Kit’s pulse jumped in her chest. “No, we didn’t.”
“You slept with me because I fit in with your rockabilly lifestyle.”
“No, that’s why I was first attracted to you. I slept with you because . . . because . . .”
“Because?”
Because you said I was beautiful and strong. Because you said you saw my soul, and because I’ve always believed that life requires being known by another soul.
She refocused her gaze on Grif. “Because I’m an idiot.”
Grif looked down, and shuffled a foot against the peeling linoleum floor.
“What are you doing?” Kit’s low, husky lover’s voice was gone.
“I need to tell you why I’m really here, Kit. I am a Centurion. I really am an angel. I meet murdered souls in the moments after their death.”
Wrapping her arms tightly around her body, she jerked her head. “Don’t do this. You know my best friend was just murdered. And my ex-husband.”
“Nicole was my Take, Kit. I was the one who was supposed to see her home.”
The dream-woman’s voice popped into Kit’s mind again. I won’t be done until I’m home again.
“Stop it,” Kit hissed lowly. “This isn’t funny.”
But then the thought of Nicole and Grif caught hold, and the blood drained from Kit’s face. “You were there,” she whispered. “I saw you in the window. I . . . I saw your hat!”
She saw him consider lying, but Kit knew what she’d seen. Like Tony himself had told her, she knew what she knew. It had been Grif.
“Yes,” he finally said, voice clipped and hard.
“You killed her.” She backed up, knocking into the kitchen table.
“No.” Grif took a step forward.
She held out a hand, like that could keep him from coming near. “I saw you up there. I saw your silhouette! You were there.”
He shrugged impatiently, and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I already told you that. But I didn’t kill her.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why should I believe you?”
“I saved you, didn’t I?”
It was a good point, and Kit tilted her head. “Did you talk to her?”
“Nicole?” Grif nodded, but Kit waited for more. “She said you were supposed to go to a bonfire last weekend. And some bar of beauty.”
The Beauty Bar. All her girlfriends met there once a month. Tears blurred Kit’s vision, and she hastily wiped them away. “Why are you doing this?”
“I can tell when death is coming from someone,” he said, pressing on with his crazy, horrible story. “I can smell it like a hound scents blood in the air. I can see the plasma of world matter, of fate, gathering in the moments before death, marking the end of that soul’s Surface time.”
“Like Paul?” she asked, one brow lifted in challenge.
But Grif continued to lie. “Yes.”
A harsh laugh ripped from her chest. “So you knew he was going to die? And you did nothing?” She shook her head. “What kind of angel is that, Grif? What kind of person is that?”
“It was fated,” he replied quickly, defensive. “There was no stopping it. Besides, he wasn’t my Take. I was with you.”
Kit thought for a moment, tried another angle. “All right. What about Marin?”
Grif didn’t even blink. “She’s got a stew of drugs inside of her that’ll probably have her outliving all of us.”
Oh, he was good. Lying with such a straight, sincere face.
“She’ll be happy to hear it.” Kit crossed her arms. “So what are you doing here, Grif? You don’t want me, that’s obvious—”
“Kit—”
“So who’s your next so-called Take?” She made finger quotes in the air, and nearly lost her sheet. She grabbed it, angry, and spun to leave . . . but froze. Stilling, looking at him, she asked, “Who is your next Take, Grif?”
Clearing his throat, he held out his hands. “Look, I screwed up. I did something I shouldn’t. I helped Nicole extend her life by minutes after she was already dead. She circled Schmidt’s name in your notebook, and that changed everything. Schmidt found it, and that’s why he’s after you. I let that happen. I . . . killed you.”
“I’m right here.”
“But you’re not supposed to be.”
“You saved me,” she pointed out. That had to mean something.
“I only prolonged the inevitable.”
“What? No . . .” She looked around the kitchen like it was the moon, frowning and shaking her head, then zeroed back in on him. “Bullshit.”
“What?” Grif drew back.
“I call bullshit on your black-winged angelic ass, that’s what.” Securing the sheet, she placed her hands on her hips, advanced on him like she was the one who was dangerous. “You’re just scared. You allowed yourself to feel something for me that you hadn’t felt in a long time, and it spooked you. You’re . . . chickenshit.”
“I’m in love with another woman!” he roared, causing her to flinch. “The woman you’re researching. Evie . . . Evelyn Shaw. She was my wife. They . . . they killed her. Right after they killed me.”
“You have had a total psychotic break with reality,” Kit said evenly.
“Really?” Grif used his anger as a counterpunch. “You’re the one who said you saw wings on my back. Tell that to your shrink.”
“They were shadows, I know. Don’t change the subject.” Don’t remind her of what she thought she saw during their lovemaking. It’d be just her luck if crazy was catching.
“So you don’t believe me?”
“I don’t even care!” she yelled, and then pulled at her hair in a way that probably made her look crazy. Grabbing at the sheet, she yelled, “All I know is that you’ve been there for me in the biggest shitstorm of my life, and there have been quite a few, Shaw! But you’ve stuck with me and helped me and we just made love for an entire day, and there’s something real between us and don’t tell me you didn’t feel it, too!”
Breathing hard, he opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Yeah, he’d felt it all. She took it as a concession, and moved close, forcing him to look her in the eye. “Look, I understand about losing someone. There’s no real getting over it. No one can replace a mother or a father or take a wife’s place in your heart. Those places forever belong to those you first loved. But you can carve out new places for new people. Love matters. It’s greater even than your Everlast.”
“The Everlast you don’t believe in.”
Kit crossed her arms. “Honestly Grif? I don’t care if you play the harp and shit stardust. But even if I did believe you, and you were a legitimate blast from the past, your Evie is long gone.”
“Not to me.”
She shook her head. “This is not cheating.”
He flinched like he’d been slapped, and Kit knew that of all the thoughts roiling in his mind, that was the one he hadn’t allowed to bubble up. “I am here because I want to know who killed me and my wife. That’s all.”
“You need to move on, Grif.”
Turning his back, he pressed his palms against the tiled countertop. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“What wouldn’t I understand?”
“You don’t just dispose of love, Kit. Not this kind.”
Sucker-punched, Kit was silent for a long moment, then let out a gutted exhalation. “Wow. That hurt even more than hearing that I’m destined to die.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said, turning to her. But of course he had. “Look, this is the only thing I’ve cared about for the last fifty years. And she’s the only woman I cared about before that. If pain can go on throughout lifetimes, then love can, too. When I get this information, when I find out what happened to Evie, and where she ended up, then and only then will I move on.”
But Kit was done talking, listening, understanding. “Jeez, Grif. The way you talk about her you’d think she was the fucking angel.”
“Watch your mouth.”
“Y
ou’re a dick.”
“I told you that.”
“Not that kind of dick.”
“Hey, I’m helping you.”
“Your help hurts!” she screamed, bent over herself, holding the sheet tight. Then she growled, whirling away, whirling back, all her anger turning in and around on itself. Finally, eyes stormy, she pointed at Grif. “I don’t want to hear another word about your wife and your wings and your lying mid-century ass. You’re just another man who’s afraid of commitment. Truth is, Grif, you don’t have any thrust!”
“Yeah? Well, I’m calling bullshit on your pseudo Lois Lane rockabilly self. How about that?” he shot back, then hit himself in the chest so hard that Kit winced. “Because I was there, I know what it was really like, and it wasn’t all Lindy Hop and circle skirts. It wasn’t different from anything you’ve seen in the past few days. It was just more of the same. Evie was the only good thing I had in that life, so—”
“Oh Evie this and Evie that . . .” Kit blew out such a hard breath the curls lifted from her forehead. “I swear to God if I hear one more thing about the perfect and precious Evelyn Shaw, I’ll kill myself!”
Grif stared, then narrowed his gaze. “You’re not going to have to hear another word about her, Kit. Guaranteed.”
“Get out!” Kit pointed to the door.
“It’s not your house.”
“I meant, get out of my life!”
And Grif stared. And then he turned.
And then he left.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kit didn’t know why she was surprised. It wasn’t like she hadn’t been left before. But Grif’s abrupt departure was at such great odds with his actions the night before, and the silence so deafening in the wake of the previous night’s lovemaking, that she stood in the kitchen long after the front door had slammed shut, shaking with mental vertigo.
An angel.
“More like a walking plague,” she muttered, forcing herself to put one foot in front of the other. She couldn’t stay here now. So she headed unthinking, unseeing, back to the bedroom, tossing the sheet on the bed that had barely cooled from her and Grif’s intertwined bodies, and quickly dressed.
“I am not the crazy one,” she whispered, as she packed her toiletries. “And I don’t chase after men who don’t want me, I don’t allow anything in my life that isn’t greatly desired, I don’t . . . I don’t . . .”
I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
Letting her toiletry bag fall to the sink, Kit stared at her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes were shadowed from too little sleep in too many nights, and the lids themselves were low and hooded . . . sexy, she thought. Or would have been minutes earlier. Now she just looked tired.
Leaning toward the mirror, she pulled her hair back from her face until it hurt, then let her fingertips trail over her cheeks and chin. Pursing lips still swollen from kisses, she then shook her head and turned away. The answers she sought wouldn’t be found in her unadorned face. Something small and unseen inside of her had her choosing men who just couldn’t seem to choose her back. Shaking her head, Kit left the bathroom, picked up her bags in the guest room, and headed back through the quiet house.
But then she spied the rickety computer cart. Biting her lower lip, Kit only paused a moment before dumping her things on the sofa. Seating herself before the desktop computer, Kit shook the mouse, bringing the machine humming to life from sleep mode. “The truth, Kit,” she told herself. “Not just the easy answers.”
She typed in “Centurions.” Nothing. “Everlast.” Nada. “You get points for creativity, Shaw,” she mumbled, then went back to her original search, back to the fifties.
Back to Grif’s stated reason for having entered her bedroom, her life—her heart—at all.
Kit’s stomach rolled at the image that popped onscreen. There she was, Evelyn Shaw. White-blond hair swirled just above her shoulders in a pinup pose that Marilyn herself would have coveted. The brows were penciled dark, and her eyes shone deeply as well—with color, with secrets, and with the knowledge that she absolutely stunned. Her body, slim yet still lush in a V-neck sheath, slimmed tightly at waist and neck, and her round, soft chin edged up into a full, red mouth. She was authentic, not retro.
Everything, Kit thought, that I’m not.
Kit frowned, and focused on the text. She’d missed this article on her initial search, either because it hadn’t been on the search engine’s home page or because she’d only been skimming. Of course, she’d believed she’d been looking for a long-dead grandmother. Not a wife. Not Grif’s . . . beloved.
But it wasn’t only that. She hadn’t really been taking Grif seriously. While happy to accept his help in solving Nic’s murder, and his protection in preventing her own, she’d put his request on the back burner, deeming its expiration date long overdue and therefore of little importance.
But it suddenly was important to Kit, and here was proof that the woman had lived—age twenty-four back in 1960, with a ring winking off her left hand, which Grif claimed was his. “I can’t believe I just got in a lover’s quarrel over a dead woman,” Kit muttered, but she kept scrolling, and reading.
And Evelyn Shaw was long dead, Kit saw, as the police report was quoted. She’d been found in a bungalow at the Marquis Hotel and Casino, with her beautiful throat slit ear to ear. Eyewitnesses said she and her husband had been downstairs gambling all night, and that her actions in the craps pit must have led to an armed confrontation in the lush, shadowed courtyard.
“Sure, blame the chick,” Kit said, scrolling until she found mention of said husband—just one line in this article, and only two words: Griffin Shaw.
Of course, it was a different Griffin, Kit reasoned, though her stomach knotted. The same man she’d already found mention of before, the grandfather that Ray DiMartino had cited at the club, and the man Tony thought he knew.
Grif and I go way back. Fifty years, give or take . . .
Tapping her fingers against the desk, refusing to accept that, Kit started a new search. This time she entered Ray DiMartino’s name, and a slew of articles came up, mostly commentary on the family’s dubious connections, and their infamous mobster past. Too broad, Kit thought, then added Mary Margaret DiMartino’s name to the mix. That limited the search a bit more, and leaning closer she began to scroll.
It didn’t take long. Mary Margaret’s disappearance back in a day when young girls didn’t disappear had been big news in this small, dusty desert town. That she was the niece of reputed kingpin Sal DiMartino made it even more remarkable. Both the Trib and Sun had covered the case extensively, though the reportage verged on gossip. What had happened to Mary Margaret? Who would be stupid enough to mess with the reputed don of Vegas’s underworld? And who would be brave enough to bring her back?
Kit followed that question to the end of the long article, written by a man named Al Zicaro, who’d apparently considered himself an expert on Las Vegas’s shady side. “Blah, blah, blah—associates, contracts, bada-boom, bada-bing . . .”
She scrolled to the last page of the article, and that’s when she saw it. Ginger hair, a hint of freckling, eyes lined with a perpetual, considering squint. The same gaze she’d stared into so deeply the night before, that’d loomed above her, giving and taking and making her forget everything but his name.
Griffin Shaw.
He stared back at her from an image taken fifty years earlier, making Kit feel like she’d been thrust through time, all reason and sense obliterated in a headlong rush into the past. When she caught her breath again, she leaned closer to the screen.
That was his suit jacket. That was his hat and tie. That was the five o’clock shadow she could still feel sliding against her slightly raw cheek. Barely breathing, Kit read the whole of the article again. Then, putting her hand to her mouth, she looked up and stared out the bulletproof-glass windows.
“Well,” she said, talking to herself again, no longer sure what was crazy. “How about that?”
Then she was grabbed from behind.
Grif was so unsteady, his breath so tight in his chest, that he could barely locate a direct thought, much less orient himself once outside Tony’s house. It didn’t matter. He was in Vegas. He just looked up, spotted the telltale neon spires, and headed in that direction. But his mind kept going in circles.
Already regretting the things he’d said to Kit, or—if not precisely that, then how he’d said them—he shoved his hands deep in his pockets, tucked his head low, and sighed. She’d treated him more gently than he had any right to be treated, then opened to him with earth-shattering trust. It wasn’t her fault she’d been marked for death. It also wasn’t her fault she was so damned beautiful and feminine and alive that he’d forgotten every damned reason he was here, and had gone to bed with her.
God, he’d gone to bed with her!
Grif couldn’t wait to hear what Frank had to say about that.
That thought alone kept him from turning around and going back. He’d sworn to Kit that he wouldn’t leave her side, but that might just be the best way to protect her. Literally, starting with the moment he’d laid eyes on her, outside the window of her best friend’s death chamber, he had been Kit Craig’s worst enemy. Besides, there wasn’t even a hint of the rotting, algal, postmortem plasma stalking her when she’d wrapped her arms around him this morning. Not an ounce of the death scent that’d hunted Paul at the Chambers estate.
Kit, Grif knew, was safe for now.
But she was wrong in thinking he could just choose to move on from Evie’s death. She was the reason he was here, after all. The reason he couldn’t move on in the Everlast. He didn’t know who he was, or where he’d be, without that reason.
So Grif headed back into Vegas’s core, hoping the chaos there would help order his thoughts. Though it was not yet full dark, the city was already a visual scream, and as Grif turned onto the boulevard, he caught it mid-shout. Tourists traipsed across intersections like colorful soldiers, moving in platoons, the city itself in command. Instead of guns, yard-long plastic cups were strapped across shoulders. The uniforms were anything but that—the pedestrians sported both glitter and jeans, and everything in between. Grif observed it all with casual disinterest, and he’d traversed the full of the Strip before realizing he was wandering with even less purpose than the slot zombies around him.
The Taken Page 27