Dangerous Secrets (d-2) by Lisa Marie Rice

Author:Lisa Marie Rice [Rice, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: love_detective
Published: 2008-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

Vassily Worontzoff’s mansion

Thursday evening, November 24

The instant Nick walked up the granite steps and walked through the huge door of Worontzoff’s crib—palace would be a better word—every hair on his body stood on end.

There was no visible reason for it. No reason at all why his blood was running cold. No reason for the adrenalin dump.

Everyone streaming up the steps and into the house was elegant and wealthy. Solid citizens. Culture mavens.

The buzz of well-bred voices echoed around the huge foyer, mixed with the murmur of well-trained servants taking coats, offering drinks, pointing toward a big reception hall.

Nick recognized the governor of Vermont, two senators from big states, a high-tech tycoon, and a famous movie director. Everyone else looked like they were famous. Average age fifty, average income several million dollars per annum on up.

This was it.

He was in the belly of the beast.

This was when Nick shone. He was at his best in extremis, close to the heart of the danger. He’d been here before, often. It was the whole point of being undercover, to get close to the unprotected center, as an insider.

It was when that internal mechanism he’d been born with revved up, the one that gave him the moniker Iceman. It was like a sixth gear and once it kicked in, his thoughts, sight, and hearing were enhanced. He was preternaturally aware of his surroundings, his entire body turned into a quick-response machine. He could be cool and calm on the outside while on the inside, his head was working its way through the complex geometry of betrayal.

While all the smug, self-satisfied elegant folk were eating Worontzoff’s hors d’oeuvres and drinking his French champagne, congratulating themselves on being invited into the great man’s home, Nick took stock.

Ninety-five percent of the people here were as clueless as lambs right up to the moment of slaughter. They had no idea what they’d walked into.

They thought they were among their own kind. They weren’t. They were with monsters.

It was amazing to him. How people could be around predators and not feel that they were different.

One elderly gent with an ebony cane topped by a silver orb took a drink off a tray offered by one of Worontzoff’s minions. He didn’t notice the barbed-wire tattoo visible under the snowy white cuff or the slight bulge under the left armpit of the man holding the tray. No doubt the goon had a backup in an ankle holster and a knife in a hip sheath. Not to mention a garrote in the fancy cummerbund.

He was an operator, no doubt about that. Steel gray crew cut, knife scar along the jawline, in his fifties and fitter than any twenty-year-old could ever hope to be.

And Clueless Geezer happily lifting a drink from the tray Crew Cut held, unaware that with one word from Worontzoff, Crew Cut would rip his throat out. Jesus.

Nick knew, though. He’d been around people like Crew Cut all his life and every sense he had was on high alert.

So he

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