by Donya Lynne
Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t call me sweetheart.”
He sneered. “Queen Bitch?”
The way blue flames lit inside her eyes made the jab worth any aggravation she’d put him through later. “Try again.”
“Coco?”
“Only if you’re a two-year-old.” She gasped in mock surprise. “Oh, that’s right. You are a two-year-old.”
“What can I say? I’m a kid at heart.” He inhaled her dark, edgy scent as she let the door slam behind her and shrugged out of her coat. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, she smelled sexy. Like feminine perspiration, oranges, and musk.
“How about you try growing up for a change?” She hung her coat on a hook.
“And spoil all the fun? Never.” He wanted to grab her hair and pull her back around to face him, just so he could get a look at all that blue fire in her eyes.
“I’m not amused.”
“Ah, now you’re just hurting my feelings, Coco.”
“Don’t call me Coco.”
“But you said—”
“It’s Cordray to you, Cro-Magnon man. Or C. Those are your choices.” She crossed her arms, pushing her breasts into tantalizing mounds.
He looked her up and down. “I can think of a few c-words I’d like to call you right about now.”
“I bet you can.”
“I kind of like Coco myself.” He hung his jacket on the hook beside Cordray’s. “Makes me think of chocolate and marshmallows served up in a cozy mug. Something you clearly aren’t, by the way. Just sayin’.”
She sighed. Was that the hint of a smile he saw biting at the corners of her mouth? “Are you finished?”
“I don’t know. Are you?” He glanced toward the sound of children chattering farther inside the house and, for the first time since arriving, felt a tremor of fear vibrate inside his heart. How would the kids react to him? Would they shy away like everyone else in his life did? Would they be scared of him?
She huffed and turned for the doorway leading into a short hallway. “You can leave your bag in here for now. I’ll give you the tour of the house after breakfast.” She brushed by him and left the room as if she didn’t care whether he followed her or not. On the way out, she muttered, “I hope you don’t need a drop cloth when you eat.”
He set his bag beside a bay of lockers, two of which on the bottom row had Aiden’s and Null’s names on them. “Naw, I follow the five-second rule,” he called after her.
“Of course you do,” she called back.
He followed her into the kitchen, where Brenna was scooping four golden pancakes from a griddle. Another female—presumably Mya—was taking up bacon and sausage from a large iron skillet. Her hair was dark brown, almost black, and it was pulled into a ponytail, which swished and bobbed as she glanced over her shoulder and smiled. Her catlike eyes gave him a swift once-over. When she turned and set the platter of meat on the counter, he read the front of her T-shirt. I’m what Willis was talkin’ ’bout was written in bright-orange block letters.
“You must be Trace.” She set down her tongs and extended her hand.
He took it and nodded. His pulse quickened as his nerves danced up a notch. Social situations weren’t his thing. After shaking his hand, Mya went back to helping Brenna finish breakfast.
He wasn’t used to being around so many people, and he didn’t have the best track record when meeting this many new faces. Tightness and panic fluttered through his chest.
Beside him, Cordray perked up as if she’d felt his fear.
“Are you okay?” she whispered. Concern edged her voice. “You’re not . . . you know . . .” Her gaze flicked quickly to his hands.
His eyes darted to hers as he took several small, rapid breaths.
She touched his arm, and in a blink, his heart rate calmed. His breathing returned to normal.
What the hell? He glanced down at where her hand delicately curled around his forearm. Never had anyone calmed him with such a gentle caress. Always in the past, when his beast pushed forward or fear gripped his throat, it had taken the heavy-handed pain that he now received from Micah to pull himself back from the brink. Cordray had barely touched him, but it had been enough to tame his demon.
“I’m fine.” He reluctantly pulled his arm from her loose grasp. “Just . . .” Admitting that he wasn’t good in social situations sat about as well on his stomach as food poisoning. “I’m not a people person.”
“No shit,” she whispered. Then, more calmly, “You sure you’re okay?” Her tone and expression were surprisingly compassionate. Then worry crept over her face as she dropped her gaze to his right hand again as if she feared it would blast her into the next decade any second. “I can’t have you losing control in here, Trace. I need to make sure my kids are safe around you.”
“They are.” He frowned and took a step away from her. “I won’t hurt them.”
Maybe he was a Cretan, and maybe he was the Hand of God who could crush his enemies’ innards into pulp, but he wouldn’t hurt Cordray’s kids. Of that much he was certain.
Kids were his one and only soft spot. Especially orphans who reminded him of his own lonely childhood. He would lay down his life to make sure Cordray’s children remained safe.
“Everything okay here?” Brenna said.
He glanced up to find her and Mya staring at him like he had a bomb strapped to his chest.
Cordray stepped forward. “Everything’s fine. Let’s eat. The bus will be here soon.”
With one more glance at him and Cordray, Brenna and Mya carried their platters of food out of the kitchen and into the dining room. The sound of chattering kids intensified as they dug into their breakfast.
“You seem . . .off,” Cordray said, stepping closer, invading his nostrils with that dark scent of hers. “If this is too much . . .”
He didn’t need her closer, because it made him want to do things to her. Naughty things. The kind of things he shouldn’t do with kids in the next room.
Frowning, he took a step away. “I told you, I’m fine. I’m not losing control or anything, so don’t worry you’re pretty little head.”
Her head cocked to the side as she swayed backward. “Pretty little head? Now I know something’s wrong with you.”
“It’s a figure of speech. You know, kind of like the one you used earlier. Don’t read anything into it.” But he’d fucked up. When he’d said she was pretty, it hadn’t been just a figure of speech in his mind. He’d really meant pretty little head. Because in that moment, that’s exactly how he saw her. She was pretty.
Beautiful really.
Desirable.
In the past twelve hours, he’d come to realize she was a stunning female. Especially here. Her guard was completely down around the kids. A different light shone around her, casting her into his awareness in a new way. One that made his heart beat a little harder and blood rush to his groin.
“Fine. Whatever.” She exhaled heavily and headed toward the dining room, fatigue sagging her shoulders. “Let’s just eat so you can get to work and get out of my hair.”
The dining room was alive with activity and chatter, and somewhere upstairs, a dog barked. A moment later, a tabby cat tore through the dining room, a small dog on its tail.
Cordray snapped her fingers. “Roxy. Out.”
The dog halted, turned, and trotted back into the living room, where it dropped onto a small dog bed beside a dark-green recliner.
The place was a study in controlled chaos, but when he stepped into the dining room behind her, everyone quieted. Forks suspended over plates, halfway to mouths, as nine sets of eyes turned toward him, including those of Aiden, Null, Brenna, and Mya.
“Who’s that?” said an older boy who looked a year or two away from his transition.
“Leon, this is Trace,” Cordray said. “He’ll be helping out around here for a few months.”
Leon’s expression hardened. He was the oldest boy there, almost a full-grown male. No doubt he took it u
pon himself to be the man of the house and didn’t like a strange male invading his space.
Cordray took a seat at the head of the table and heaped a stack of pancakes and sausage on her plate.
Null wiggled, waved, and motioned him over. “Sit next to me, Twace.” He beamed proudly from his booster seat, as if knowing who Trace was pushed him into a higher social standing among the others.
Trace made his way around the table, the stares of the other kids like ice sliding down his back. It made his skin prickle and reminded him of when he was a kid.
In school, the other kids had never talked to him. They had just stared and whispered to each other about what a freak he was. They hadn’t known he could hear them, but he could. It was just one of the oddities about him that had isolated him from everyone else.
Freak.
A dark shadow had seemed to hover over him everywhere he went as a child. The other kids had ignored and avoided him as though he were a demon. He scared them. He scared everyone. He still did.
Unlike Brak, who had been everyone’s friend. No one had been afraid of Brak.
But then Mother had given his twin the gift of white light, hadn’t she? She’d given Trace darkness. Wasn’t that what she’d told them when they were about Null and Aiden’s age?
“While I carried you inside me, I gave each of you powerful gifts,” she’d said. “To you, Brak, I gave the light. The gift to heal. To create. To mend.” She’d brushed her hand lovingly over Brak’s hair. “And to you, Trace, I gave the gift of darkness. The power to destroy, to hide, to protect.” There had been no loving caress through his hair. Just a hardness in her expression, with the barest hint of compassion in her eyes. As if he’d brought the darkness on himself rather than received it from her.
He blinked away the memory as sadness tugged at his heart, even as the kids around the table recovered from his introduction and began eating.
Null reached toward him and wrapped his tiny fingers around one of his. The moment he did, all sadness vanished from his mind as if blown away on a breeze. Calm and peace swept over him, and he turned his gaze toward the little boy.
Null smiled up at him, his blue eyes shimmering, his irises shifting as if they were tiny oceans. Then they shifted back to normal.
“Bettew?” Null said.
Trace nodded weakly, not sure what to make of those eyes, then glanced at Cordray, who was watching them. The curiosity must have shown on his face, because she raised her fingers as if to tell him she would explain what had just happened later.
He certainly hoped so, because he felt like he was in an episode of The Twilight Zone. Asylum sure was living up to its name.
Chapter 13
“What have you got?” Micah stood behind Io at the massive computer console that looked like something out of the movie, The Matrix. Six monitors displayed frozen images from various security cameras around or near the Sentinel.
Io swiveled in his chair to face him, pulling a cherry Tootsie Pop from his mouth with a slurp. “You owe me for this.”
Io normally didn’t stay at AKM during daylight hours, especially not since he’d mated King Bain’s daughter, but Micah had implored him to stick around after his shift to help hack into the city’s security cameras.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll buy you a fruitcake for Christmas. Now, what have you got.” He crossed his arms and glanced from one screen to the next, trying to figure out what he was looking at.
With a snort, Io spun his chair to face the monitors as he shoved the Tootsie Pop back in his mouth and tucked it against his cheek. “I hate fruitcake.” The hard candy knocked against his teeth as he tapped a couple of keys on his keyboard. The top left monitor sprang to life. Io slurped the lollipop as he pulled it out of his mouth again and used it to point to the screen. “Okay, here’s our boy at your place, playing Spiderman.”
Micah watched as Skeletor’s dark image glided down the side of the building, placed his hand on the window of his apartment, and then a moment later, the glass shattered.
“What did he use to break the window?”
Io tapped another sequence of keys and brought up the image of a small device that looked like one of those hand buzzers people pranked their friends with back in the fifties, only this was larger, flatter, and matte black. It had what appeared to be a small speaker in the center. The contraption looked military grade.
“My guess is that he’s using one of these.”
“And this would be . . .?”
“It’s called an oscillator. I found this one on the Dark Net.”
The Dark Net. The black market. Where society’s criminal element did their online holiday shopping.
Io brought up several more images as he continued explaining. “The idea is, you hold one of these babies up to a pane of glass, activate it so it gives off a sound at the right frequency, and”—he popped his fingers open as if mimicking an explosion—“Boom! Broken window.” Io crossed his arms. “But ones this small and this powerful ain’t cheap. Your guy is well funded.”
Great. Just what Micah needed. A rich cat burglar with nothing better to do with his time than to break into his apartment and steal ancient artifacts.
He should have put the ankh in one of the two seventeen-thousand-dollar Fort Knox safes in his home in the burbs. That’s really where the damn thing belonged, not in the small, easily cracked safe in his apartment. But through centuries of despair after losing Kat, he’d lost his ability to give a fuck and had tucked everything into the small safe without much care over what happened to it. When he mated Sam in January and finally bobbed back to the surface to breathe again, he’d all but forgotten about the safe. Besides, he’d grown complacent with the idea that if no one had stolen his priceless heirlooms in nearly a thousand years no one ever would.
He’d been so wrong, and now he was paying the price.
But hindsight was twenty-twenty. Once he got his father’s ankh back—and he would get it back—he would rectify his mistake and put it where it should have been in the first place.
But first, he had to get the damn thing back.
“Okay, so what else have you got?”
Io grinned, leaned forward, and typed out another command. Another monitor came to life. “Okay, here’s your boy in the alley fighting that drag queen, Cordray.”
Micah smirked. “Drag queen. You’re funny.”
“Thought you’d like that.” Another monitor unfroze as Io continued typing and sucking on his Tootsie Pop. “And this is the shot from the alley. See, there he goes.” The thief gunned his motorcycle and raced away from where he’d left Cordray sitting on her ass in the rain. “And this”—Io pointed to another monitor—“is the parking lot where you found the abandoned mask. Watch.”
Micah leaned forward and rested his hand on the desk beside the keyboard. A moment later, Skeletor rolled into the parking lot. His back was to the camera, and he was hunched over as if he knew it was there and wanted to hide his face. He reached under his hood. A moment later, he tossed the mask in the dumpster. Then he gunned the throttle, spun the rear tire around, and sped away, keeping his head down.
Yep, Skeletor knew the camera was there.
But Micah caught the flash of skin around his jaw. “Stop. Rewind.”
Io did as instructed.
“Now, go forward. Slowly.”
The image began to scroll.
“There. Stop.”
Micah leaned closer and narrowed his eyes. Looked like Skeletor had a square jaw and black, close-shaved stubble. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was something. Add that to what Cordray had said about Skeletor having vivid, grey-blue eyes, and they at least had the start of a suspect’s sketch. Slowly but surely, they were building a face to go with the mask.
Io squinted and leaned toward the monitor. “Is he laughing?”
Micah pushed off the desk and stood tall as he peered at the frozen image. “Yeah, he’s laughing. Little fucker. He knew the camera was there. He knew we�
�d use it to track him.”
“Which means . . .?”
“That he’s toying with us. He obviously knows who I am, and he obviously knows I have resources to hunt his ass down.” Which put Micah behind the eight ball, because he knew exactly squat about Skeletor. Eye and hair color, and a square jawline with black stubble weren’t a lot to go on.
“And he’s using those resources to taunt you.” Io turned his attention back to his screens. The hard cherry shell of his Tootsie Pop knocked against his teeth as he tongued it to the other side of his mouth. “Ballsy little fucker.”
“You’re telling me.” And when he found this sonofabitch with balls the size of an elephant’s, he’d teach him a thing or two about respect the Micah Black way. Which involved fists and maybe a pair of steel-toed boots.
“So,” Io said, “if he knew we would tap into the city’s cameras to track him, what good is all this footage I found? He probably staged his entire egress for maximum exposure to ensure you’d follow him.”
“Exactly.” Micah leaned forward again, placing his hand on the back of Io’s chair as he scanned the monitors. “Which means he’s got an ego. And you of all people know how egos are. They sometimes get in the way of smart decisions.”
Io had been known to make some pretty boneheaded decisions in his past, all because he thought he was the bee’s knees. In fact, one of those decisions—going after Princess Miriam—had almost gotten him killed a few weeks ago. It had also been the reason Trace had spent two weeks in King Bain’s dungeon, Tristan was still on house arrest, and Micah was in charge of the team now. So yeah, it was safe to say Io knew the trouble an inflated ego could cause, even if all had ended well when Miriam turned out to be his mate.
A knowing grin spread across Io’s face. “Hey, I resemble that remark.” He chuckled. “But you’re right. If we’re patient, our boy will eventually screw up.”
“And we’ll be there when he does.” Micah would personally lead the welcome party when Skeletor—or whoever he really was—made his first wrong move and walked straight into Micah’s waiting fist. “Show me the rest.”
The next screen came to life. “I followed him through the city to this location.”