by Lara Adrian
Trygg was waiting there for her, his scowl firmly in place and his bulky arms crossed over his chest. “Nice work. Very convincing.”
“Thank you.” She lifted her bared shoulder and offered him a satisfied smile. “It almost seemed too easy. Maybe being Atlantean in this world has its advantages.”
He grunted. “Don’t ever do something like that again.”
He strode away from her, his boots thumping on the pavement, his pace agitated. Sia marched after him. “Why are you upset?”
He wheeled on her, his hands clamping around her biceps in a grip so fierce he shook with it. “I told you not to come inside.” He ground out the words, his eyes crackling with sparks that told her just how hot his anger was. “I told you to leave because I don’t want to be responsible for you, Sia.”
“You’re not responsible,” she snapped. “I’ve been taking care of myself for longer than you’ve been alive. In case you’ve forgotten, warrior, I’m immortal. If someone wanted to kill me, they’d have to be determined enough to take my head.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t be hurt,” he shot back angrily. “Do you have any idea what I thought when I heard your voice behind me in there? I thought something had actually happened to you. I thought Santino or one of his men—” He broke off on a harsh curse. “Forget it. Doesn’t matter what I thought. It was just an act and you played it well.”
She blinked, utterly stunned. “You were afraid for me, Trygg?”
“Afraid?” He scoffed, those glowing flecks in his eyes blazing now. “I’m mad as fuck, woman.”
His grasp tightened on her arms, almost to the point of pain. When his lip curled back from his teeth, all she could see was the razor-sharp points of his elongating fangs. But as enraged as he surely was with her, his eyes kept darting to her mouth. She watched his nostrils flare, his harsh face as terrifying as she’d ever seen it.
And yet she was certain that the worst this deadly Breed male wanted to do to her right now was kiss her.
Do it, she thought, all but daring him to as she lifted her chin and stared unflinchingly into his fiery, wild eyes. Her heart raced at the idea, her pulse drumming from both leftover adrenaline and the even stronger rush of arousal that spiraled through her as she held Trygg’s heated gaze.
After a long moment, he made a frustrated sound in the back of his throat, then his grip fell away. The air between them still pulsed with unresolved desire, but Trygg’s face was a mask of indifference now. “We’re finished here, Sia. I’ll drop you at the shelter on my way back to the command center.”
His tone was flat, all business. He’d returned to warrior mode as they’d walked to the waiting SUV, and she should probably be thankful for that. Hadn’t she messed up her life enough without adding to it by getting involved with a crude beast like Trygg?
Except he wasn’t crude, nor a beast.
And she was involved.
Like it or not, they were bound by a common goal—unraveling Rosa’s secrets.
“What about the evidence?” she asked once they were seated in the vehicle.
“What about it?”
“Did you get Rosa’s things?”
His nod was curt as he started the engine and rolled into the river of evening traffic. “I got them.”
“Let me see!” She could hardly contain her excitement. He reached inside his leather jacket and withdrew a bulging large brown envelope. She grabbed it out of his hands and broke the seal. “Have you looked inside?”
“Not yet. After I snatched it, I was too busy wondering if I’d have to save a certain Atlantean’s reckless ass.”
Sia smirked. “Fine ass, you mean.”
He nearly choked, swiveling a confused frown on her. “What?”
“Isn’t that what you said last night outside the shelter? I believe you said I had a fine ass.”
He scowled, but words seemed to fail him. Sia shrugged, pretending she wasn’t taking far too much satisfaction in his flustered reaction. She opened the envelope and reached inside.
“There’s not much in here.” She carefully spilled the contents into her lap. Rosa’s wallet, which contained only a handful of euros and her ID. Her phone. A gold locket on a delicate, broken chain. “I never saw Rosa without this necklace on. It must’ve fallen off when that bloodsucking monster strangled her.”
Trygg glanced at her as they approached a red traffic light. “What about the phone? Power it up. Let’s see who she’s been talking to recently.”
Sia tried, then shook her head. “It’s asking for a passcode.”
He didn’t touch the device, but a small vibration buzzed her fingertips. “Try it now.”
“Showing off, vampire?”
He smirked. “You’ll know when I am.”
The phone lit up in her hands, unveiling the home screen and a photo of Rosa holding Angelina in her arms on a bright, sunny day. The baby was wrapped in a pink blanket, and Rosa’s expression was one of pure happiness, captured in the midst of a joyful laugh. Sia traced her finger around the mother and child, her heart squeezing with sadness.
“What do you want me to search for?” she murmured.
“Phone calls, messages. Anyone she communicated with on a regular basis, but also any anomalies. Even a one-off phone number or text could be the lead that will bring us closer to her connection to Santino.”
As Sia scrolled through weeks and months of incoming and outgoing calls in the phone’s history, she thought back to the photo of Rosa and her baby. “You don’t suppose she was involved with him, do you? Santino and Rosa. Could they have been lovers?”
Trygg chuckled as he turned the SUV onto the street where the shelter was located. “Highly doubtful.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because Roberto Santino prefers men in his bed. The younger the better. He’s even paid for boys when it suits him, according to our intel on the sick fuck.”
A brutal edge crept into Trygg’s rough voice as he relayed that last bit of information. He’d made it no secret that he despised the criminal for his proliferation of Red Dragon and other drugs, but this charge against Santino seemed to resonate someplace deeper in Trygg.
Sia wanted to ask him about it. She wanted to know so much where he was concerned.
But Trygg lived behind steep walls. She was seeing that for the first time tonight. Where before, after she had first arrived from the colony, she had dismissed him as a menacing brute. With his forbidding looks and surly attitude, she had been only too happy to avoid his dark glares and off-putting silence.
Now it just made her want to know more.
As an Atlantean elder, one who had spent all of her long life safely cocooned behind the veil that shielded her kind from violence and bloodshed, the idea that she might be intrigued by one of the Breed—and a warrior besides—would have been laughable. That she could actually be attracted to one of them? Well, that would have been beyond horrifying.
Yet she felt desire and then some for Trygg.
She studied him as he pulled up in front of the shelter.
As soon as they were parked, he pivoted toward her. He held out his hand, the big broad palm open. “I’ll take that phone now, Sia. And the rest of those things.”
“No.” The refusal slipped past her lips before she could stop it. She shook her head. “No. I’m not going to give it up. This evidence belongs to me as much as it does you or the Order.”
“Like hell it does.”
“I helped you get it tonight and you know it. At least be man enough to admit that—”
He flashed his fangs at her. “Oh, I am man enough, Sia. Man enough for anything you’ve got in mind.”
“You don’t frighten me, Trygg. And like it or not, we’re in this together.”
His expression darkened. “Damn right I don’t like it.”
“Good. Then at least we agree on something.”
She slid the phone and the rest of the contents back into the envelope. The
n she hopped out of the vehicle, closing the door on Trygg’s vivid curse behind her.
Chapter 6
While he’d sure as hell rather be surrounded by his tech equipment at the command center, Trygg couldn’t find much to object to as he followed Sia up an exterior staircase to a private third-floor entrance of the house. As irritated as he was after her power play in the car just now—not to mention her earlier act of defiance that had rattled him more than he cared to admit, even to himself—it was hard to think about much else except the rhythmic sway of her hips as she mounted the old iron steps.
Very hard.
Her long, elegant spine and firm backside were a temptation that stoked a growing heat inside him as he stalked up the climb behind her. Everything male in him burned with desire. Everything Breed in him hungered for her too. If she chanced a look over her shoulder, it would be damn close to impossible to hide the amber lighting his irises or the press of his sharp fangs as they filled his mouth.
Letting her win just now was a mistake he already regretted, but that’s where her control was going to end. He’d go inside as she insisted and they’d do a cursory look through the rest of the items they’d brought with them. He would point out something or other so she’d have a bone to chew on, then he’d take everything back to the command center and dig into the meat of the scant evidence alone.
The way he preferred to operate.
He scowled at her when they reached the top of the stairs. “Is this the way you sneak in all the men you bring home with you?”
“Only the surly ones.” Her blonde brow arched over her long-lashed eyes. “And to answer the question you really want to ask, I’ve never brought anyone up here before.”
He didn’t want to ask that, so why did her answer give him such a healthy stab of satisfaction?
“Come in.” She opened the door into a cramped, one-room attic apartment. Trygg stepped inside, feeling like a giant in a dollhouse. The decor was aged and modest, the rug covering rustic wood floors threadbare. An upholstered chair and mirrored dresser stood on one side of the room. On the other was a narrow bed.
Sia walked over and sat on the edge of it, dumping the evidence envelope onto the coverlet. When Trygg didn’t budge, she looked at him expectedly. “Are you going to stand over there the whole time? Sit down, Trygg.” Her mouth twisted with amusement. “I’m not going to bite you.”
Christ.
Just the thought made his cock buck against his zipper. Was the heat on in the room? Suddenly he was too warm, the confined space seeming as tight as a cell. He swiped the skullcap from his head and shrugged out of his leather jacket, setting both on the cushioned chair as he walked over to the bed and sat down beside Sia.
She was already engrossed in the phone once more, paging through the call history and text threads. “Only a few of her messages are recent. It’s as if she cut off most of her other ties about a year ago. Oh. What’s this one? There’s no name attached to the text, just an odd number.”
Trygg glanced at the screen. “The phone number it came from has a block on it. People use them when they don’t want to be identified.”
Sia looked at him pointedly. “This is the only person Rosa communicated with on a regular basis in the past three months. And look—most of these texts came in five days ago. Trygg, Rosa showed up at the shelter two days later.”
He leaned closer. “Let me see those texts.”
She gave him the phone and he scrolled through the conversation thread. “It’s a male. She’s careful not to use his name, but she’s talking to him about their baby. Sounds like he could be married to someone else.”
Sia scoffed. “What a prince.”
“A lot of these messages are idle chat.” Trygg’s jaw tensed as he skimmed a few of the more explicit comments. He was already having enough trouble staying focused on the task at hand with Sia sitting close enough that he could feel the warmth of her body, her sweet scent filling his head with all kinds of dangerous ideas. He cleared his throat and kept scrolling. “A couple of months ago, Rosa thanks him for a gift he gave their daughter, says it’s the child’s favorite thing. That she can’t go to sleep without it. There’s a gap in dates between that text and the next one. He’s telling her there’s a problem on his end and he needs to lay low for a while.”
“I’ll bet,” Sia interjected. “A problem with the wife?”
Trygg smirked and scrolled through a few more messages. “He doesn’t elaborate. The next time he contacts her is five days ago. He tells her he’s leaving Rome the next day. She’s upset, doesn’t understand what’s going on. He doesn’t say, just urges her to take the child and go somewhere else too.”
“She didn’t take his advice,” Sia murmured grimly. “Rosa stayed, and now she’s dead.”
Trygg nodded. “Which seems to suggest she had no idea about the trouble this man of hers was in. Or that he’d somehow put her into it too.”
“The poor girl. She deserved better than that. Better than him.”
“What about photos?” Trygg asked.
Sia shrugged. “The only one I saw was on the home screen.”
Trygg made a quick check of the galleries. “Everything’s been deleted. Or has it?”
With a few taps and swipes and hardware overrides, he managed to break open the cache of deleted photos. Just as he suspected, the majority of the images were ones of Rosa, some with her baby, some of them intimate, meant for her lover’s eyes only. He ignored those few out of respect, and because he was searching for something specific.
And there it was.
A selfie she had taken in a sun-filled park. Rosa was pregnant, and seated beside her was a man. He looked a bit old for her, with gray at his temples and shadows under his eyes.
Trygg peered at the human male, zooming in on his face. “Holy shit.”
Sia leaned closer. “What is it?”
“I’ve seen him before.” He grabbed his own phone and pulled up a search browser. The news article he was looking for filled his screen. He showed it to Sia.
She glanced at the story and the accompanying photos, then read the Italian headline aloud. “Body of Gianni Tiaggi, Special Investigator for the Guardia di Finanza, recovered from the Tevere near the Vatican on Sunday morning.” She looked at Trygg, her lovely face drawn in shock. “Santino had him killed?”
“Considering that the Guardia di Finanza is the agency in charge of investigating international drug trafficking, there’s no doubt that Santino had him dealt with. Now we need to figure out what Tiaggi did to cross him, or what he might’ve had on the bastard that was damaging enough for Santino to have him killed. Maybe that something ended up in Rosa’s possession. If it did, she probably didn’t even realize she had it.”
“What kind of man would jeopardize the mother of his own child like that?”
“A desperate one.” Trygg picked up the gold locket. “Didn’t you say Rosa was always wearing this?”
“I never saw her without it on.”
He tried to open the delicate piece of jewelry, but struggled. His hands were too big, his fingers more accustomed to weapons and technology than fragile, feminine things.
Sia reached for it, her soft touch brushing his knuckles. “Here, let me do that.”
Sitting next to her so closely on the narrow mattress was its own kind of hell. Now that she had pressed up even tighter to him as she worked on the locket, it was all he could do to resist reaching out to smooth his fingers through the loose cascade of her platinum hair. She smelled like citrus and fresh sea air, and her body’s warmth radiated against him like the heat of the sun. His mouth watered as he breathed her in, his fangs throbbing as they slid out of his gums behind his closed mouth.
“Got it,” she blurted, glancing up with a smile as she held the tiny photo frame open to him.
The image was a close-up of the baby’s sleeping face, her tiny fist resting against her cheek and wrapped tight around the edge of a pink blanket.
&n
bsp; “She’s such a sweet child,” Sia murmured, gazing at the picture. “It breaks my heart to think of how much she’s been through in her short little life.”
Hearing the sadness in her voice, Trygg wondered if Tamisia had ever wanted children of her own. Before he could stop himself, a shocking mental fantasy came to life in his head. He and Sia making love. Him planting his seed inside her while he sank his fangs into her creamy throat.
Fuck.
Arousal surged through him, instant and uncontrollable. The erection he’d been fighting all night raged to life, making him shift in discomfort on the bed. He cleared his throat, but nothing could mask the rough edge of his voice.
“Take the photo out, Sia. Maybe there’s something behind it.”
She nodded and went to work, gently prying it out with her fingernail. She shook her head. “Nothing. Just a photo in a locket. Dammit!”
“We’ll find it,” he assured her, but he had to admit his own disappointment too. “I’ll bring these things back to the command center and the Order will take care of the rest, Sia. Then you can let all of this ugliness go and get on with your life.”
Nothing could’ve prepared him for her bleak, haunted expression or what it did to him inside. “Life as I knew it ended six weeks ago, when my inaction caused the death of a friend and beloved husband and father. I won’t stand by and let bad things happen ever again. If I’m willing to do that after everything I’ve lost, then I should have refused my banishment and begged the colony to kill me.”
He let her rant, sensing she needed it. She wasn’t a woman to lose control, and the fact that she felt safe enough to do so with him moved him more deeply than he cared to admit.
“Do you miss it? Your old life with your people.”
“Every day.” She smiled sadly. “But it doesn’t matter. I can never go back and I’ll never be able to redeem myself to the colony, so I must do it here. I have to do something purposeful with this new life—for myself as much as I want to show my people that I’m not the awful person they believe me to be. I need to prove that I have honor, that I’m worth something.”