Read The Death and Life of Nicholas Linnear for Free Online

building and he had made certain that he encountered no one in the hallways.
    As he watched her emerge from the bathroom, slim, tall, naked, he considered that she had made every move correctly in accordance with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War . Baron Po may not have been her enemy, but his patron in the Central Committee certainly was. How else to explain how Baron Po had suffered no consequences in ordering her abduction? Anna had an enemy in the Central Committee who was more powerful than she was. Now she had quite cleverly cut off her enemy’s main source of income. What would that do to his power? Only Anna could answer that question, but Nicholas suspected it would all but neuter him.
    As she came toward him, her flawless skin streaked with the tiger stripes of sunlight coming through the slats, she lifted her arms, ran her fingers through her thick, lustrous hair. Her small, firm breasts were thrust into prominence, their nipples hard and quivering as she approached him.
    Climbing onto the bed, she straddled him. “What a conflagration you set off,” she said softly. “I have confirmation that Baron Po and his cadre all perished in the blaze.” She ran a fingertip across his throat. “Still, he hurt you.”
    “Not him. I never saw him.”
    “And yet you managed to destroy him utterly.” She bent down, her nipples scoring his chest. “How you managed it I don’t know.” Her lips covered his as a way of telling him she didn’t care how he’d done it, just that he had.
    There was no expression on her face, but her eyes were alight with lust. Nicholas suspected the word “passion” did not exist for her, except in the sphere of business, just as “love” did not exist for her at all.
    Nevertheless, she was as adept a tactician in bed as she was behind a desk. That’s all that counted for her; sex wasn’t about anything other than power. For Nicholas, it was refreshing to make love to a woman who had no pretexts about what they were doing and why. Coming together, coupling, then drawing apart were a series of maneuvers that brought her pleasure rather than money and respect—though there was another form of pleasure in those things, as well.
    He liked to hear her cry out at the end. It was the only time he ever heard her raise her voice. And, too, it was a different voice—hoarse, throaty, emanating from deep in her belly as her chi rose up for a moment to overwhelm her. In that instant, she was vulnerable, but only he possessed the insight to recognize it. Then, in the blink of an eye, it was snuffed out, like a candle in a wind rising before a storm.
    “ Cha ,” she said, afterward. Tea. It was not a question, but the beginning of a complex ritual that followed sex. It was her way to physically restore the rigid order that had been shredded by animal chaos.
    “Not yet,” Nicholas said as he rolled out of bed. “I’m taking a shower.”
    “Shall I join you before or after you soap up?” she asked, intuiting his intent.
    This was the only time she allowed herself to be playful. After the first sip of tea, that part of her would vanish as if it had never existed.
    “I’ll leave it up to you.”
    “How much time do you need to recover?” She said, with the last remnant of the throaty yell that presaged her orgasm. It was a question to which she already knew the answer.
    He turned on the hot water, stepped into the shower. He had kept the bathroom door open. Through the shower’s translucent pebbled glass, he could see a slightly distorted image of her bounce out of bed, pad across the room, open the slatted blinds. Sunlight streamed into the room, blotting out her form.
    He started to wash the accumulated sweat and grime off of his body. Halfway through, he saw her shadow come through the open doorway into the bathroom. Only it wasn’t Anna Song he was confronting, but Quilin, the man on the tanker.
    In Quilin’s hands two daggers glistened with refracted light through the shower’s downpour.