Page 72 of Empire of Light
I stretched, my legs tangling in the sheet wrapped downward from my waist. My hand reached upward, my fingers sliding in along the hair on the back of Damen’s head.
Holding him to me. Not wanting to break the pseudo sleep I was still in the thick of.
His low voice, amused, rumbled into my neck. “I have to meet a guy downstairs about a phone.”
My heavy eyelids opened and I twisted, looking up at him. He wasn’t still lying naked in bed with me—he was hovering over me, fully dressed, balancing on his knees.
“Yuck. No—stay in bed. You’ve had everything else delivered up here—clothes, food, drink—our own little bubble so we never have to see the outside world again. A phone could be slipped under the door.”
He chuckled. “I hope not. I would wonder about the craftsmanship of the door maker if there was that big of a gap under the door.”
I rolled my eyes.
He leaned down and pecked my forehead. “As much as I am enjoying our bubble, I need a phone to stay on top of everything and I have to make sure this one is set up correctly. Victor smashed my last one.”
My gaze found his face. “Did he get any information off it?”
“Just false information.” He shrugged. “He gained access to it by my eye scan, and that sent him to a false profile.”
I sat up, tapping my forefinger onto his chest through his dark grey button-down shirt as he shifted to sit on the edge of the bed. “You are a fucking genius.”
He grinned. “I am nothing if not careful.”
I searched his face. It was scary sometimes how many angles Damen had working all at once. He tended to think out every situation in about a hundred different variations, and then acted accordingly. “Which was why you didn’t mind leaving Victor alive?”
“With what he would have seen on the phone, he’s more useful to me alive at the moment.”
“How so?”
“He would have seen information about the Griwanda clan in Chile looking to move in on his lithium mines.”
“Lithium?”
“It’s all about money and cheap labor—lithium mines are this century’s diamond mines. It’s a race to get them up and running. Someone threatening that source for Victor is likely to get destroyed.”
I nodded. “So you want Victor to dispose of the Griwanda clan?”
His head tilted to the side with a slight nod. “That would be convenient for me. The Griwanda clan has become far too powerful in that corner of the world. Power they don’t wield in a conducive way to keeping the balance to the species. They are the epitome of unhinged terrorists.”
“Are they actually trying to move into Victor’s empire there?”
He shook his head.
“How did you know to have information on there for him?”
“I didn’t. I keep lots of false information in that profile. Any one of my enemies could get a hold of it and the first thing they would do is search for their own names. At any given time, I determine who I would like to take each other out, then imagine all sorts of ways that could happen. Then I record some of it in that false profile—if I’m not actively putting something into motion myself.”
I stared at him for a long moment, slightly dumbstruck at the machinations he had going on in his head. “You’re rather diabolical.”
“Just keeping the different malefic factions under control. If they’re fighting each other, they’re not helping to set the world on fire, which it already is without their help.” He traced his fingers down the length of my bare arm. “Victor is a threat, yes, but not an immediate one. Mostly, he’s an opportunist. My brother broke the Folotto code—he approached Victor with the plan to take me down, and Victor never saw Perseus as anything more than a puppet he could control. So the person that needed to die on Mykonos was my brother.”
I nodded, trying to read what was etched in the weary lines around his eyes. A life spent fighting for the right for every breath he took, I supposed.
I grabbed the knee of his left leg still bent toward me on the bed. “Stay.”
He looked down to my hand, and for a moment, I thought I’d enticed him.
He shook his head. “Unfortunately, the world will continue to turn whether we leave this room or not. I have to at least pretend to care about it, even if all I really want to do is hide out in these sheets with you for another month.” He patted my hand. “I’ll meet the tech guy, grab the phone, and then I promise you another twenty-four hours of bliss.”