LITMIR.BIZ

      “Zhenchenka?” A hand reached out from underneath the sheets, stretching blindly into the space where Wren had been sleeping. It patted the mattress, as though thinking the body might still be there, then gave up.

      Rolling over, Sergei Didier opened his eyes, blinking against the faint sunlight reaching up into his sleeping loft, and calculated the time. The semifamiliar smell of coffee rose from the main level. So much for an early morning roll call.

      Getting out of bed, he noted that Wren’s clothing was gone from the pile. Tossing his castoffs into the laundry basket, he pulled fresh socks and underwear from the dresser drawer, and went down to shower. The burns on his chest and thighs were tender, but already healing.

      He knew it worried Wren, the way her current would occasionally overflow while they were making love, but he didn’t mind. Yes, he knew what current could do. He had seen the remains of the wizzarts killed by the overrush of current, during that case last year. On her insistence, he had even read a book about electricity and the ways it had been used to kill, over the years. Interesting book. That probably hadn’t been the reaction she had intended to provoke in him.

      He trusted her, even when she wasn’t sure she trusted herself, not to hurt him.

      Much, anyway. And a little pain mixed in with the pleasure…well, sometimes, with the right person, it just added to the pleasure. That was a new realization for him, and he was still poking around the edges of it. Carefully, the way he did everything, but not shying away from the facts, either.

      He turned on the water, and stepped under the spray.

      Besides, she’d been grounding in him for years. He doubted that had left him totally untouched—his most recent medical exam had shown some interesting striations on his kidneys that hadn’t been there before that fiasco in Maine, and the incident in Italy over the summer couldn’t have helped any.

      No job was without risks. So why not take the benefits, too?

      Not that he was going to tell her any of that. The last thing she needed to do was start pulling back in the middle of a job because she was worried about his internal organs.

      Resting his head against the wall and letting the hot water pound against his skin, Sergei tried to force himself to relax. Wren was going to be okay. She was tough; toughest woman he’d ever met, in some ways. Lee’s death was a blow, but she’d recover. All he had to do was keep her busy, somehow. Find her a job. Keep her body going—jobs as he can, sex when he can’t. It was all he could think of, and it wasn’t enough to stave off the feeling of disquiet he had, holding her while she slept, watching while tears flowed from under her closed eyelids.

      A shudder swept over him, like a horse trying to shake off flies. In all his life, Sergei Didier had only failed once. The thought of it happening again—losing someone because he wasn’t strong enough to save them—wasn’t one he could accept.

      By the time he came out of the shower, tying his robe around his midsection, the smell of coffee had faded, and the apartment was completely quiet, the way only a very expensive, modern building could manage in the middle of a bustling city. So he knew, even before he saw the note on the kitchen counter, that she was gone.

      A scrawl on the back of a used envelope. Stuff’s cooking. Nothing to worry, just details. Thanks for dinner—and dessert! Will stop by later.

      And that was all. Vague even for Wren, who thought you should never preface anything with more than, “Hey, watch this!”

      Rinsing out the coffeepot and setting it out to dry, Sergei put on the kettle for his own tea, toasted a bagel, and spread it with a schmear of cream cheese, and went to check his e-mail. She had left the machine on—unlike her. Very unlike her, normally as cautious around expensive electronics as a soldier in a minefield.

      It had taken him longer than he liked to admit to Talent-proof his apartment for Wren, and the sight of the surge protectors and add-ons still made him do a faint double-take of “how’d that get there?” The kitchen had likewise been proofed, although it was less visible there. Expensive and unsightly, but the ability to use his electronics was one less excuse Wren could use to rush home, rather than staying the night. He’d found that he liked having her stay until morning. Purely selfish, and he made no excuses for it.

      Plus, he liked his apartment much more than hers. A better shower, for one, and a much larger, more comfortable bed. At five-foot and inches, she could get away with a twin mattress. He was considerably taller, and liked to sprawl.

      “Incoming!” the computer sang out, and he looked to see what had landed in his in-box. Most of it sorted into “gallery” files, some to “clientele,” which meant potential jobs or leads for Wren, and the rest went directly into the main folder to be sorted by hand.

      One of those e-mails was red-tagged as urgent. The return-reply name was simply “bossman.” That was enough.

      Sergei opened it.

      We need a meet. Sigma GG.

      That was all it said, and all Sergei needed to read. “Bossman” was Andre Felhim, his former superior officer and current contract liaison with the Silence, the organization that had saved their bacon last year and then tossed it right back into the fire with the Nescanni Parchment job. The job that had—indirectly—gotten one of Wren’s best friends, Lee, killed, and landed Sergei in the hospital with severely bruised kidneys the doctors were at a total loss to explain. Wren had treated him like he was made out of spun glass for a month after that.

      Turnabout on the traditional role-play, he supposed, and no more than he deserved, but it had made him even more determined to keep his partner as far away from the Silence as he could. Just the mention of his former employer made her eyes go cold and hard in a way that wasn’t natural to her.

      No, even without the GG coding—Greta Garbo, for “tell no one, come alone”—he wouldn’t have mentioned it to his partner. Keeping her busy was only part of the plan. Keeping her unstressed, so she had time to work through her thoughts, that was key. She wasn’t the type to talk it out, or act it out, or any other “out.” All you could do was stand by and wait for the storm to pass.

      Deleting the message, and then wiping it from his system seven ways from Sunday, so that only the most determined snoop would be able to reconstruct it, Sergei started to reconfigure his workday. He needed to be able to get away long enough to meet with Andre without either Wren or his gallery assistant noticing that he was missing. Sending the revised schedule to Lowell for him to sync with the gallery’s computer, Sergei browsed the morning’s headlines, did one last check of his e-mail, then shut down the computer and went back upstairs to get dressed.

      The last thing he did, before leaving the apartment, clad in his usual expensively subdued suit and tie, was to retrieve the delicate-looking but vicious handgun from his lockbox, count out a handful of bullets, and place the pistol in the holster snugged into the small of his back. You didn’t call for a meet—something outside of the office—without there being trouble. And trouble, when it came from Andre, meant going armed.

      I hate that thing. Wren’s voice, floating around inside his brain. She had a more than decent touch of psychosymmetry that made her actively ill around guns, especially this one, which had his touch all over it. She didn’t like to be reminded of the fact that he was capable of taking life. Even when it was to save her own.

      Don’t go. Her voice again. Or, call me. Let me be your backup, not that thing.

      “Sorry, Wrenlet. But there are some parts of the Silence you still don’t know about. And

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