Sinful Seduction (Darkest Desire Book 3)

Prologue

Silence.

But not quite. There was always some kind of noise in the city. A telly making noise somewhere, the wind rattling fences and windows, a door opening and closing, a car alarm beeping in the distance. The noises that constituted the so-called 'quiet' in a neighborhood such as this. 

A woman shrouded in dark robes looks one way, then the other, before briskly stepping away from the entrance of the shabby inn. It was a desolate place, where one stayed for its anonymity and silence that could be bought with a few galleons. Her face was obscured from view by the hood of the robes she was wearing, but in the light of the single functioning streetlight one could catch a hint of red hair and pale skin before it faded back into darkness.

She furtively cast a glance over her shoulder, before quickening her pace. Long, tapered fingers brushed the edges of her cloak, pulling it tighter around her in the cold evening breeze and then slipping into a pocket to curl around a wand. 

Several houses down, hidden in the shadows of a doorway, Dimitri Kuzenkova breathed in the cool night air, wondering why on earth he'd agreed to this stakeout. It had been weeks of information gathering, tracking down useless leads and dead ends. Even more long nights of searching and looking about, hoping to find someone who might have seen something. And then the notice came in of a possible sighting in some piece-of-shit neighborhood in Leeds, Yorkshire of all places. After all the setbacks and dead ends he'd been about to call it quite, but he'd made the trip out there and met up with some nosy Squib whose hobby it was to keep tabs on everyone and everything going on in his street. He'd been about to turn around and just leave when he met the older man, wearing a stained robe in some nondescript brown color that whisked around his scrawny frame with each jittery move of his this shoulders. But his eyes glittered in acknowledgement when he'd shown the picture of the person they were looking for, greedy hands already wrung together at the thought of the reward of several galleons. 

The Ministry had approved of the stakeout of the inn where their target was supposedly staying, and Dimitri had taken it upon himself to see this one through. They'd send in a local informant, dressed as some drunk disgruntled customer, and when the positive identification had come through he'd put together a team of Aurors to make sure the arrest would go down without a glitch. 

And now here he was, trying to keep his tall and bulky frame unnoticed in some goddamn doorway while waiting for the target to move along. They needed her isolated, someplace where she wouldn't be able to do any harm to any innocent passerby's, not that there was much chance of that happening at this late hour. But you never knew. Better safe than sorry. The woman they were after had a reputation, after all. They needed to approach this carefully.

Hours ago the sunset had radiated across the cloud, turning it molten orange with bands of pink. Now it was gone and Dimitri stood motionless under the starless, moonless sky. There was no twilight, only blackness.  The low sky has become a ceiling of grey black rock above, midnight blue with clouds swirling like spilled black ink in water. Night had fallen fast over the city. No more than a couple of hours ago the sky was painted with hues of red, orange and pink, but all colour had faded leaving only a matt black canvas with no stars to be looked upon. The darkness was thick, and under his robes Dimitri's hand curled more firmly around his wand, his eyes trained on the badly lit street, assessing the situation.

Other than the darkness and Dimitri himself all that seemed to exist was the chilly wind that was a harsh bite and could be felt through his cloak. He could feel the hairs on his arm raise, and the bite of the wind had left its mark in the form of small bumps that were tingling on his arms, but its bite was more than flesh deep. His blood ran cold through his veins and his bones were chilled. Closing his eyes briefly he rolled his shoulders, hoping to brush off the stiffness settling in his joints from standing so long.