“I prefer to consider it preemptive surveillance.”
His response reminded me of the conversation I’d had with Caroline regarding the difference between the two just days ago.
Should I be worried that Liam’s and my responses were pretty much the same?
“The thing that really clenched it was that while you and the wolf were under the Playground’s enchantment, her maker and the other two were gathering information from its underbelly.”
Well, damn. I’d hoped no one would notice that.
Liam sat up to drop a quick kiss against my lips. “Nathan doesn’t miss much.”
“I’m aware,” I said grumpily.
I’d known it would be pretty much impossible to fool him. It looks like I was right.
“Why didn’t you just tell Thomas what was going on?”
I plucked at the sheets in my lap with a troubled frown. “I don’t know.”
That was what bothered me. In the moment, it had seemed perfectly rational to keep what was going on from him. Now, looking back, I had to question what made me think that.
A thought tickled at the back of my mind. Something else about this situation that Liam needed to know about.
Before I could grasp it, it was gone.
“I do not like the thought of you being in this city,” Liam was saying when I tuned back in.
“Why?”
I shivered as Liam trailed his fingers up and down the bare skin of my back. It was hard to concentrate when he did that.
“Outwardly, Vegas is considered a neutral zone. It has to be to fulfill its function as a playground.” Liam dropped a kiss on my shoulder. “But in reality, the Fae’s strong presence here is a cause for concern.”
“You think the master of this territory is somebody’s puppet,” I guessed.
“We didn’t. The djinn is powerful. It’s difficult to imagine him bending to anyone’s will.” Liam tangled his fingers in the hair at the back of my head. He massaged my scalp, the sensation almost drugging as my eyes slipped closed. “Recently, however, there’s been a change. Fae with close ties to the Summer King placed in positions of authority in Saul’s court. There have been incidents.”
The hesitation before that last word told me everything I needed to know about what sort of “incidents” he was talking about.
“Thomas wasn’t happy to find Saul waiting for him at the airfield when we arrived,” I said slowly.
I knew there’d been something between them. Tension. Unhappiness. Whatever you wanted to call it.
“It’s unusual for him to welcome someone to a territory in that fashion. Normally, the visitor goes to the city’s master. Not the other way around.”
“You think Saul was trying to keep Thomas’s arrival a secret?”
If so, that would be good news for us. It meant the city’s master wasn’t as fully under Muiredach’s thumb as they thought.
“I would be reluctant to assign a motive to Saul’s actions. Djinn are notoriously difficult creatures to understand. They’re like the Fae in that way. They were never human.”
And as such they didn’t subscribe to the same ideas of right and wrong.
“We can’t trust the master of the city. That’s not exactly news,” I said.
Liam and his vampires made me look like a normal, well-adjusted person. Each of them as paranoid as the last.
“Honestly, I don’t see the problem,” I told him.
