The Losing Game (13 page)

Dante signed his name below Lucas’s. Lucas watched, to see if he added some elegant sentiment in Latin. Something profound and fitting.

Stepping away when he’d finished, Dante motioned for Lucas to read.
I still have your Le Creuset casserole dish. I take it you meant for me to keep it.

Lucas laughed. It broke through the somber hush of the memorial room with all the dignity of a fart. He slapped his hand over his mouth.

“I’m sorry,” he said through his fingers. “That wasn’t what I was expecting.”

Dante gently clasped Lucas’s wrist and lowered his hand from his face. “Don’t hide that smile.”

Lucas’s heart skipped and raced. The rousing effect of Dante’s touch, though brief, lingered—still lingered, like ripples spreading out on water from a single drop of rain. As if that wasn’t enough to leave Lucas unbalanced, the slight waft of Dante’s cologne followed. Citrus, pepper, and musk. It suffused Lucas with the unmistakable heat of desire. He didn’t know what to do with it. Not here.

The blush flamed from his chest to his cheeks. Dante must have been able to see it. Amusement played at the corners of his mouth and lit up his eyes, and it was a playful and blindingly attractive expression.

Was making Lucas blush his intention? Was Dante flirting at Avery’s memorial? It certainly felt that way. Lucas wasn’t imagining it. (Or wishing it?)

The thrill raced like electrical current through his limbs, and he wanted to laugh more than ever. “All right,” he said, “I won’t hide mine if you don’t hide yours.”

Dante held out his hand, and they shook. Lucas took the liberty of holding Dante’s hand a second too long, savoring the warm silk of his skin and the strength in his fingers.

The gesture didn’t go unnoticed. Afterward, it seemed they had made a connection that drew them closer together. The difference was subtle, but Lucas felt sure Dante was aware of it too. They stood with the proximity of confidantes.

Well, they did share one secret, did they not? And by accident (or perhaps design) Avery had been the one to instigate it. So perhaps it was fitting that the first spark of
something
should be ignited here.

They took their time, perusing the display of photographs and memorabilia along the back of the room. Lucas had never seen these pictures before. Avery was an unconventional beauty, but an undeniable beauty nonetheless. She’d had strong features and the golden complexion of someone who’d lived well, much of the time in the sun.

“Did Avery put this together?” Lucas asked the attendant, whose name badge said Dean Hodges.

“I believe so.”

The display had been printed onto sheets that could easily be bound into an album or framed. Lucas asked, “What will happen to everything, once the memorial is over?”

Dean didn’t look sure. “I expect one of her family members will take it.”

“I wouldn’t bank on it,” Dante said.

If that were the case…. Lucas took his chance. “If no one comes, I’ll have everything.”

Dean Hodges shuffled uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “I don’t know if that’s possible. Her brothers might want it.”

Dante seemed to grow ten centimeters taller. Lucas was reminded of their first meeting, and he at once pitied poor Dean Hodges.

More so when Dante looked Dean straight in the eye with his sniper glare and slowly enunciated, “Like he said, if no one comes, he’ll take everything. Lucas, give the man your number.”

Dean looked anxiously in the direction the doorway. “All right. I’ll check with my manager.”

Dean scurried out of the room, leaving Lucas slightly bemused at how much he’d enjoyed that little display. Until Dante stood in front of Avery’s coffin. The simple box rested forlornly on a cloth-covered stand, bare and plain, nothing like the lady that rested inside it. Dante bowed his head, whispered something Lucas didn’t hear, and resumed his perusal of the display boards.

Lucas followed, pausing in front of a picture of a young Avery and a man who looked distinctly like Dante standing on a front-door step, arm in arm.

“Is that your father?”

“Yes.”

Gabriel Okoro had been more narrowly built than his son. They shared the intense gaze, broad nose and high cheekbones, but Dante had a softness to him that Lucas couldn’t see in his father. Not that a single photograph reflected an entire personality.

Dante didn’t linger over the board immortalizing Avery’s days at Le Plaisir. He wandered farther along, to pictures of Avery in various locales across the country, across the globe, with men and women who neither he, nor apparently Lucas, recognized.

“She got around,” Lucas said.

“Nothing and no one could hold her back.”

A gloom had descended over Dante, and in turn Lucas. Lucas needed to get out of this room. He’d paid his respects and sung along to one of the cheesy tunes on Avery’s playlist. After he left his number with Dean, there would be nothing more to do here. Perhaps he’d judged Avery’s brothers too harshly for leaving as quickly as they did.

Dante had left the boards and was looking out of wide window, over the gardens. According to the details sent to Lucas by the EEP, Avery’s ashes would be scattered amongst the roses, according to her wishes, under a bed of a plum-colored variety with a strong, sweet scent, called Ebb Tide. She knew how to make a statement.

In profile, Dante was as handsome as face-to-face. He stood with his arms behind his back, one leg slightly ahead of the other. The back of his head was perfectly round, his close-cropped hair no more than a shadow over his skin. His broad shoulders and slim waist were accentuated by the cut of yet another beautifully tailored black suit. Lucas gave him a moment with his thoughts while he spent a moment with his own.

Dante Okoro had frightened the living daylights out of Lucas the first time they’d met. In a way, he still did, for completely different reasons. Dante had read the files Lucas gave him. He said he’d read “every word,” and he was prepared to discuss helping Lucas, if that was what Lucas still wanted.

Lucas didn’t. Not anymore. Not now that he had a gun. Not now there was a glimmer of possibility that he and Dante might…. he didn’t want to speculate too hard.

Gingerly, Lucas approached. He said, “The first couple of months after Grace died, I was busy taking care of her affairs. Then there was the court case. It dragged on and on.” Men and women in suits whose names Lucas had forgotten, whose faces he never could. “After that, once it was all over and done with, I think that’s when I lost it.”

Lucas pressed on. Though Dante hadn’t moved or responded, Lucas had no doubt he was listening. “I haven’t…. You didn’t see me at my finest.”

Dante turned to face him. “Sometimes it’s more reliable to let others speak for us, when we’re not up to the job of speaking for ourselves. Avery loved you. Very much.”

More than Dante knew.

Voices in the corridor interrupted their quiet exchange. Lucas thought, at first, that Avery might have had more guests, but the sounds rose and faded without the appearance of another person. They must have been attending a memorial in another room.

Lucas asked, “Would you like to take a walk in the grounds?”

“I don’t think so. It’s very cold.”

Lucas remained at Dante’s side. Outside in the beds, a few leaves clung to the rosebushes, ruddy and brittle and ready to fall. Funny to think that Avery would soon be beneath them, nothing more than mineral dust and memories.

She had loved Lucas. He wondered, though, if her bequest had been made during a period of clarity or whether her decision had been rash. Careless. Lucas wasn’t sure Dante was the person to ask, but who else was there?

“I’m ready to leave,” he said. “Whenever you are.”

“Then let’s leave now.”

“Can you drop me home? I’m not going back to work today.”

“Of course.” After a pause, Dante added, “I’m not working today either.”

There was something hopeful yet terribly sad in Dante’s tone. He wasn’t as invulnerable as Lucas had imagined him to be.

“Perhaps, when we get back to my place, you’d like to come in? I make good coffee.”

Dante seemed to straighten and, at the same time, relax, like a weight had been lifted. “I’d like that very much. Though I wouldn’t say no to something stronger than coffee.”

“There’s an off-license on the Roseport Road. And a deli next door.”

At that, Dante placed his hand at the small of Lucas’s back and steered him toward the door. “Then we should drink to Avery with a glass of something expensive and curse her for buggering off before anyone was ready.”

As they left the crematorium building and crossed the car park to Dante’s Mercedes, Lucas wrapped his scarf more tightly about his neck, out of habit more than necessity. The sun shone warmly on his face, and the icy patches on the ground had completely thawed.

LUCAS’S HOUSE
was an early twenty-first-century build, and in keeping with the era, the size of a shoe box. From the front door, Lucas led Dante through the small hallway and living area to the kitchen-diner at the back.

The wide windows and pale walls created an illusion of space, and Lucas had a minimalist approach to décor, which afforded his home a sunny freshness that stood incongruously against this day of grief. The tightness in Dante’s neck and shoulders eased. It felt like a lifetime had passed since he’d asked Kit to invite Sharps over for Christmas. Since he nullified the wager with Jim. Since Jim had warned him not to get involved with Lucas’s plans to nullify Shaw.

He took off his coat and sat on the offered stool at the breakfast bar; the kitchen was too small for a dining table. The window over the sink overlooked a postage-stamp-sized garden, with a patch of damp lawn and naked shrubbery at its borders. Lucas kept it neat, like his home. Indeed, seeing him here, at home in his kitchen, moving from cupboard to drawer with uninhibited grace, Dante was pleased to discover Lucas had an alluring level of poise and confidence.

Lucas emptied the bag of food onto the counter and handed Dante the Barolo and a corkscrew. “Will you open this?”

Dante secured the bottle between his thighs as Lucas placed two large wineglasses on the counter between them. The cherry peppers stuffed with soft cheese, the olives, and the bread, Lucas spread onto a platter.

The cork lifted with a squeak and a pop and released its rich cherry vapors. Dante held the bottle high and poured them each a few centimeters, swirling the contents of both his glass and Lucas’s, while Lucas set out plates and cutlery. The wine had an intense color—bloody and brilliant. A perfect tribute.

“There.” Dante took the paper serviette Lucas had put on his plate and shook it open. “We have a feast.”

“Before we eat, I want to show you something.”

Lucas’s voice had the seriousness of someone about to confess. (Dante’s stomach lurched. Except, no, Lucas couldn’t have done it already. Dante had seen Shaw on camera this morning, leaving his house.) And like that, Dante was reminded of his own guilty secret. The cameras planted outside, overlooking Lucas’s back garden and the front of his house.

“Go ahead.”

From the other side of the breakfast bar, Lucas opened a drawer and took out an envelope. He slid it across the cold black stone, his fingertips lingering on the red paper, as if he wasn’t quite ready to let it go.

“I saw Avery five days ago. We went out together, and she gave me this. Go on, look inside.”

Dante already knew, of course, about Avery’s night out with Lucas. He’d spied them. Spied on them. Secrets and lies had never been a problem for Dante—they were sometimes necessary, occasionally thrilling—but there was something about Lucas. Deceiving him felt like swallowing stones.

He took out the Christmas card. Avery had never celebrated Christmas, and to have chosen one with a traditional design: Three kings, marching over a desert, taking gifts to the king of kings was even more unlikely to see.

“Open it,” Lucas said.

In a shaky hand, Avery had written:
In the spirit of the season of goodwill to all men, and with love from a friend
. What looked like a credit card was slotted into a tab on the inside.

“She told me to wait until Christmas. But who does that?” Lucas smiled ruefully. “It’s a prepaid credit card. I found out how much is on it yesterday.” Lucas shed his suit jacket and folded his arms, slotting his hands under his armpits. “She knew I’d open it early, but she didn’t want me to know how much she was giving me until after…. Christ. I didn’t think she had that sort of money.”

Dante didn’t feel it was his place to ask, but he knew a thing or two about Avery that maybe Lucas didn’t. He wasn’t surprised when Lucas said, “Fifty thousand.” That would be like Avery.

“As I said earlier, she loved you.”

One gesture at a time, Dante was beginning to see why. The way Lucas invited Dante to open the wine, yet made sure he was comfortable and catered to, at once made Dante feel at home. Lucas didn’t stand on formality, but he was mindful of Dante’s wellbeing and feelings. Never before had Dante felt so ashamed of the secret surveillance cameras perched in the evergreens outside.

Lucas returned the prepaid credit card to the envelope and returned it to the drawer. “You were like family. Did she…?”

“No, she didn’t. But that she did it for you meant she must have thought you could put that money to good use.”

“I’m sorry. You’d known her so long. It doesn’t seem right.”

Dante pondered this as he tasted the wine. It had an intriguing bouquet—sour fruits and spice enveloped hints of vanilla and cocoa. It was a wine to be savored, to be smelled and tasted with the patience and attention one might give a lover.

Now there was a thought.

Dante swiftly plucked an olive from the platter. “Next week, Avery’s solicitor will be reading her will. She might have left me something. She might not. I don’t care. I don’t need her money, and I’d rather not have to contend with her brothers complaining they’ve been cheated out of their due.” Of course, it made sense. “That’s probably why she put this cash aside for you early. To keep you out of the drama. She was pragmatic like that.”