I was about the only person I’d ever seen him doing it around.
“I was questioning a couple of wolves—the two of them on their own, I can handle. I know them, have had to deal with them before—even in ugly situations. But this time…well, things got dicey,” I said stiltedly. “Confidential case and I can’t discuss it, but I had to talk to them.”
“I already heard things went down bad.” He slid his hand up my torso until he could brush my hair back. “Chang said a Banner cop dropped you off here. Are you working with them?”
“I do sometimes,” I said and guilt settled nasty little hooks in my heart. “The Assembly and Banner both see me as a fairly neutral faction so I’m a good bet. I don’t have to do it often, but this was one of those jobs I pretty much had to take.”
“Why?”
“Because nobody else can work it as well as I can.” Because if I don’t, you’re going to die and I won’t trust your life to anybody else. “I guess it’s that bulldog mentality of mine.”
“Aided by a streak of luck?” he said softly.
“That, too. You know me. I usually land on my feet.”
“You ended up with a massive hole in your body this time.”
“And worse.” The hole that worried me was the one acid and guilt were chewing in my heart, even now. “Neither of them were high-level. I could take the two of them. Like I said, I knew them, which was why I went. But they were waiting on a drug drop and they panicked. I took them out almost right away, but their partner showed up and he was higher level. Had enough power in him to worry me so I focused on slowing him down while I tried to get out. All I had to do was get outside and I knew I could get Goliath’s attention. I slipped—I was bleeding bad and…well, one of them got close enough to grab me. He threw me, but it was close to the door. I could get out. I just needed to get my hands on one of my knives. It’s one of the ones the Green Road did for me.”
He grimaced. He knew those blades. The first time he’d looked at them, his eyes had flashed and gone dark. Then he’d smiled at me and said, “You’re a mean little bitch sometimes, baby girl. Well done.” I took that as approval.
“He had me pinned against the wall for a few seconds—he didn’t do anything, but while I was getting at my knife, he…it just put me in a bad place.” I didn’t want to talk about that bad place. There were things that had happened to me and Damon knew things had happened, but I couldn’t talk about them to him. Not yet. “Anyway. I got the knife in him and he shoved me away. That’s when the Banner cop showed up. I guess he dealt with the other one. I just sat on the floor and watched the silver work on the one who’d had me against the wall.”
I darted a look at Damon. “He didn’t even do anything, but I’m still freaked me out. Put me in a bad place mentally. It set a nightmare off.”
Silence swelled up, one of those deafening silences where you’re painfully aware of the ticking of the clock, of every breath you take, of the slightest, smallest sound.
“I’m told one of them got away. Which one?”
I closed my eyes, tried to think. “I don’t know…there was a third, weaker wolf in the background. Nobody I know. I think Bonner was the one Justin killed. Not sure of that guy’s name, but he was strong.”
Damon nodded. Then he sat up slowly, his eyes narrowing. “Justin. I know that name.”
Oh. Shit.
“He’s the Banner cop I’m working with.”
“No. That’s not why I know it, Kit.”
I stared at his back. The black ink from his tattoo spilled over the top edge of his left shoulder and I could see it shifting, rippling. Muscles flexed under the smooth surface of his skin and I could see the wild heat of his energy hovering above him. Mad. He was mad. Oh, yes.
“Who is Justin, Kit?”
I leaned back against the headboard and drew my knees to my chest. “I used to see him for a while.”
The muscles in his back knotted tighter. “Find another Banner cop to work with.”
“Not an option, Damon.” I blew out a careful breath and swallowed past the knot that had decided to lodge itself in my throat. “This isn’t a thing for you to worry about—”
He went from sitting on the edge of the bed to crouched over my knees so fast, I never even saw it coming. I was good. I was fast. I thought I knew how fast he was…and I was wrong.
“Don’t tell me what’s a thing for me to worry about,” he whispered, his voice just barely human now. “I told you that I’d try harder, but I never said I’d hold it together while you worked with some guy you used to fuck.”
“Stop it,” I warned him softly even as a forgotten fear tried to wing itself to life inside. I wasn’t going to be afraid and I wasn’t going to do this. Lifting a hand, I touched his cheek. He tensed like he might move away and if he had, I might have shattered. He didn’t though and I managed to keep that part of me from dying. “If I had a choice in this, I wouldn’t work with him. I don’t want this job and if I had my way, I’d bury my blade so far up his ass, I’d see the end of it out his throat.”
“Then do it,” he snarled. “I’ll help you bury the body.”
“I can’t.” If I do, they’re going to kill you, damn it…I stared at him and even though I didn’t say a damn thing, wasn’t even really planning on it, I felt the edge of pain slicing through my brain, like some nasty little parasite had decided to settle down inside my skull and chew its way through me. Thanks, Justin. The fucking oath he’d put on me.
I couldn’t even think the truth around Damon.
Only one thing kept me from showing the pain that was ripping through my skull and that was the fact that I was used to it. Far too used to living with pain and I was able to breathe through it, even calm myself down enough that my heart slowed and I was able to meet his eyes and say again, “I have to work this damned case, Damon. If I had any other choice, I’d walk away, but I don’t.”
Something had him worried, though. Whether he sensed the pain I was in or he saw something in my face, because that fury leeched away from his eyes, replaced by something that bothered me even more. It was that probing, insightful stare. His storm-cloud gray eyes locked on my face and he reached up, closing a hand around my wrist. “How much trouble are you in, baby girl?”
“It’s not me.” I closed my eyes so he wouldn’t see the fear in them. “It’s not me, Damon. I can swear to that.” I formulated the words I wanted to say and even though the headache grew to nauseating proportions, I managed to force them out. “But I have to work this case. I need Justin’s help and he’s the only person who can back me up the way I need.”
With my heart racing away like a Thoroughbred in the Derby, I made myself look at him, trying to focus through the pain. “I can’t let people die because you don’t want me working with an ex-boyfriend. That’s all he is to me. Somebody who came into my life for a while.”
“He’s more than that. I can see it.”
I sighed. Wiggling away from him, I shifted to my knees and draped my arms around his neck. “Yeah. For a while, he was. Damon, you don’t know how broken I was. For a very long while. I just…” I traced my finger down the lines of his tattoo, searching for the words. “Remember the wolf girl who was with Doyle?”
She’d been one of the ones trapped in that pit, one the hunters had turned into a toy. One they’d chased, over and over again. She’d never reached her spike and now she was living with one of the healer schools while they tried to fix the damage that had been done to her, body and soul.
I’d seen her a month ago and even that had been like a slice to my heart. She wasn’t even a shell of a person…and she’d reminded me too much of myself.
“For a very long while, I wasn’t much better than her. I was creeping out of that shell when I met Justin. He helped me climb the rest of the way out. So yeah, he mattered…for a while.
“But he’s not what you are to me.” I leaned back and cupped his face in my hands. “He never could be. Nobody co
uld.”
His hands closed around my waist, kneading the flesh there as he pressed his head against my neck.
I held still, trying not to move, not to breathe, because I knew I was pushing this. Pushing him too far—
He sighed and shifted, rubbing his mouth along my neck. I shivered a little and relaxed. Everything was okay. Everything was just fine—shit—I hissed out a breath as he sank his teeth into my neck. My mind processed what he was doing but before I could decide if I was going to do a damn thing, his hand tangled in my hair, arching my head to the side as he pressed down harder, harder until his teeth broke through the skin.
He growled against me and I groaned.
It hurt—
There isn’t anything remotely sexy or romantic about having a six-foot five, two-hundred fifty pound werecat sink a powerful set of teeth into your neck.
But it was over in seconds and I was still in processing mode as he grabbed something from the bed to press against my neck. “You’re asking me to deal with something that I can’t change and I hate it,” he said, his voice hard and flat. “That’s how I’m dealing. The next time anybody looks at you, they’re going to see what I wanted everybody to know months ago.”
He lifted his head and stared at me, the storm-clouds in his eyes darkened to near black.
“Well. I guess this means there’s no point in worrying about whether or not I’m going to be a target anymore,” I said. “We just deal with that as it comes now, right?”
He snorted and shifted his attention to the bite on my neck. “Kit, you walk around with a target on your back. Sometimes I think you enjoy it.”
Chapter Ten
Two things woke me.
Well, one thing…the phone rang and it forced me out of the exhausted well of sleep. I did my damnedest to escape the sound, burying my face in my pillow and trying to roll away.
That was what really cleared the cobwebs from my brain. The second I moved, pain flooded me. Pain from everywhere. Pain in my side. Pain in my neck. I groaned and reached up, trying to remember why my neck was hurting. I remembered the mess with my side—you don’t forget when a werewolf takes a chunk out of you, trying to get to your spleen, your heart. Whatever his intended snack had been.
But at first, I didn’t remember my neck—oh, wait.
Damon pressed a kiss to my shoulder. “How are you feeling?”
I jabbed my elbow into his gut. Since he was built like a tank, all it did was hurt my arm, but I felt better. “I feel like somebody bit a chunk out of my side and like a Neanderthal decided to mark his territory by chewing up my neck.” I cracked open one eye to glare at him.
There was a large clock dominating the wall opposite us. He had pretty keen eyesight, so I had to assume he just liked the look of it. It was ornate, kind of old world style and I figured it was pretty. But I’d rather not know how early it was. I just wanted to sleep.
The phone rang again. Once. Only once. Then it went silent. Hadn’t it just done that?
“Why in the hell is it doing that?”
“They want my attention,” Damon said. His hand rested on my hip. “They can have it in a minute.”
I sat up, taking my time with it because I expected to hurt like a bitch…damn, I wasn’t wrong about that. There wasn’t a part of me that didn’t hurt and that wasn’t good. I might not be super tough shifter stock, able to heal massive holes in my body in the blink of an eye, but after a night of rest, I should have felt better than this.
The fact that I didn’t told me one brutal fact: I’d been closer to dying than I’d been in a long, long while.
I didn’t feel up to much of anything just yet, but I needed to get over that. Food would help. Coffee would help. A shower. But first, I had to sit up.
Pain lingered as I shifted upright into the bed. It wouldn’t keep me from fighting, from moving, from working though, and that was all that mattered. A hot meal or two, slowing it down a bit and I’d be fine. There was an odd, residual ache in my side and I could feel the pull of healing muscles, but that was it.
In the end, I was alive so hey, I couldn’t really complain. Considering the lingering weakness, it was probably nothing short of a miracle that I was alive, actually.
I slid a hand down and ran it over my side, grimacing as I felt the new array scars. “Who did the healing?” I asked. A full-fledged healing would have taken care of the pain, so I hadn’t gotten that, but somebody had done something.
“There wasn’t one. I was going to call Colleen once you woke up.” He covered my hand with his. “This could have been bad, kitten.”
I looked at him. “You know how many times I’ve seen you stumble through the door over the past few months, bones broken? Bleeding so bad sometimes I don’t even recognize you?”
His eyes flashed and he opened to his mouth.
But to his credit, he said nothing.
“If I was fully human and untrained, running around doing something I had no right to do, then maybe I’d understand,” I said quietly. “But this is what I’m made for…and short of trying my hand at full-time contract killings, Damon? This is the one thing I’m good at.”
“I told you I’d try.” Then he looked back down and blew out a ragged breath as he bent down and pressed his lips to my side. “Although, fuck, Kit, if I’d known it was going to be this hard right out of the gate, I might have made you agree to start working out naked all the damned time.”
A grin tugged at my lips as I curved my hand over the back of his neck. “You’re a deviant.”
“Hmmm. A little.” Then he straightened up and probed the wound at my side.
I leaned back and let him. He’d taken enough beatings in his life to know what to look for, plus I suspected he’d helped with some of the minor injuries that had happened within the clan, back when he’d been serving as one of the enforcers.
“It’s healing well,” he said softly.
“I can tell. As bad as I feel, I ought to be flat on my back, so somebody either helped me or had something handy to speed things along.”
He smoothed my shirt down over my ribs and glanced up to meet my eyes. “You can thank TJ for that. Apparently she had some high quality witches put together whatever she used on you before she sent you off with the Banner cop.”
She did have some high-quality witches. Colleen was the only witch TJ trusted so it was Colleen’s magic that had healed up the damage done to me. Sliding off the bed, I headed over to one of the mirrors and stared at my reflection. I don’t look like much. My hair is pale and under the summer sun, it would lighten to near white. We were deep into autumn now and the sun sometimes played peek-a-boo with the clouds so my hair was darkening to its natural light blonde shot through with streaks of platinum.
I’d expected to look almost gray with exhaustion, but I didn’t. Admittedly, I didn’t look my best, but it could have been worse. A lot worse. A hot shower, a couple of meals and I’d be okay.
Dropping my gaze to my neck, I stared at the new mark there.
A shapeshifter wouldn’t scar from such a bite, I knew. They bit each other when they acknowledged some sort of deep bond in a relationship. Damon had already done this to me once and I carried those marks on my wrist. At the time, he’d chosen my wrist to make a point—I’d fed Jude, the vampire I later realized was out to screw me over so very badly from the same wrist and Damon knew Jude would notice.
It wasn’t long after he’d taken the position as Alpha that we’d decided to play it quiet.
He worried I’d be a target.
I didn’t care. I didn’t enjoy being a target, but I’d dealt with it for the first part of my life—I could handle it. If I had him? Hey, that made this better all around already.
I had him and that was more than I’d ever expected. Sometimes my head still spun when I thought about just what I had with him. It didn’t always make sense, but he filled some empty space in my heart that I hadn’t even realized was there until he came along.
Now there was a new empty space, one caused by this mess Justin had dumped in my lap, and it was worse because if I messed things up…No. I cut that thought off. I wouldn’t mess it up. I knew how to do my job. It was one thing I was good at. I’d do my job and Damon would be fine.
I closed my eyes as I sensed him coming. I never heard him, but I always knew. I could feel the energy a shifter threw off and his in particular; it was warm, buzzing against my skin.
A living blanket.
As he moved to stand behind me, wrapping an arm around my upper body, I opened my eyes to look at him. With hooded eyes, he stared at me. “How much trouble are you in, Kit?” he asked, his voice lower than normal, rougher. “You need to tell me so I can help. Nobody is going to hurt you again, but I need to know what the hell is going on.”
He’d asked me that before.
“I already told you…I’m not.” I heaved out a sigh as I hooked my hands over his forearm and met his eyes. I want to tell you…And even as the thought entered my head, the headache slammed back into me. I swallowed back a groan and let my head fall, staring down at the plush area rug. The floors were hardwood, but Damon had put some rugs down. I suspected he’d done it for me. The floors always felt cold to me and I hated being cold…
“Something’s bothering you,” he whispered, drawing my eyes back to him. “Don’t tell me it’s not. I know you too well.”
“It’s not me that’s in trouble. I’m not lying.”
The phone rang again. That annoying, insistent, polite little ring. I swore under my breath and drove my head back against Damon’s chest.
“Hey…watch it. You had your head busted open, remember?”
“It’s fine.” I didn’t even have a headache now. Well, except for the magically induced one. That phone, though…
Sure, enough. It did another ring. I glared at it. “If you don’t answer that thing, I’m going to.”
He laughed a little. “Before you do—or I do—whichever, we should talk. I’ve been out of touch for a bit and that means they have business to discuss. They’ll come in here and see you–”
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