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The stare-off continued another few seconds before Icarus slid into the nearest chair. “I have a call with my client later tonight.”
“Why not now?” Robin claimed the seat across from him. “We brought you your shit.”
Icarus didn’t rise to the bait, his fangs and claws tucked away, his tone carefully indifferent. “While you might prefer brute force, I usually get what I want through more persuasive means.” He crossed his legs and shifted his attention to Adam. “What is it we want?”
“A meet.” Adam sank into the chair beside him. “We’ll try it your way first and hold brute force in our back pocket if needed.”
“We’ll need to meet on neutral ground,” Cormac said as he took a seat beside Robin. “Extracurriculars aside, Icarus’s client is still a cop. His defenses will be up. We don’t want to be outgunned.”
“Portola,” Robin suggested.
Icarus fisted a hand beneath the table. Adam covered it with his and offered an alternative. “The Lost Valley.”
Robin lurched forward and braced his forearms on the table. “You can’t go back into the city.”
“It’s my fucking home.” He tried to keep his voice even, but the unrelenting frustration darkened the already jagged edges of his words. “I’m not going to let Vincent drive me out of it.”
Cormac slumped and scrubbed his hands over his face. “Fucking death wish.”
Beneath the table, Icarus tangled their fingers. “So we get this meet,” he said. “We convince my client to arrest Vincent and bring him in. Then what?”
Cormac dropped his arms. “Yerba Buena Building is a fortress. After the Rift, they rebuilt it to be impenetrable. Not to mention half the cops and guards inside are on Vincent’s payroll.”
“So we use the in we have,” Adam said. “Icarus’s client gets us plans and clears us a path.”
“How do we separate Vincent from the warlock?”
“We give Atlas what he wants. Me.”
Icarus’s hand nearly crushed his, and across the table, Robin growled his disagreement. “You can’t be serious.”
“I don’t want this thing inside me. Let him take it and then you kill him too.”
“You’ll die,” Cormac said. “Thatthingis what’s keeping you alive.”
“They died to give you thatthing,” Robin rumbled.
“I didn’t ask for this. I would have rather died with them, but now, all I’ve got left of my marriage, of my life, is a charred photo and the Devil.” He shoved back from the table. Present respite over; it was time to meet fate and the future head-on. “I want it to be over, all of it.”
TWENTY-FIVE
It tookAdam thirty minutes and several laps around the reflecting pool to rein himself in. It took another ninety with Cormac, Robin, and the rest of his team on the main level to sort logistics and evaluate potential meet locations. By the time he returned to the cellar, Adam found the bunk room completely transformed.
With most of the winery’s business in the main facility down the mountain, the villa’s cellar was minimally used as storage for extra equipment and living and sleeping quarters for seasonal workers during harvest, which had ended a month ago this year. But you wouldn’t know it for the lived-in coziness Icarus had created in two short hours.
The line of single beds had been pushed together in the center of the room, Cormac’s mother’s hand-knitted quilts thrown across them in a splash of color. More soft shades painted the walls, cast by the silk and sheer tops Icarus had draped over the room’s lamps. Across from the beds, the storage trunks that normally sat at the end of each bed had been stacked and arranged so that Icarus’s laptop and webcam on top were aimed directly at the now oversized bed. Everything was perfectly arranged, except for the single bed shoved in the corner nearest the door, Icarus’s go bag open and spilling what was left of its contents the length of it.
Adam leaned a shoulder against the door. “Do you have everything you need?”
“Not everything,” a silk-robed Icarus said. He dug through the bag once more and produced a bottle of lube. “But enough.” His voice was a shade brighter than earlier but still careful, and as Icarus placed the tube of lube on the bedside table and surveyed the room’s final setup, he likewise carefully avoided Adam’s gaze.
Mentally replaying his earlier outburst, Adam could see how his harsh words might have bruised Icarus. They’d revealed a darkness, an inevitability, that Icarus maybe hadn’t fully appreciated—or accepted. He stepped into the room, and as Icarus passed by on his way back to the spare bed, Adam lightly clasped his elbow. “Icarus, please.”
He wrenched his elbow free and flicked a dismissive hand in the air. “I can’t be in this headspace with you when I need to be Icarus for someone else.”
The computer pinged, a guest waiting.
“I want to stay while you do this.” It was a wildly inappropriate suggestion that got Adam the reaction he craved.
