Page 98 of The Maverick
His face did not move.
"Of course, sir. Someone will meet you at your room after you get cleaned up."
I waited a beat for a name.
He didn't offer one.
That was its own small message, and I took it the way it was meant. The man would be a name when the house decided he needed to be a name. Today he was a butler, and I was a guest, and the rest would arrive in its own time.
"Appreciate it," I said.
"Of course, sir."
He left me at my offered residence door.
The room they'd given me was on the third floor, end of a wide hallway, behind a heavy paneled door that opened on a suite about the size of Rebecca's whole apartment. Sitting room. Bedroom. A bathroom in marble that made the marble at The Palmetto Rose look modest. A small writing desk againsta window that looked out across the back lawns toward what I could see was an actual riding ring with actual horses in the distance. It was lit up with stadium lighting.
I didn't take it in.
I went into the bathroom and turned the shower on and stripped and stood under the water and let myself think.
I took my time.
Not the way I'd taken my time with Rebecca Lynn in her clawfoot tub. The opposite of that. I took my time the way operators took their time before going into a room they didn't entirely understand—slow, methodical, working the angles out loud to no one.
What was Dominion Hall?
Really?
Lucas had given me the line.Home for wayward warriors.It was a beautiful line. It was the kind of line that landed smooth and fresh on a man who had spent years running solo missions and burying the part of him that wanted somewhere to come back to, and Lucas had delivered it exactly knowing what it would do. That was a tell. The line had beenengineered. Lines that got engineered got engineered for a reason.
What was the reason?
The first possibility was that Dominion Hall was what Lucas said it was. A network. A tight-knit group of men who had served and who now did service of a different kind, paid for by money they had earned somewhere along the way, with a viper in the foyer and a butler at the door because they had taste and could afford it. Wayward warriors. End of story.
The second possibility was that Dominion Hall was afront.
Not for the FBI. I would have read FBI on Lucas in the first sixty seconds and the read would have been clean. Lucas had operator on him, but he had no Bureau on him. WhateverDominion Hall was, it wasn't federal. At least, not that I could tell.
But that didn't mean it wasn't dangerous.
My brothers wereoff the board.That was Lucas's phrasing.Off the boardcould meansafe in a Dominion Hall asset somewhere.Off the boardcould also meanbeing held in a Dominion Hall asset somewhere. The difference was a question of consent, and Lucas had not invited me to verify it. He'd asked me to take the line on faith.
I'd taken it.
Twenty-four hours ago, I'd taken it without a tremor, because the Lucas in the parlor had felt like the Lucas in the parlor, and I'd been raised to read men, and my read had been clean.
A man with Lexi Montgomery in his lap was not, on its face, the kind of man you assumed was running a cartel.
But movie stars married mobsters. The world was littered with that example. Real powerful men with real powerful enemies had a habit, when they got rich enough, of marrying the most beautiful and famous woman they could find, because beautiful and famous were a kind of armor a man like that could wear in public. Beautiful-and-famous didn't get shot at outside restaurants. Beautiful-and-famous got photographed instead.
It was a clean tactic.
I'd respect it if it was the tactic.
I needed to know.
I let the water run over me and worked it.
