Turncoat by Megan Derr (the false prince series txt) 📕

they felt that damned sorry for him. "I'm getting some sleep. I'll deal with this mess when I wake up."

So saying, he closed his eyes and immediately fell asleep.

Abrupt silence woke him up a little later—just over an hour, as that was about how long it took to get to Byron's place in normal traffic. Dixie blinked, looked around. "We good?"

"Yeah, home safe and sound," Byron said. "Come on, I'd just finished making dinner when our mutual friend here called me. A little while later I got your text. I can't wait to hear this story. I'm honestly surprised this is the first time you two are meeting."

"Why would I have cause to meet a cat burglar who's got more in common with a bull in a china shop?"

"At least I'm not spaghetti western meets boys in the hood," the man muttered.

Dixie gave him a look. "Watch it, pintsize."

"I'm just saying, you look like you bench press Buicks and sound like you're headed for the rodeo."

"Shut up," Dixie said, but the curt tone he was trying for was ruined by the smile twitching at his mouth.

The man gave a small smile back, eyes dropping as he pushed back a stray lock of hair. "Thanks for saving me, by the way. I really am sorry about your house and everything. I didn't—"

"Ain't a thing, darling. I've lost much worse than houses, and houses can be replaced. Don't worry your pintsized head about it." Dixie winked and turned away to head for the elevators and up to Byron's apartment.

It was a shithole of a place on the outside, the kind of apartment building filled with people one step from living on the streets. Except a lot of those people had come upon sudden windfalls and gone elsewhere, and a whole lot of non-existent people had moved in. Byron had spent good money to interconnect the apartment into something like an oversized mouse cage, with nooks, crannies, tunnels, and more secrets than the CIA.

And there were enough people coming and going to see Byron, alias Fortune—or rather, one of his many, many covers—that the rest of the world didn't notice there was anything funny about the place.

In the elevator, Dixie leaned against the back wall. The little guy—Whisker, which just made Dixie want to call him 'kitten'—remained close to the doors. Byron punched in his access code, then pressed his hand to a panel and presented his eye to another for fingerprint and retina scans.

The elevator beeped and began to move, taking them up to the seventh floor where Byron's main rooms were located. They stepped out into a dingy hall, only two yellow-orange lights giving the cockroaches and rats something to see by. Byron unlocked his door, paused briefly as discreet scanners read all three of them, then finally let them inside.

"Make yourselves at home," Byron said, throwing his keys on the kitchen island and shrugging out of the dark purple leather jacket he'd been wearing. Some days he looked like a faerie prince; some days he looked like a faerie prostitute. Some days Dixie honestly couldn't decide. "Beer? Greg, I've got wine, too."

"Yes," Greg and Dixie said together. Greg smiled faintly, then ducked his head and slipped away through the door that led to the various bedrooms.

Dixie pulled a stool up to the island and took the beer Byron held out. "Thanks. So that's Whisker?"

"Yeah," Byron replied. He leaned against the kitchen sink and took a pull on his own beer. "Gregory Raines. He's a paralegal by day. Comes in handy. He works for one of the biggest firms in town and everybody likes kittens."

Dixie snorted a laugh over his beer bottle. At least he wasn't the only one with that impression. "Do you know what he was doing collapsing in my yard? You might want to check out his head. I patched it up, but I ain't a medic by any stretch of the imagination."

Byron nodded, then set his beer aside and went to pull something out of the oven. "Get the salad out of the fridge."

"Yes, Boss."

They'd finished getting all of dinner on the table when the door creaked open. Dixie turned, and hell if he didn't feel a touch like a drunk butterfly right about then. All cleaned up and wearing jeans and a blue polo, hair still damp and standing out a little around his head, Greg looked like the bastard child of a devil and angel, something with a sweet mouth and a wicked tongue. He had pretty brown eyes that just barely faded to gold along the edges.

A soft snort drew Dixie's attention, and he tore his eyes away and went to the fridge for another beer, bringing one for Byron too. "I swear I just ate, but hell if I ain't hungry again."

"Pizza, rice, or pasta?" Byron asked wryly, in that boarding school tone of his that drove Dixie up the fucking wall. Too reminiscent of the lily white man-children who'd kept him and his parents as little better than slaves to tend the hi-tech computer system Dixie's daddy had built all on his own.

"Shut it, white boy," Dixie replied. "I ain't putting up with nonsense from a glorified bank robber."

Byron sniffed. "I'm a bit more than that."

"You really ain't," Dixie said with a grin.

Greg huffed from where he sat dead opposite Dixie at the table. "You are a bank robber, Byron. But I want to know who the hell he is."

Byron raised his brows at Dixie, who shrugged and said, "Name's Dixon Mountebank. Most folks call me Dixie."

"And the G.O.D. prefers to call him Turncoat," Byron added.

"Holy shit!" Greg almost dropped the bottle of wine he'd picked up. "Seriously?"

"Seriously," Dixie drawled, dragging out every letter. "More important question is: what the hell was you doing tonight and how did the G.O.D. find you?"

Greg's mouth pinched. "They might have found me because it was a G.O.D. house I had to break into."

Byron dropped his fork and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Why would