Most of my friends had left to go back to their own homes to try to get some sleep during what remained of the night, but Owen was waiting for me in one of the spare bedrooms. He’d taken a shower too, and he was lying on the bed, a robe covering his body, trying to relax and recover his equilibrium after all the seesaw emotions of the day. Yeah. Me too.
Owen got to his feet as I entered and shut the door behind me. We stared at each other, his violet eyes locked onto my gray ones, everything so still and quiet that I could hear the grandfather clock in the hall outside tick-tocking off the seconds.
Then, with one thought, we rushed toward each other.
Owen cupped my face in his hands and crushed his lips to mine in a kiss that was even hotter, harder, and more frantic than the one he’d given me in the kitchen earlier. His tongue plunged into my mouth, rough and demanding, while I fumbled with the belt on his robe, yanking it open so that I could touch all of his warm, solid muscles. I raked my nails down his chest, while he sucked at my neck, tearing off my robe as frantically as I had his. I breathed in, letting the rich, faintly metallic smell of him seep deep down into my lungs, imprinting his scent, taste, and touch on my heart.
Given everything that had happened, we were both too impatient to do our usual slow dance of teasing seduction. Owen stopped kissing me long enough to cover himself with a condom, then picked me up, put my back against the nearest wall, and entered me with one long, hard, smooth thrust. I moaned into his mouth, locked my legs around his waist, and rocked against him, desperate to feel every part of him and to mold my body even tighter to his.
He buried his head between my breasts, his breath hot against my skin, and I tangled my fingers in his silky, black hair, urging him on.
“More,” I whispered in his ear. “More, more, more . . .”
He growled and kissed me again, our tongues thrusting against each other just as our bodies were. We kept moving together the whole time, so hard that the pictures rattled on the wall next to my head. Everything about it was fast, fierce, furious. The pressure, the pleasure, built and built, and our movements became quicker, harder, longer, until we were both groaning at how good it felt. But we both kept going, trying to drive each other to new heights, trying to give each other more and more pleasure, trying to show just how much we truly cared.
Finally, with one more deep thrust, we both exploded, going over the edge as one, our lips, bodies, and hearts tangled up and bound together more tightly than ever before.
We both shuddered out our release, and Owen slid me down the wall. But instead of grabbing my hand and walking over to the bed, he kept sliding down, down, down, so that we ended up lying on the hardwood floor together.
Owen turned his head to look at me. “I can’t feel my legs right now.”
I laughed. “That makes two of us.”
I leaned in and rested my head on his muscled shoulder. His arms closed around me, and he started stroking his fingers through my still-wet hair, down my neck, across my shoulder, and all the way to my wrist before moving back in the opposite direction, then starting the whole cycle over again. I flexed my hand over his heart, feeling its strong, rapid thump-thump-thump-thump deep in his chest.
Finally, Owen spoke. “The others kept telling me that you were gone, but I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t let myself believe it.”
“I know,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry that I put you through that.”
He pressed a kiss to the top of my head, and we both tightened our grips. For a long time we lay there on the floor and just held each other—because it was more than we’d both thought we’d ever have again.
“You know,” Owen said, a teasing note creeping into his voice as he propped himself up on his elbow, “I think that I’ve recovered enough to actually stand up and get in bed, if you want to get under the covers to get warm.”
I gently pushed on his shoulders until his back was on the floor. Owen quirked an eyebrow at me, wondering what I was doing, so I hooked my leg over his body so that I was straddling him.
“Really?” I asked, sliding my body against his. “You want to waste all that precious time going over to the bed?”
He laughed and pulled me down on top of him.
We didn’t make it to the bed until much, much later.
20
I left the salon early the next morning to put the first part of my plan into action. After Jo-Jo helped me get ready, I kissed a sleepy Owen good-bye, promising that I’d be careful, then met Bria outside in the driveway.
I slid into the back of her sedan, lying down across the seat, so no one would realize that someone else was in the vehicle. Sophia had already scouted the perimeter, and she hadn’t seen anyone watching the house from the woods or noticed any strange cars parked on the streets farther out in the subdivision. But given Madeline’s lingering doubts about my demise, I wouldn’t have put it past her to send some spies over here this morning or to have them follow my friends around for the next few days, just to make doubly sure that I was as dead as she hoped I was.
“Are you sure that this is the right move?” Bria asked, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “It’s a big risk, going down there, especially right now. If someone sees you, then our advantage is gone.”
“It doesn’t matter so much if they see me. It’s if they recognize me that we’ll be in trouble.”
In addition to keeping out of sight, I had also taken the extra but necessary precaution of wearing a disguise—a short blond wig, bright blue contacts, and clear glasses with silver frames. Roslyn had been nice enough to bring me the items from her stash at Northern Aggression, since her workers used the wigs and more to satisfy the fantasies of their clients. She’d also brought over the tight black suit jacket, short, fitted skirt, and towering heels that I was wearing, along with a black patent-leather briefcase. Apparently, some folks were really into the whole corporate-raider look, which I found a bit disturbing, but the suit would get me into practically every building in Ashland, including the one where we were going.
Jo-Jo had done my makeup, adding a bit of bronzing powder to my pale skin and slick plum gloss to my lips. The dwarf had even let me borrow a chunky string of her pearls to wear over the black suit. All put together, I looked like a completely different person—and about as far away from Gin Blanco as I could get.
Oh, if someone who knew me well studied my face for any length of time, she would eventually see through my disguise, but I was betting that wouldn’t happen. Everyone would be too focused on Bria to pay much attention to me, the office drone drifting along in their wake.
That was my hope, anyway.
Bria steered her sedan out of the subdivision, through Northtown, and into the downtown loop. Thirty minutes later, she pulled up to a familiar location—the Ashland Police Station.
She parked in one of the lots close to the impound yard, and I rose up just enough that I could peer out the backseat window. In the distance, wide sheets of cardboard covered the gaping hole that I’d left in the side of the station. I grinned. Madeline might have her faux dedications to Mab, but I’d left my mark on things around here too.
“You ready for this?” Bria asked.
“I’ll be behind you all the way, just like we planned,” I said.
“All right, then. Here we go.”
She opened her door, got out, and headed toward the station. I waited a minute, then slipped out of the sedan and followed her. It was early, just after seven in the morning, but people were already moving into the station, coffee, cell phones, and briefcases in hand, getting ready for another long day of all the headaches, paperwork, bribes, and bureaucracy that went along with the Ashland legal system.
I made sure that two people were in between us as Bria and I went through the metal detectors. She didn’t look back as I collected my briefcase from the cop working the X-ray machine and started walking behind her.
It had only taken us about two minutes to get through security, but tha
t was enough time for folks to realize that Bria was here. Everyone stopped what they were doing to stare at her, but my sister kept her eyes forward and her head up as she moved deeper into the station. Of course, all the cops had heard about what had supposedly happened to me, and a great number of them had been on the scene at the Pork Pit. But what surprised me was how many of them stopped her to say how sorry they were for her loss. Some of them actually seemed to mean it.
Bria gave them all sharp nods and tight smiles before moving on. I followed about fifteen feet behind her, and the only reason the cops looked at me was to leer at my legs. But I fixed my face into a frown, as though I were deep in thought about something, ignored their stares, and hurried on.
Finally, Bria reached an elevator and stepped inside.
“Hold the elevator, please,” I called out.
She nodded and held her hand out, so that the doors wouldn’t close and I could step inside with her. When the doors slid shut, she murmured out of the side of her mouth.
“Well, that was easier than I’d thought it would be.”
“Don’t jinx us just yet.”
She snorted, and we rode the rest of the way in silence.
After a couple of stops, the doors finally pinged open in the basement. This wasn’t the cops’ domain, though.
It was the coroner’s.
From what Madeline had said last night, the coroner would be doing my supposed autopsy first thing this morning. I wasn’t sure how he would try to go about identifying my supposed body. It wasn’t like I’d left dental records and DNA samples just lying around for anyone to find. But I definitely didn’t want him telling Madeline that the burned body wasn’t me. That would ruin everything else I had planned.
Bria and I stepped out of the elevator. Unlike the main floor, this one was deserted, so we walked together down the long corridor until we reached the glass door that led into the coroner’s office. We entered and found ourselves in a small waiting area with padded chairs along the walls, dusty plastic palm trees in the corners, and several large boxes of tissues lined up on a glass coffee table in the middle of the room.
Bria went to the back of the waiting room and swiped her police ID through a scanner attached to the wall. Another door—this one made out of thick, frosted glass—buzzed open.
We stepped through to the other side and found ourselves in a room made largely out of metal. Stainless-steel vaults fronted with doors lined two of the walls, looking like gym lockers, although they held dead bodies instead of sweatpants and dirty socks. A series of long metal tables took up the center of the room, and several drains were set into the floor. The air was cool against my skin, and the faint antiseptic stench that permeated everything reminded me of Beauregard Benson. My stomach turned over at the memory of the vamp’s lab and the torture I’d endured there, but I forced myself to focus on the man standing next to one of the tables.
The coroner was wearing a long-sleeved black T-shirt under bright blue scrubs that brought out his dark hazel eyes and ebony skin. His black hair was cropped close to his skull, and a small black goatee clung to his chin. I’d seen him many times over the past year, the most recently being at the Bone Mountain Nature Preserve, back when his office was dealing with all the bodies that had been found at Harley Grimes’s remote camp. The coroner had given me a jaunty wave back then. I hoped that he would be even more accommodating today. But what I’d brought along in my briefcase should help with that.
A badly burned body lay on the metal table before him. It looked exactly as I remembered it from the Pork Pit—a charred husk with dull bits of teeth and bones gleaming here and there. I breathed in, and the scent of smoke and ash drifted over to me, making my chest clench.
The coroner had gotten an even earlier start than I’d expected. I couldn’t tell how far along into the autopsy he was, but he’d already started making notes, judging from the clipboard and pen that were lying on another, smaller table.
He looked up at the sound of the door’s buzzing open. A faint wince creased his face as he spotted Bria, and he stepped in front of the table, as if he wanted to shield her from the sight of the burned body.
“Oh, Bria,” he said in a quiet, sympathetic voice. “I thought that I might see you here today. But . . . later. Much later. After I was . . . finished.”
Bria glanced at me, and I nodded. The coroner frowned as he studied me, as if I seemed familiar but he couldn’t quite place me. I stared back at him, completely calm, as if I had nothing at all to hide, even though my heart started thumping a little louder and faster in my chest.
But my disguise must have fooled him because he turned back to Bria. “You shouldn’t be here. Most people would find it very . . . upsetting. If you’d like, you can wait outside with your friend. I have to warn you that I will probably be quite a while, though. Given the . . . state of the remains.”
He kept his voice low and gentle. He was trying to spare her from the horror of seeing the charred body of her supposedly dead sister and then watching as that body was sliced open and examined from head to toe.
“But I’ll take good care of her,” he continued. “I promise. Just like I always do.”
Bria gave him a thin, brittle smile, playing her part well. “Thanks for your concern, Ryan. I appreciate it. Really, I do. But I’m fine. This isn’t my first body or autopsy.”
“I really don’t think that you should be here for this, Bria. There are some things you just can’t unsee.”
She nodded. “And I agree with you one hundred percent. But I needed to talk to you.”
He frowned. “About what?”
That was my cue. I stepped forward, put my briefcase on another table, and popped open the top. I reached inside and drew out a fat envelope, which I passed over to Bria.
She put the envelope on the table next to the coroner’s clipboard, then stepped back. “We all know that’s my sister. Nothing’s going to change that, especially not waiting days for the results to come back on all the tests you like to run. Do the autopsy and the tests if you like, but I want you to go ahead, make a positive ID, and declare that that body is my sister, Gin Blanco.”
Ryan’s eyes narrowed, his face tightened, and he studied my sister in a new light. “I don’t take bribes, Bria. Everybody else around here does, but not me. Not for any reason. I didn’t think you were like that either.”
“And I thought that you might make an exception this one time. Please, Ryan. We’re friends. I really need you to do this for me. I just want to bury my sister as quickly as possible. That’s all.”
That wasn’t all, not by a long shot, and he could tell that she was lying. He stared at her, obviously torn between giving in to her plea and telling her where to stick that envelope of cash. From what Bria had told me, the two of them respected each other and had a great working relationship, but he was also an honest man, one of the few good ones in the entire building.
I didn’t like using him this way, asking him to do something so underhanded, something that went against his beliefs, but I didn’t have a choice. Not if I wanted time to plot against Madeline. But just because I wanted to get her didn’t mean that I was going to hurt innocent people to do it. If the coroner wouldn’t do what we wanted, then so be it. We’d figure out another way.
“No one will question your findings,” Bria continued, trying to convince him. “My sister went into her restaurant, and she never came back out again. Dozens of witnesses support that.”
“But she’s a powerful elemental. If anyone could have survived the fire, it would have been Gin Blanco . . .” Ryan’s voice trailed off, and I could almost see the wheels spinning as he thought about the implication of declaring me dead. “But you actually . . . want this body to be your sister. Why would you want something like that to be true?”
Bria must have been taking acting lessons from Finn because she pinched the bridge of her nose, as if she were fighting back tears. “Because it is her. You’ve heard all the rumors
about Gin and Dobson and the bull pen.”
Ryan winced again.
Bria dropped her hand from her face and stared him down. “I can’t do anything about all of that, but I can do this one last thing for my sister. I want you to expedite things so I can bury her as soon as possible. That’s what she would have wanted. Not this . . . circus. Besides, I know that you’re getting . . . pressure to perform the autopsy so you can give your findings to certain . . . interested individuals.”
For a moment, I almost thought she had him, but her last, not-so-veiled reference to Madeline hardened his resolve.
He straightened up and crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t hurry my work, and I certainly don’t falsify it.”
Bria’s lips tightened into a thin line. She opened her mouth to argue with him, but he held up his hand, cutting her off.
“But your sister . . . helped me once. Did a . . . favor for my family. At least, I think that she did. So I’ll go ahead with the autopsy. I’ll say what you want me to, Bria. Giving myself enough wiggle room to backtrack later, of course.”
She nodded at him. “Of course.”
Bria looked at me, obviously wanting us to leave before he changed his mind, but I wasn’t quite ready to go yet.
“Actually, I have something for Dr. Colson,” I said. “Something that might answer some of his questions. About Ms. Blanco.”
I reached into my briefcase and pulled out several old newspaper articles that I’d had Silvio look up online and print out for me. Puzzled, Bria took the papers from me and handed them over to the coroner.
At first, he frowned, but as he read the sheets and the words sank in, his eyes widened, and his mouth silently dropped open into an O. Then he came to the last sheet, which featured a news photo of a grief-stricken young man clutching the bloodstained body of his kid brother to his chest.
His fingers dug into the paper, crumpling the edges, and his head snapped in my direction. “Where did you get . . . how did you know . . .”
“Several years ago, your younger brother Roy was murdered,” I said. “Shot by some gangbangers during a robbery of your parents’ grocery store. The police did very little to investigate the crime, but the perpetrators were found soon after, all of them with their throats cut.”
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