Free Dare Me by Julie Leto

in her family for years.”
    This much, he knew.  “Her murder was no accident.  If we
hadn’t removed the housekeeper, she would have been next.”
    Macy pursed her lips, but didn’t speak, smudging her red
lipstick while she ran her fingers up and down the picture frame.  Dante knew
he shouldn’t be noticing her lips, but he couldn’t help himself.  When he’d
walked into the billiards room earlier with Marshall on his heels, he’d had an
instant to recognize what would have happened next if world safety hadn’t
interfered.
    The way she’d dressed, the way she’d moved—he’d been two
seconds away from living out his fantasy.  She’d intended to seduce him and no
matter his intention to draw out his teasing one more night, she would have
succeeded in changing his mind.  Last night, when he locked her in the room,
he’d expended the last of his control.  With blood rushing to his cock and his
brain starving for nutrition, he’d barely put her off for one more evening.
    His time had run out.  She wanted him.  And if not for this
ominous change in the course of their operation, she would have had him, likely
right on the billiards table.
    Macy moved to a curio case filled with knick-knacks all
related to tobacco and smoking.  A collection of antique pipes.  A snuffbox.  A
cigar cutter inlaid with genuine mother-of-pearl.
    “Bogdanov played chess.  His hobbies included puzzles,
mainly those in three dimensions,” she answered.  “I suspect he hid the code by
creating a pattern of objects.”  She marched to the desk, lifting an ink
blotter first, then the pen set, then a tarnished silver vase.  “And he’d keep
it out in the open.”
    “Hidden in plain sight?” he guessed.
    “Yes.  Visual connection to the counter-code would have
given him comfort.  He was a worrier.  He often wrote his formulas, even the
ones he’d memorized, on large sheets of paper and hung them in his laboratory. 
That’s why I started my search with the kitchen.  He loved to cook and spent
many hours there.”
    Dante crossed his arms, fighting the knowledge that his
presence was completely unnecessary.  Before they’d begun, she’d assured him
that talking through the dilemma might bring some clue to light that would
help, but he wondered if taking the time to talk out loud wasn’t slowing her
down.
    “So you’re searching the rooms in the order of how much time
he spent there?”
    “With the exception of the billiards room, yes.  I tried
that room on a hunch.  You can’t imagine how ticked I am that it didn’t pan
out.”
    For a split second, Dante didn’t register her full meaning. 
When he did, he couldn’t contain an ironic chuckle.
    “I guess some things aren’t meant to work out the way we
planned.”
    She spun and surprised him with a quirked grin.  “The best
things never do.”
    * * *
    Macy stormed out of the library, stalked into the parlor and
because she knew she’d already thoroughly searched the room top to bottom,
kicked a small ottoman across the room.  She screamed in impotent frustration,
dragging her hands through her hair and toyed with the idea of pulling the
strands free so that her head might stop pounding.
    They’d searched through the night and come up with nothing. 
Zero.  Zip.  The code had to be here.  It had to be.
    “The code isn’t here,” Dante announced.
    He’d left her ten minutes ago to take an urgent call from
Abe.  When she realized her boss wasn’t asking to speak to her, her frustration
escalated.  Now, not only was she a failure, she was a third wheel.
    “You don’t know that.”
    “Abe says the team in Minsk found the counter-code.”
    “Minsk?” she asked, the pitch of her voice stabbing into her
brain like an ice-pick.  “That’s impossible.  By all measures of probability,
that’s the least likely place Bogdanov would have hidden the code.”
    Dante shrugged.  “But he did.  The team you sent there is sure
of it.”
    She