Nine forty-six P.M. Almost time.

The monitor glowed with eerie blue light in the darkened room, but the mosaic of windows on the screen remained stubbornly dark. Seth Mackey glanced at his watch and drummed his fingers against the desktop. Her schedule never varied. She should be home any minute.

There were more important things for him to be doing. He had hundreds of hours of tape to process, and even with Kearn’s new kick-ass rapid-filter software, it still took time to run the analyses. He should be studying the specs for the new generation of Colbit mikes, or at least conducting a random sweep of the other surveillance sites.

Still he stared at the monitor, trying to rationalize away the buzz of hot excitement in his body. The dozens of hours of vid that he had on file for her wouldn’t do the trick. He needed her live, in real time.

Like a junkie needed his fix.

He spat out a curse at the passing thought, negating it. He didn’t need anything, not anymore. Since Jesse’s death, he’d reinvented himself. He was as cool and detached as a cyborg. His heart rate did not vary, his palms did not sweat. His goal was sharp and clear. It shone in the still, cold darkness of his interior landscape, as brilliant as a guiding star. The plan to destroy Victor Lazar and Kurt Novak was the first thing that had aroused Seth’s interest in the ten months since they had murdered his little brother. It had rendered him a miracle of single-minded concentration—until three weeks ago.

The woman who was about to walk into the rooms monitored by the screen in front of him was the second thing.

The light-activated camera monitoring her garage flicked suddenly to life. He tried to ignore the way his heart rate spiked, and glanced at his watch. Nine fifty-one. She’d been at the office since 7:30 A.M.

Her car pulled in, the headlights switched off. She sat, slumped in the car for so long that the camera switched itself off and the window went dark. He cursed softly through his teeth and made a note to himself to reprogram the default from three minutes to ten.

The second two cameras activated themselves as she unlocked the front door and headed for the kitchen. She took a bottle of spring water from the refrigerator, tilted her head back, and drank. She took off her ugly horn-rimmed glasses and rubbed her eyes, clutching the edge of the kitchen sink for balance. The miniscule camera embedded in the macramé knots of the plant hanger framed her oval face, her stubborn jaw, the shadows under her large, heavily lashed eyes. She looked at the mascara smeared on her fingers and closed her eyes. The sweep of her lashes was dramatic, shadowy, and soft against the delicate curve of her high cheekbones. She looked exhausted.

Being Lazar’s new sex toy must be more strenuous than she had bargained for. He wondered how she’d gotten herself embroiled with him. Whether she was in too deep to ever get out. Most people who got involved with Lazar soon found they were in over their heads. By then, of course, it was too late.

There was no objective reason for him to continue to monitor her. According to the personnel file he’d hacked into, Lazar Shipping International had hired her a month ago as an executive assistant. Had it not been for the fact that she was living in Lazar’s ex-mistress’s house, she might never have come to his attention at all. Lazar’s visits to that house had warranted surveillance, and Seth had been watching it for months.

But Lazar didn’t visit the blonde, or at least he hadn’t yet. She came straight home from the office every night, stopping only to get groceries or to pick up her dry cleaning. The transmitter he had planted in her car confirmed that she never varied her route. A weekly phone call to her mother revealed only that the woman had no clue about her daughter’s latest career move, which was understandable; a young woman kept for pleasure by a ruthless criminal slimebag might well choose to hide the knowledge from her family. She knew no one in Seattle, went nowhere, had no social life that he could discern.

Kind of like himself.

The blonde stared almost directly into the camera with big, haunted eyes. She disquieted him. She looked…God, sweet was the word that came to mind, even though it made him wince.

He had never before had moral qualms about spying on people. When he was a kid reading comic books, he’d picked out his superhero mutation of choice right away. X-ray eyes won, hands down. It was the perfect mutation for a suspicious, paranoid control freak like himself. Knowledge was power, and power was good. He’d built an extremely lucrative career on that philosophy. Jesse used to tease him about it.

He shoved that thought away fast, before it could bite him.

He’d watched Montserrat, Lazar’s former mistress, with business-like detachment. Even seeing her writhing in bed with Lazar had left him cool and unmoved, even a little repulsed. Never once had he felt guilty. But Montserrat was a professional, a player who knew the rules. He read it in her sinuous, calculated body language. She wore a mask all the time: when she was fucking Lazar, even when she was alone.

The blonde had no mask at all. She was wide open and defenseless and soft, like whipped cream, like butter, like silk. It made him feel sleazy for watching her, an emotion so unfamiliar that it had taken him days to put a name to it. The hell of it was, the sleazier he felt, the more impossible it was to stop. He wished he could shake the nagging sense that she needed to be rescued. He wasn’t the white knight type to begin with, and besides, he had Jesse to avenge. That was enough responsibility.

He wished she weren’t so fucking beautiful. It was disturbing.

A shrink could probably explain his fixation; he was under stress, projecting his deprived childhood fantasies onto her because she looked like a fairy-tale princess. He’d read too many comic books as a kid. He was alienated, depressed, obsessed, had an altered perception of reality, blah, blah, blah. You name it, he was afflicted with it.

And the sight of that woman’s stunning body had altered reality beyond recognition. It had shocked his numbed libido violently into life.

She drifted wearily into the range of the micro-camera nestled inside the carved latticework of a hanging lamp in the bedroom. The lamp had been left behind by Montserrat, who had departed so abruptly that she hadn’t even taken the time to pack the personal items that she had contributed to the apartment’s décor.

The blonde had brought nothing of her own to the apartment, and had shown no interest in changing or moving the pieces that were already in place, which was good. The lamp commanded an excellent view of the mirror on the armoire, a detail for which he had reason to be grateful. She opened her armoire, and he enlarged the image until it filled the whole screen, pushing away the now-familiar pang of guilt. This was his favorite part.

She removed her tailored jacket and clipped the skirt to the hanger, which left her clad in a pale silk blouse. Not for the first time, he wished he’d installed one of the color cams, at least in the bedroom. He’d seen no point in it at the time, but with the black-and-whites he couldn’t tell if the blouse was white, ivory, yellow, pink, baby blue, or ice green. He wanted to differentiate between every tiny gradation of her perfect skin, from pale cream to pink to blush rose to deep crimson. He wanted it almost badly enough to break into the house again and upgrade. Almost.

She stretched up on tiptoe to hang up the suit, and the tail of her blouse hiked up to reveal prim cotton briefs that stretched tightly across the swell of her rounded ass. He knew her evening routine as well as if it were the opening credits of an old television show, but still he hung on every detail. Her artless, unself-conscious movements fascinated him. Most of the good-looking women he knew played constantly to an imaginary camera; checking every reflective surface they passed to make sure they were still beautiful. This dreamy-eyed girl didn’t seem to particularly notice, or care.

She peeled off her hose, flung them into the corner, and slowly commenced her clumsy, innocent nightly striptease. She fumbled with her cuffs until he wanted to scream at her to get the fuck on with it. Then she fussed and picked at the buttons at the throat of the high-necked blouse, gazing into the mirror as if she saw another world entirely.

His breath hissed sharply in between his teeth when she finally shrugged off the blouse. Her full, plump breasts were sternly restrained by a plain white under-wire bra. It was not a sexy, rich man’s plaything scrap of lingerie. It was full-coverage, wide straps, practical and unadorned—and the faint hint of cleavage it revealed was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.

He rearranged his throbbing private parts inside his jeans and dragged his hand over his hot face with a groan. He had no business getting anything more than a purely casual, incidental hard-on for one of Lazar’s toys. It was deadly stupid, and it had to stop.

Except that now it was time for the hair. God, he loved that part.

She tossed pin after pin into the china tray on the dresser, and uncoiled the thick blond braid from the bun at the nape of her neck. She unraveled the strands, shaking them loose until they rippled past the small of her back, tapering down to gleaming wisps that brushed tenderly against the swell of her ass.

His breath sighed out in a low, audible groan as she reached behind herself and unhooked the bra. His hands tingled as he stared at her plump, luscious breasts, crowned with pale pink nipples. He imagined them taut, flushed, and hard against his fingers, the palms of his hands, his feverish face, his hungry, suckling mouth. His heart began to pound.

She peeled off the panties, and stretched her beautiful body. Rolling her shoulders, her neck, arching her back until her breasts thrust out, enjoying the sensual freedom of being naked and alone. Unmasked and defenseless. Whipped cream and butter and silk.

The nest of springy, dark blond curls at her crotch didn’t quite hide the shadowy cleft between her shapely thighs. He wanted to press his face against those soft ringlets, inhale her warm woman scent, and then taste her, parting the moist, tender pink folds of her cunt, licking and suckling her until she collapsed in pleasure. Video was not enough. He needed more data. Colors, smells, tastes. He was starving for it.

And then, the gesture that always undid him. She bent from the waist and flung her hair over her head, arching her back and running her fingers through the wavy mass. The placement of the camera and the mirror guaranteed him a spectacular view of her soft, rounded thighs, the creamy globes of her ass, the enticing divide between them.

Sweet Jesus, it was enough to wake the dead.