It wassomething.
And I could get to it.
But what was it?
Chapter Nineteen
Alaric
The day on the water had been nice. Sailing had always calmed me, and I hardly ever did it. It was a perfect day on the water, Natalia was enjoying herself, and it was almost possible to pretend that I had some other kind of life: a wife, a family, a boat to sail on, and nothing dark lurking in every corner of my world.
I could tell that Eric was brooding about something. He had his eyes on Natalia with a strange light behind them. I hadn’t told him anything about her—I hadn’t even told him why he was there yet, but Eric was no fool. We weren’t the kind of friends who visited each other for a nice day of sailing and to introduce our girlfriends. If we summoned each other, there was business on the table, and I had, by rights, only one kind of business with Eric: the favor he owed me.
He didn’t know about Kyril, but he knewofKyril, and in our line of work, rumors didn’t travel fast but they did travel. I wondered, as he looked at Natalia with his eyes half-closed, as though she were a woman he had met once and couldn’t place.
I dismissed it as paranoia; I needed Eric’s favor if I wanted to find out if Natalia was pregnant and to have our baby delivered with discretion. There could be hundreds of reasons why I might do that, and Eric was my choice precisely because he owed it to me not to ask questions.
“I’m going to bed,” Natalia announced early in the evening. She was genuinely tired, which only added confirmation to my suspicions. I took her to bed and returned to talk to Eric.
Eric cleared his throat and leaned forward to set his drink down. “Pretty girl,” he said.
It was Eric’s way of saying a lot in few words. I set my own drink down and rolled an ice cube in my mouth.
“Tell me why I’m here, mate.”
I looked out at the dark blue of the ocean. “I need a favor.”
Eric took a sip of his whiskey and cleared his throat again. “I got that, mate. What I don’t understand is what you’re spending your credit on, exactly.”
I was silent.
“Tell me it isn’t her.”
“You know it is.”
He cracked an ice cube. “Mate, look. You know you’ve got whatever you want coming from me... but it’s... you can take care of this kind of thing through the mail.”
