Free Department 57: Rubies of Fire by Lynne Connolly Page A

everything is my loyalty to my kind and my family. Talents know this is a place they can feel safe, even if they don’t know precisely what it does. Do you really think I’d compromise that?”
    “Brava.” Cristos spoke the words softly, but he didn’t need to shout in the hushed stillness.
    “Do you believe me?” She wouldn’t let Andreas look away. If he hesitated now, he’d lose her. He knew that for sure.
    “Yes.” Everything he knew about her told him she spoke the truth. That, and everything he knew about himself. He’d read her so deeply that he couldn’t have missed anything. Impossible.
    But he had doubts—he knew she saw it, even though he opened his mind to her once more. Too many betrayals, too much harshness had passed before his eyes not to let his cynicism rear up once more. That instinct had saved his life a time or two. And she had to know what he was, what being an agent actually meant.
    She let him see what she felt, didn’t hide it. She couldn’t grow closer to a man who didn’t trust her, couldn’t let him see her deepest desires, her greatest fears.
     
    SHE’D STAY, BUT she couldn’t deny that he’d hurt her. Andreas would prove an amusement, she told herself. When this case ended, they would drift apart, like most of her lovers before. She’d found some harder to shed than others, but after John died, Roz didn’t want to feel hurt like that again.
    So why did she feel so disappointed? Why that deep pang of sadness? She had done that many times before—had an affair, moved on—so what made Andreas Constant so different?
    She had no answer. Not when she was gazing into the dark eyes she’d watched last night as he’d come apart in her arms, fragmenting and re-forming in ecstatic joy.
    He turned away at the same time she did. They didn’t touch.
    “To continue,” Cristos said smoothly, just as though her world hadn’t shifted, and just as if it hadn’t, she looked up at him brightly.
    “I’m here to do the best I can to find the people who murdered two members of my family. You should know that.”
    He regarded her gravely. “I know it.” He already knew that was her prime objective, overriding everything else. She had no doubt he’d take it into account in his dealings with her. As she would in her dealings with him.
    “We are, at least for the present, working on the same side. So we will, if you don’t mind, work as a team.” His cold gaze left her to sweep the other occupants of the room. “All of us. You can make that an order.” He glanced up. “Fabrice has more information for you.”
    Fabrice strolled over, a cup of black coffee in one hand. He glanced around, his gaze lingering on Roz and Andreas. “I had to meet Andreas to give him the new interference bug, instead of our usual mental contact. Roz followed us, like a good agent, and we made her almost as soon as she walked in, but later, outside, we were attacked. Seven of them. They weren’t taking any chances. They were carrying powerful drugs, enough to knock out a vampire and kill me, and they had a hypo filled with Cephalox for any shape-shifters. So they weren’t sure what kind of Talents we were, but they came prepared. We took them on, and I—” He shrugged. “They weren’t expecting a virgin Sorcerer. I zapped ’em.” A chuckle rippled around the room. Fabrice smiled self-deprecatingly. “Yeah. I read them afterward, when they were lying on the ground. All mortal, but all under thrall. Some clever person had wiped that part, the identification. Sometimes you can tell with signatures, but not this time.”
    Cristos spoke the words in everyone’s minds. “Black ops.”
    “Possibly. Their orders were to take us, but I don’t know where, because they didn’t know. They were to take us and stow us in the back of a truck waiting nearby. They didn’t know any more than that. Probably deliberately, since whoever was controlling them knew to expect Talents.”
    “They want what we have,