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* * *
Bertram took Sparrow to the Park Hyatt, where he booked a deluxe suite. He hadn’t been intending to stay the night, but he also hadn’t been intending to apprehend one of the Vanguard’s spies, and he wasn’t about to turn down such a prime opportunity.
“Not bad,” Sparrow remarked as Bertram jostled him in through the doorway to their suite. As soon as Bertram released him to shut the door, he headed for the sofa and threw himself onto it with all the grace of a sack of potatoes. The frame groaned, but Sparrow wasn’t particularly interested in its plight. He kicked off his loafers, stretched his legs out, and spread his toes, seeming to make a point out of taking up as much space as he could.
Once he was finished stretching, he burrowed his socked feet beneath one of the couch’s Luigi Bevilacqua throw pillows and kept them there.
Bertram’s eye ticced.
“You live like this all the time?” Sparrow asked, rolling the pillow from one foot to the other. “Or are you putting on a show to try to impress me?”
“I can assure you, I have no interest in impressing you.”
“Mm. Typical dragon.” The pillow tumbled off Sparrow’s feet and landed on the floor, and without it to keep him occupied, he rolled onto his side, facing the huge flat-screen television mounted on the wall. “Hey, you’ve got a bar in here, right?”
Bertram glanced through the doorway into the next room, where crystalware was suspended over a sleekly polished countertop. “It appears so.”
“Then how about you make me a drink before you interrogate me? I’d like a Manhattan, easy on the bitters.”
“Are you even old enough to drink?”
“You’re a dragon; what do you care?” Sparrow tried—and failed—to pick up the pillow with his toes. When his third attempt proved just as unsuccessful, he scowled and kicked it across the room, narrowly missing Bertram’s shin. “Dumb pillow,” he muttered, then looked up at Bertram expectantly, as though he hadn’t almost bopped him with a designer silk projectile. “So, about that drink…”
Bertram sighed.
He had interrogated a great number of people, but he could not say he had ever had an interrogation go quite like this. Resigned to his fate, he left the room to go make drinks.
“Oh,” Sparrow called out from the couch as he went, “and while you’re at it, could you double the cherries? I’m a slut for a good maraschino.”
* * *
Sparrow cupped his Manhattan with both hands and sipped at it eagerly while Bertram dragged an armchair over so they could sit facing each other. By the time he’d finished, half of Sparrow’s drink was gone.
Bertram had made it using an eighteen-year-old bottle of Jameson.
His eye ticced yet again.
“Raven sent you to follow me,” Bertram said, half to get the conversation over with, and half to distract himself from how Sparrow was guzzling down the last of the Manhattan like a runner chugging water after a marathon. “I take it from our previous conversation that you’re aware he cut contact with me several months ago, but I need to speak with him about something urgent. Please tell me where he is.”
Sparrow downed the last drop of his Manhattan with a satisfied hiss, then slumped onto the couch and crossed an ankle over his knee. He held his empty glass loosely at his side and looked lazily at Bertram. “Uh, how about no?”
“I am his mate, Sparrow.”
“For an agent of the council, you’re not very good at this whole spy thing, are you?” Sparrow arched an eyebrow. “Aren’t you supposed to be like, torturing me for information or something? Pulling out my fingernails? Threatening me with a mullet?”
“Do you mean a mallet?”
“I said what I said.” Sparrow leaned over, stretching his whole body to set his glass on the nearest end table. “Anyway, unless you’re gonna pluck my taste buds out one by one or scoop out my eyes with melon ballers, I’m not going to tell you jack shit about where Raven is. That would be seriously uncool, and I am not about that life. If he doesn’t want to talk to you, maybe you should, oh, I don’t know… leave him alone?”
Very few things over the last nine hundred years had left Bertram speechless.
This was one of them.
He stared at Sparrow for a good, long moment, then put forth lamely, “But he is my mate.”
“And?”
“We share a bond.”
