Prologue
Grafton Manor
St. Ives, England
Two weeks ago…
“Everyone calls me Angel.”
The stranger’s voice was raspy and deep. Quiet. But backed up by a sharp edge of steel.
When he spoke those four simple words, a feeling of doom slipped through Sonya Butler’s veins. She’d just met him, and yet she could sense the menace surrounding him. It permeated the air in the library until her lungs burned with it. Mr. Tall, Dark, and Dangerous.
Jamin Agassi, a.k.a. “Angel,” was not a man to mess with.
Which made the fact that he sat across from Lord Grafton, her boss and the undisputed king of the underworld, that much more terrifying.
“Angel, you say?” Grafton steepled his fingers under his goateed chin. His eyes were beady and black. Sonya sometimes thought they looked dead, but right then, they sparked with excitement.
Grafton had something on Angel.
Her feeling of doom increased tenfold.
Sitting forward in his leather chair, Grafton thumbed on the tablet lying atop his desk. He read the document glowing on the screen with deliberate intent, almost as if he were slow on the uptake. Sonya knew better. It was all a ruse.
Like a cat with a mouse, Grafton played a chilling game. He hadn’t built and maintained the largest crime syndicate the planet had ever seen by missing any IQ points. In fact, in the six months she’d been his girl Friday, she’d come to realize he was quite possibly the most duplicitous man she’d ever known.
And definitely the most ruthless.
Case in point…
“But according to my sources”—Grafton eyed Angel—“your real name is Majid Abass.” The spark in Grafton’s eyes turned positively incandescent. Next would come the part he loved best. The gotcha. “Or maybe you’re more accustomed to your nickname? Should I call you the Prince of Shadows?”
To contain her gasp, Sonya bit the inside of her cheek. Her eyes raked over the stranger in disbelief. The name Majid Abass hadn’t rung any bells. Prince of Shadows set all of them clanging.
No, she thought. He can’t be. No one has seen or heard from the Prince of Shadows since the explosion in Tehran.
Standing beside Grafton’s desk like the good little lackey she was, she closely watched Angel’s reaction. Or should she say non-reaction? He was so still he could have been a picture, betraying nothing of what he was thinking, what he was feeling.
“Everyone calls me Angel.” His scratchy tone was unchanged. His eyes as black as pitch and…not dead-looking. Not like Grafton’s. They were simply expressionless.
Grafton laughed at Angel’s imitation of a broken record. It was a dry, snapping sound reminiscent of heavy boots stomping atop brittle bones.
“Come now,” Grafton scolded. “You can drop the ruse. I know all about you.” He swiped through documents on his tablet until he found the one he wanted. Holding the device up, he read in his urbane English accent, “Majid Abass, raised in Tehran. No brothers or sisters. Parents dead. You attended university on scholarship, where you studied nuclear engineering. It was there the Iranian government recruited you into their ranks. They wanted your help in their clandestine efforts to build a bomb. The bomb.” Grafton set down the tablet. “Any of this sound familiar?”
For what seemed an eternity, Angel and Grafton had themselves an old-fashioned staring contest. Dead eyes drilling into inscrutable ones.
The strain in the air was palpable. It took every ounce of willpower Sonya possessed not to fidget. After fretting with the button on her blouse, adjusting it just so, she linked her hands behind her back. Squeezing her fingers together, she pushed the tension in her shoulders down into her palms where it could remain hidden.
Five seconds became fifteen. Fifteen stretched into thirty. She didn’t dare breathe. Or scratch her nose—which, proving the universe was a twisted piece of Scheisse, had begun itching.
To her surprise, Grafton was the first to look away. He glanced at the tablet on his desk and continued to paraphrase the information on the screen. “But instead of helping your motherland become a nuclear power, you fell in with the Israeli Mossad, Iran’s sworn enemy.”
At mention of Israel’s spy organization, she winced. Luckily, neither Grafton nor Angel noticed.
“And during your five years working as a double agent inside Iran”—Grafton continued, lifting a finger—“you infected the computers controlling their centrifuges with the perfidious Stuxnet virus, voiding the viability of their products.” Up went a second finger. “You personally assassinated two Iranian scientists charged with miniaturizing warheads to fit on intercontinental ballistic missiles.” A third finger joined the first two. “And you rigged an explosion at a secret missile base in Tehran, killing three dozen Revolutionary Guards and reducing Iran’s stockpile of long-range Shahab rockets to a mound of twisted steel and rubble.”
Grafton once again steepled his knobby-knuckled fingers under his chin. “But that time your cover was blown, yeah? Too many things added up for the Iranians, and all of them pointed to you. Now…” Grafton narrowed his eyes. The flames in the fireplace cast dancing shadows across his dark complexion. It was August, but the Cornish coast was cool and damp, and the best way to combat both in the drafty, old manor house was with a constantly crackling fire. “This is the bit where it gets really interesting. Somehow, the Mossad was able to spirit you out of Iran. You fled to Europe, where a talented plastic surgeon took this face…” Grafton swiped through documents until he stopped on a photograph. He lifted the tablet and angled it toward Angel. “And turned it into that face.” He pointed a finger between Angel’s hell-black eyes.
