The Gift: A Novella by Sandra Marton

CHAPTER ONE
    A s a boy, Kazimir Savitch always figured the best way to start the day was to open your eyes and discover that it was a summer Saturday and the Yankees were playing a home game, meaning that if he was careful and clever, he could sneak onto a rooftop near the stadium and watch a few innings before the superintendent discovered him and damn near kicked his butt down six flights of stairs and straight out into the street.
    As a man, Kaz still loved the Yankees, but he’d discovered a great way to begin the day, and it didn’t depend on the season or the day or even on baseball.
    You woke up with a warm and willing woman in your bed, you were off to the best possible start.
    Unfortunately, what he awoke to on this cold December morning was the shrill cry of his alarm clock.
    Kaz groaned, opened one eye, looked at the clock and briefly considered hurling it at the wall.
    Yeah, but it wasn’t the clock’s fault he was tired.
    He’d been out to dinner with a client last night and fell into bed someplace around midnight, caught a couple of hours sleep before getting up to check the figures coming in from the Tokyo Stock Exchange. He’d made a couple of calls, dropped back into bed and now…now it was 6:40 a.m. and if he didn’t get moving, he’d be late.
    Kaz slapped the alarm to silence. Yawning, he sat up and stretched his arms high over his head as the sheet and comforter fell to his waist.
    Did he have time for a quick workout in the gym on the upper level of his penthouse?
    No. Not today.
    He had an eight o’clock appointment at his office on Madison Avenue. Being late was not an option. It never was—his years in Special Ops had trained him well—but today, more than ever, being on time was important. He wanted to be at his desk before Zach Castelianos showed up. They had served in the same unit; Kaz had even done some work for Zach’s elite security firm after they’d both left the service. Then he’d gone on to other things. They’d kept in touch —a couple of beers once in a while—but Zach had made it clear today was about business, though he wouldn’t say more than that over the phone.
    Kaz was curious.
    Did Zach have a job he wanted done? Something a little dangerous?
    His walk-in shower had six sprays. He turned them all to high, grabbed a container of shampoo, dumped some in his dark hair and turned his face up to the cascading water.
    It was a long time since he’d done anything edgy.
    He washed quickly, rinsed off, turned off the sprays and wrapped an oversized bath sheet around his hips. Then he stepped before the double sink, lathered his face, picked up a razor and began to shave.
    Once, his specialty had been surveillance. Intelligence gathering. And darker skills.
    Now, it was finance. International finance. And he was good at it.
    He was the head honcho, the brains behind and the guy who ran TSIF. The Sardovian Investment Fund. It had made him rich. Better still, it had meant schools and hospitals parks and roads for Sardovia and its people, and the damnedest thing was that it had happened only because he’d been wounded—barely wounded, compared with what had happened to some of the men he’d served with in Afghanistan. A punctured eardrum and the subsequent minor hearing loss was nothing, but it had rendered him unfit for Special Ops, where a man depended as much on his senses as on his M4 carbine.
    Kaz rinsed the remaining lather from his face, dried it, slapped on some aftershave that didn’t smell like a field of flowers, and headed into his dressing room.
    Who’d have imagined that when he’d looked around for a way to make a living, he’d have ended up the head of an investment fund? A successful one, enough so that it was kind of a moral quid pro quo, a way for him to make up for the immorality of the Sardovian SOB who’d sired him.
    Until he was ten, he’d never known a thing about the man. And he’d never heard of Sardovia, but who had? A small kingdom on the