate equilibrium of the divine forces residing inside of me.”
The next was black braided leather with what looked to her like black onyx resting in patterned silver.
“Is this new?” she asked, running her fingertip over the black beads.
“It is.”
“For Onyx?”
