“And she believed you?”
“I’m going to be very honest with you,” he says. “She was sedated. I put a little something in the cheese toastie before I had her examined. It’s easier to deal with people who aren’t conscious. In so many ways.”
I make a mental note not to break the pregnancy news to Ella until this is all settled. When I know we are all safe, and she will be able to enjoy it, that is when we will tell her. Right now, the news will overwhelm her, between her guilt-ridden world escape attempts and the constant threat of new evils… it’s not the time.
“You’ve gotten slow over the years,” I say.
“Is that right, old man?”
“It is. The version of you I used to know would never have spent this long monologuing and threatening, giving me timeto ensure the love of my life is extracted from your grip before anything can hurt her.”
Eric smirks. “There is no way to take someone out of this house without me knowing. Every window is alarmed. There are pressure plates under the floors. There are cameras everywhere.”
“And yet, she’s already gone,” I say, spreading my hands out palm up, much like a magician unveiling a particularly smart trick.
He looks perturbed, and in that moment, we both know I have won. Whether Ella is still in his home or not (she is not), he has been visibly rattled. Eric hates nothing more than being outplayed.
“While you sat here with me, I had a team of ex-Marine commandos break in through the roof and take her out in a helicopter.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“We’ll have the tiles replaced,” I say. “They had to break a few to rappel into the attic where you were keeping her.”
“How did you know that?”
“Because this building doesn’t have a basement, and she would have thrown herself out a window if she had access to one, so the natural conclusion was attic. No windows, relatively secure, you can’t hear her complaining. The downside of that is you can’t hear her being rescued either. We used one of those special helicopters. The ones that move silently. What are they called again?”
I pretend not to remember, so he says it for me.
“Comanche,” he says. “Or a modified Black Hawk. Or I suppose, one of the very new Defiant range.”
“One of them,” I smile.
“If this is true…”
“Why don’t we go up and look?”
Eric leads me up to the attic. These old English places have a very specific layout and being historic, those layouts are on file. There are also very strict rules against modifying them.
He opens the door to the attic, and sure enough, piss weak English sun is doing its best to stream through the hole in the ceiling. Ella is not there. The room, sparsely but somewhat nicely furnished, is empty, save for plaster on the floor and a few broken tiles that I already warned him about.
Eric stands and stares for a moment, then lets out a laugh that sits somewhere between impressed and deranged. “My gods, man,” he says, clapping his thigh. “I wouldn’t have imagined it, but you did it.”
“I am never going to work for you,” I tell him. “And if you ever, and I do meaneverallow anybody to put their hands on my wife again, I can promise you it will be the last thing you do.”
“You expect me to protect her?”
“Yes,” I say. “I expect you to make it very clear to everybody under your umbrella that the Levin family was never one to be trifled with.”
I am not going to kill him. If I was to do that, the network he has spent years putting together would fracture in an instant,and instead of being a largely controllable entity, we would face a world full of splintered psychopaths each vying for control.
Eric smiles at me. “You like me, don’t you.” He says it flatly, like it is a simple matter of fact. “I’ve always liked you too, Aiden. If you’re going to marry that woman, I can promise you an interesting life.”
“I’m leaving,” I tell him. “And I don’t want to see you any time soon. Thanks to you, I had to get my badly injured brother out of the hospital and fly him over here. He’s going to have damp in his wound, and it will be your fault.”
“Sounding faintly petulant,” Eric says. “But understandable. You’ve won this round.”
“This is the last round. I don’t want any more rounds. If there’s another round, the next round will be rounds in you. Get it?”
