Susan Johnson (39 page)

“Koo’s scum, just like your kind redskin,” Jake spat, his perception of social equality seriously defective.

“Now, Jake, that’s no way to talk about your host,” Trey admonished pleasantly. “Koo here’s been supplying you with golden dreams and beautiful women for days now.”

“Fuck you,” Jake snarled.

“Sorry, you’re not my type,” Trey murmured, and his eyes half closed as a slow smile curved his mouth.

Jake failed to appreciate Trey’s sense of humor, his hate so corrosive that it poisoned his mind sleeping or awake, drugged or not, until his only thought was killing Trey and ending the Braddock-Black succession. For too long they’d resisted expansion of his cattle range, for too long Hazard had stood unyielding and indestructible in his path; and if Hazard eluded death, his son was more susceptible, had always been, with a youthful, cavalier attitude toward death. Now … at last he had him in his sights. “I’m going to kill you,” he muttered,
“kill, kill, kill you …” The litany was unsullied by reason, implacable with spleen.

“Not if you don’t stop shaking, Jake,” Trey murmured, and rolled away onto his side as if drifting back to sleep.

A convulsive tremor shook Jake as he gazed at the tautly muscled back heedlessly turned to him. Why wouldn’t the bastard beg for his life? Where was the pleasure and satisfaction if he wouldn’t humiliate himself? And with sly cunning he thought of the woman, the one at Lily’s, the one, rumor had it, who had walked out on Trey. Immune to fear, perhaps the arrogant Braddock-Black cub would respond to pricked vanity. “She wouldn’t have left if I’d bought her,” Jake said with an unpleasant smile. “I’d have locked her up right tight.” His voice took on a goading satisfaction as he warmed to the subject. “Only a fool would give a whore freedom. You can’t trust whores, you know … they’ll fuck anything.”

When Trey rolled back, Jake experienced a sudden galvanic glee. The pale, silvery eyes weren’t lazily half lidded anymore, nor indolently unfocused or amused. They were, Jake noted, pleased with his strategy, anticipating his long-awaited revenge, malevolent with outrage. At last, he’d drawn blood. “I would have tied her to the bed and seen that she entertained me,” he went on, twisting the knife in the wound. “You redskins are more stupid than I thought.”

Adrenaline began pumping fiercely through Trey’s body, and he saw the gun for the first time, really focused on it, only inches away. The violence of his feelings burned away the drowsy lethargy, and his mind came to a ragged attention. The pistol was wavering, he noted with brisk economy of thought, definitely. His glance swept the room, checking the door, Jake’s swaying bulk, the tremor in Jake’s gun hand, with a sudden, rapid alertness, as if he’d awakened from a ten-year sleep. Jake Poltrain had mistakenly stepped over the line, past Trey’s sense of indulgence or neutrality and into restricted territory. His feelings for Empress, however inexplicable, were his personal property, and no one, particularly Jake Poltrain, was allowed to infringe on his property. Emotion governed Trey’s mind, not reason, and the thought of Jake Poltrain touching Empress, keeping her for himself, was intolerable. Trey’s need for vengeance, the compelling impulse to punish he’d been struggling with for days, took on a new focus,
and he hastily considered whether in his opium-induced languor he was capable of outmoving a bullet. Trey’s gaze swung upward again to the trembling hand holding the Colt .45, and the faintest smile appeared on his lean, bronzed face. Damn good chance, he decided.

“So you couldn’t make her stay,” Jake taunted, his face flushed with vindictive triumph, his heavy breathing sonorous in the quiet room. “If I see her after you’re dead, I’ll give her a kiss someplace sweet in memory of you.” And if it was possible to glow with success, Jake Poltrain would have illuminated the silk-hung interior.

Trey recognized what Jake was doing, was conscious of the irrational basis of his own anger, even understood in a brief moment of reflection that Jake’s goading was all only words and could be ignored, if his emotions allowed.

But they didn’t … because against all reason, she was still
his property.
“Pull the trigger, Jake,” Trey said softly, “if you want her, because it’s the only way you’ll ever get close enough to touch her.” And in the dimness of the room, Empress was suddenly between them, vividly real, a dream image, lush, smiling, waiting to be kissed. She took a step closer. “No-o-o-o,” Trey screamed in an instinctive, roaring challenge and, rolling off the lacquered couch, lunged at Jake.

Jake Poltrain only dealt with sure things, and holding a revolver on an unarmed man a foot away offered the degree of security Jake preferred. Beyond that level of safety, he hadn’t prepared. Confounded at Trey’s audacity, his opium-dulled brain attempted to respond, but his reflexes were sluggish enough to allow Trey the half pulse beat he needed before Jake pulled the trigger.

As Trey’s diving body struck Jake’s legs, the pistol flashed, Jake staggered backward with the full impact of Trey’s weight, and, off-balance, dropped the revolver. Jake scrambled for the weapon, which had skidded under a low, black-lacquered chair, but Trey ignored it, as he ignored the blood beginning to stream down the side of his face, indifferent to the weapon and his wound, intent only on one compelling need. Primordial and inherently uncivilized in resolve, he meant to make certain Jake Poltrain never touched Empress. Like a madman crazed with a single barbaric impulse, Trey
threw himself on top of Jake, deterring him only inches away from the glistening pistol handle. Twisting violently, Jake turned to protect himself and, with heavy, flailing arms and booted feet, fought Trey off, outweighing him under normal conditions and measurably heavier now with Trey’s weight loss. They rolled across the carpet, leaving a trail of blood, as Trey blocked Jake’s fists and kicks or absorbed with grunts of pain the blows that connected. He was virtually unprotected, with only the silk pajama pants for clothing, and blood was impairing the vision in his left eye but single-mindedly Trey sought a grip on Jake’s massive neck, reaching, always reaching, past the hammering fists and damaging boot blows.

Jake knocked his attacking assailant off, shoved him aside, plummeted him with vicious fists, fought for his life, but Trey’s eyes were wild, his face harsh in its intent, his long-boned hands like powerful claws relentless on their prey. They closed finally, despite Jake’s ferocious resistance, and would not be dislodged however frantically Jake struggled. Locked on like a machine set in motion, Trey’s slender fingers squeezed with a fatal determination undeterred by human emotion. As Trey’s blood dripped in a steady rhythm onto the wide-eyed face below, like some macabre accompaniment to death, Jake’s face turned from red to blue to a hideous purple, his strangled, choking sounds muffled reverberations in the silken room. But Trey was detached from the sight and sounds, from the substance of humanity dying under his hands; only the slow, measured act of killing was real, the necessary silencing of Jake Poltrain, as if the action existed apart from the man.

He was no longer lucid, if he ever had been since the opium had taken effect, and light-headed now with the loss of blood, but implacably Trey maintained the pressure on Jake’s throat until his arms screamed with pain. And even then he held firm, enduring the pain as he’d been taught, tenacious in his blind impulse, assuring himself that Jake would never touch Empress.

Perhaps some primal instinct triggered the causal directive to release his grip; perhaps, more prosaically, the drifting scent of incense from his brazier caught in his nostrils. Whatever
the reason for the message to his brain, he relaxed his lethal embrace, rose to his feet slowly in a gradual uncoiling of rippling muscle and, stepping over Jake Poltrain’s dead body, dropped gracefully onto his cushioned couch.

He lay against the heaped pillows until his dizziness passed, brushed the blood from his eyes with a portion of the drapery behind him and, clear-sighted now, thought briefly of walking to the mirror in order to assess the extent of his bleeding. On second thought he decided to see Empress smiling her welcome instead. Supported on one elbow, his breathing quiet once more, Trey slowly went through the procedure: the rolling of the sticky resin, careful placement into the small bowl, lighting, the first sweet inhalation from the long-stemmed pipe. He lay back on the silk cushions, let the drug work its magic, saw the familiar golden glow first, and then Empress was there, smiling at him. She was farther away this time, halfway up a snow-covered hill with crocus peeking through the frosty ice crystals, but she was smiling at him, calling his name. He reached for the pipe again to bring her closer.

Koo personally checked on all his important customers to see that they were satisfied, comfortable, adequately supplied with all their needs, and once the maimed body was carted away downstairs and order restored, he returned to his normal rounds. Appalled, he noted the unattended door as he neared Trey’s room, viewed with alarm the half-open threshold, and began mentally packing in the event of catastrophe. His directives from Hazard were simple but clear: His son was to have anything he wished and
never
left unguarded.

How far did Hazard’s vengeance reach? Koo reflected uneasily as he pushed the door open and eased into the room. At a glance it was apparent that Jake Poltrain was dead, and with trepidation he surveyed Trey’s blood-smeared, reclining form. It took a moment to distinguish the slight rise and fall of his breathing in the dimly lit room, and with monumental relief Koo approached the couch. At least Trey was still alive. Quickly backing out of the room, he carefully shut the door and sent a servant running for a doctor.

An hour later, after Trey had been cleaned and bandaged and Koo had been assured for the tenth time by the doctor that Trey’s wound was a glancing trajectory, not in the least mortal, Koo had a message sent to Hazard … then personally guarded the room until he arrived.

Hazard, followed closely by Blue and Fox, came up the steps at a run. “How is he?” Hazard asked harshly, bracing himself for the worst after the garbled message he’d received from Koo’s servant, which mentioned doctors, a gunfight, and Jake Poltrain.

“He’s fine,” Koo replied swiftly. “Just fine.” His hasty reassurance was insurance against Hazard’s savage scowl. “Jake Poltrain’s in there dead, but no one’s been in except the doctor and myself,” he added quickly, after another look at Hazard’s face. And Koo thanked his ancestors for guarding him from calamity. Hazard’s fierce expression as he towered over him would have sent all the demons in hell running for safe haven.

Without a word, Hazard brushed by Koo and walked into the room, quietly closing the door behind him. He was wet from the rain outside, his tweed jacket smelling of Scottish moors, his hair sleek against his head, neck, and throat. Brushing it impatiently back, he narrowed his eyes in the gloom, his heart still pounding from the fear he’d lived with on the train ride in, the boiler plate red-hot by the time they’d reached Helena. Koo’s words has stilled the terror—his son was not dead. And for that he said a silent prayer to Ah-badt-dadt-deah.

Trey’s eyes came up at the slight sound of the door latch closing, and looking up at his father, he smiled. “Hello, Papa.”

Hazard was momentarily shocked at Trey’s appearance, but when he spoke, his voice revealed none of his anxiety. “How are you?” he said, ignoring the body in the middle of the floor, overwhelming relief that Trey lived quelling his initial shock at Trey’s appearance. His son was noticeably thinner, the prominent bone structure of his face accenting the intensity of his eyes, brilliant in the glow of the brazier. But he
lounged barefoot on the cushioned couch as though he hadn’t recently defended his life, undisturbed by the dead man a yard away. “How are you?” Hazard repeated softly.

“I’m fine,” Trey said, a faint smile lifting the corners of his mouth. “Would you like to try some of Koo’s forgetfulness?”

Hazard didn’t move, but he shook his head briefly in refusal, and his dark hair gleamed with the movement. “Your mother’s waiting to see you. She’s been worried.” Hazard had been steadying Blaze’s high-strung urge to interfere for days now. “She’d like you back home.”

Rolling over with a languid grace, Trey reached for a paper lying beneath the lacquered couch. “I’m not beyond redemption, you know,” he said, returning to his comfortable sprawl, his mouth quirked in a half-smile.

“I know,” his father answered calmly, experienced and worldly. Opium dens of all descriptions from foul to fashionable catered to those interested in escape and pleasure. Hazard had been with the Prince of Wales’s party last season in Paris when the night ended in a luxurious opium palace, a playful amusement for the wealthy all over the world. “Your mother’s more anxious,” he finished softly.

“Here,” Trey said, holding out the page. “I’d given myself a week to indulge all the black demons.” And to see Empress, he thought, in the opium dreams that made her so real, it seemed like he could feel the silk of her hair and the warmth of her skin. The sensations were a solace of sorts, juxtaposed and at war with the anger. “I was coming home tomorrow.”

Taking the proffered page, Hazard glanced at the slashed lines across the squares and numbers before he dropped the sheet on a nearby table. “I think a day early would set your mother’s mind at ease.” There was authority beneath his quiet, deep voice, although his choice of words was diplomatic. “And,” Hazard added, his dark eyes briefly flicking over Jake’s body, “there’s the immediate problem of … disposal.”

“He drew on me first.” The simple sentence was explanation and expiation.

“A mistake, apparently,” Hazard said dryly.

“It does start the adrenaline pumping,” Trey replied, and levering himself slowly into a sitting position, he flexed his long fingers. Looking up at his father, he said softly, “I didn’t have any choice … he was out to kill me, plain and simple.”

“I would have done the same, and probably with less provocation,” Hazard answered, his dark eyes on his only child. Trey was alive, and for that he would have sold his soul and killed a dozen Jake Poltrains.