by J. R. Ward
"I cannot believe I'm hearing this from you," she snapped. "You're working all the time, too."
"I take breaks. I sleep with my wife. I see her every day--"
"Do not make this about Vishous. Don't you dare turn this into a personal issue--"
"It is a personal issue, Jane. As well as a professional one."
"Whatever, I am doing important, necessary work here. I give everything to my patients and you know it--"
"You're giving too much. That's the problem." He put his hand up when she went to cut him off. "No, you're going to listen to me. And then when I'm through, you can tell me to fuck off, if you want. But you're going to shut up and hear me out."
"I don't believe this," she muttered.
"Believe it. And do you honestly think you're the first physician I've had this conversation with? Huh? Really? I was departmental chair at St. Francis before I came here. I've gone the rounds in this ring with a shit ton of people like you and me. You need to take some time off before you make a bad call and never forgive yourself."
Jane went to run a hand through her hair and discovered it was wet from the shower. Probably still had some suds in it. Who cared. "Listen, we are short-staffed and you know it. It's only you and me and Ehlena. The Brotherhood and the fighters can get hurt at any time--"
"And that's what they make phones for. Jane, I'm telling you, as a friend and a partner, that you need some perspective. And then maybe you and Vishous can finally--"
"Wait, hold up here." She leaned forward with anger. "Did he call you and ask you to do this? Because that is bullshit, Manny. Don't you dare take his side in this out of some kind of guy code--"
"Side? I'm not taking anyone's side--"
"Did he tell you he cheated on me? Huh? Did that come up?"
Manny recoiled. "Jesus, Jane."
"Guess he neglected to mention that, huh."
"Vishous and I haven't talked about this--"
"Whatever, you men always stick together. I just expected more from you after everything we've been through together."
Manny looked away, to the aquamarine water that was still. When he refocused on her, his face was cold and his eyes were flat. "You know what, we're done talking, you and I."
"Good. Can I go back to work now, sir?"
"No, you can't."
"Excuse me?" Jane cocked an eyebrow at him. "You're not in charge. I was here before you."
"Wrath is in charge. And unless you take twenty-four hours off, I am prepared to go to him and tell him that in my professional opinion, you are unfit to function as a physician at this time. Your choice, and make it now. Either you leave or I have you removed."
"I have done nothing wrong!"
"Maybe in your opinion, but I am not comfortable with how fast you moved in there with Assail. You were flying around that room, grabbing syringes and using them without checking--"
"I filled those myself! I knew what was in them!"
"There is a reason we double-check things. What if Ehlena or I had switched them out for something else."
"But you didn't!"
"How did you know that?" Manny also leaned forward on his hips. "You and I run this place together, and we have to be each other's oversight. There's no Patient Care Assessment Committee checking on outcomes, no hospital Board of Trustees we're accountable to, no Joint Commission coming to inspect us and make sure we have, and are observing, best practices. It's you and it's me, and we need to police ourselves."
"Ehlena doesn't have a problem with me."
"Who do you think raised this in the first place."
Jane shook her head and stared at the tile, tracing the pale blue and black pattern. Then she started to walk away.
"Fine," she said over her shoulder. "You want this place to yourselves, have at it, genius."
SEVENTEEN
After Streeter left the art gallery, Vitoria locked herself inside and went to her brother Eduardo's first-floor office. She didn't have to ask which one it was. It had a gold-leafed door.
As she went to enter the code that had worked on everything else, she worried it would not function here. Eduardo had had his own ways of doing things--but she needn't have worried. This was, after all, Ricardo's establishment, and therefore he would expect to be able to get into every space under its roof.
Also, at the end of the day, their younger sibling had always done what he was told.
Opening the door, she walked into the pitch-black room, and instantly, lights flared from brass sconces.
"Oh, Eduardo."
No minimalism here. No, it was Versace everything, lush with animal prints and gold accents, the desk like something a French royal would have had made in the eighteenth century. And talk about your messes, although not because the office had been sacked. Eduardo had been obsessive only about math and money, not neatness: There were papers everywhere. An adding machine with tape drooling out of its printer onto the floor. Three phones, cockeyed with one another. Pens here and there. A coffee mug with an inch of dehydrated stain at the bottom.
The modern padded leather chair that Eduardo had sat in was turned about and facing the exit, as if he had bolted up and left the room in a hurry. Or perhaps risen with alarm due to an intrusion.
No windows. No closet. Air that was so musty, she wanted to sneeze.
Heading around, she braced herself as she looked at the floor behind the desk. No body there, however--and someone would have smelled that a year ago, anyway.
She had almost expected to find him here.
When her two brothers had gone into business together, they had been a poor pairing on paper, the elder so disciplined and decisive, the younger so flashy and exuberant. The only thing they had in common was trust born out of familial connection--which was necessary in a line of work wherein the legitimate law could not be used to govern interactions and contractual arrangements. Still, there were limits to brotherly love.
In truth, when Ricardo had first disappeared, she had wondered if the brothers' relationship hadn't concluded in the old way, with a grave.
But now? With Eduardo's office so obviously untouched and looking like he had left in a hurry, perhaps called to aid? It seemed more likely they had both been killed by someone else.
Or someones.
Sitting down in that soft chair, she stared over the year-old receipts, the bills...the notes written in a leather journal that was lying faceup, a whore with her privacy exposed.
Oh, yes, Vitoria thought as she picked the thing up. This was what she was looking for.
Everything scribbled in the little book was in a Spanish dialect shorthand that she recognized from their youth. Smart. It would require a native speaker who excelled at codes to decipher it.
And what did you know, Eduardo, greedy as he was, kept precise notations on things, both the drug deals and--guns, too? Interestingly, they had diversified into arms.
Profitable. Smart.
She turned another page. And another. And another, going backward from the last entry. There was nothing about art; then again, that was the front of the house's operation, the ruse for the rest, so all those deals were processed and accounted for properly by trained staff with adequate transparency. She had seen the reports herself when she had gotten server access.
Ricardo had set all that up so well, the business had functioned without him for the last twelve months--
Oh, good man, she thought. Eduardo included names in here and numbers of contacts on both sides of the table. As well as pricing and delivery locations. This was perfect--yes, there had been a lapse in supply, but there was no reason to think competitive pricing for cocaine and heroin couldn't bring back customers who had once been loyal.
The laws of a free market economy applied to the drug trade, after all.
Going back to that final entry, she reread the notation about a delivery on the river to someone named...Assayl...? Must be misspelled. That name certainly appeared often, however.
/> It would seem logical to start with whoever that was and see if it led anywhere. If that was the last meeting? Maybe Assayl was the killer
Or perhaps another "client."
During her meeting with Streeter, the man had maintained he knew little about her brothers' disappearance, and she believed him. Considering the kind of people Ricardo had done business with, both on the abroad side for the importers, and the U.S. contingency for distribution, it was wholly conceivable that her kin had been disposed of in such a discreet way that nobody would find the bodies. But the lack of a message was odd. Typically, there would have been something sent to the family back in South America, a photograph of the bodies, a gruesome memento.
A threat that the trail should be left to grow cold or further unpleasantness would ensue.
Yet there had been nothing sent to her. And as neither of her brothers had ever married, she was their next of kin.
Looking up at the ceiling, she imagined her brothers working here, Ricardo on top, figuratively and literally, doing the strategy and the deals on the second floor, Eduardo tallying everything down below in his Studio 54-meets-Neiman Marcus cave.
And then something had interrupted the flow.
What, though--
As her new burner cell phone rang in her coat, she took it out. "Streeter."
"How'd you know it was me?"
"You are the only person to whom I have provided this number. Have you forgotten something?"
"Yeah. I dint think of it till I got home. I had this friend of mine. He worked for your brothers, too. His name was Two-Tone 'cuz he had this birthmark on half his face. 'Bout the time your brothers got gone, he and me was out and he said he was leaving on assignment the next day. He never come back."
"Tell me more," she murmured, sitting forward.
"He said he was takin' care of someone. You know. Takin' care."
"Where? Here in Caldwell? Or at the West Point house property?"
"No. Somewhere's else. He said he was goin' outta town, up north someplace."
"Can you remember an exact day?"
"It was like, the week of my birthday. That's why we was out."
As the man worked on a precise date by drawing all kinds of complex mental notes on an imaginary calendar, Vitoria kept track of the numbers as she waited for the tally to be completed.
"Yeah, I remember now," Streeter concluded. "It were that Wednesday."
And look at this, she thought. The final entry in the middle of the journal was the day after.
"What else can you tell me?"
"That's all I got."
"Do you have access to your friend's abode?"
"His what? Hey, I don't go like that--"
"House," she snapped. "Can you get into his house?"
"Yeah."
Although she didn't know why she was bothering to ask. So much time had passed.
"Go there. See if you can find anything. I want to know where he went and with whom."
As she ended the call, she glanced around at the desk. She was going to have to go through every sheet of paper here--and also at the mansion. Ricardo had had a lot of files there, all handwritten in Spanish as if he didn't trust computers very much.
Her brothers' secrets were going to be her own.
* * *
--
'Lo, the best-laid plans of mice and vampires.
Vishous was distracted and buzzing out of his skin as he walked into the Pit. Somewhere between him resolving not to end up here and the meeting at Wrath's Audience House breaking up, he'd been tasked with doing a search on social media for any mentions of shadows jumping out of alleys and attacking people.
Not the kind of thing he could do easily on his phone.
As he shut the door behind himself, he listened to all the quiet and thought...God, the place was so empty. And as he went forward into the living area, everything was so neat, no duffel bags crowding the base of the foosball table, no medical journals facedown in mid-article on the couch, no open boxes of cereal on the counter of the galley kitchen.
Fritz had obviously been by. But more than that, no one had really been living in the living room. With Jane and him both avoiding the place, and Butch and Marissa happiest when they were in their bedroom together, there wasn't much going on to mess shit up.
Shrugging out of his leather jacket, he grimaced and ignored his aching arm as he went to his liquor cabinet by the kitchen sink and pulled out a nice big Goose. Popping the top off the vodka, he drank from the open bottle--
The coughing fit left him with drool down the front of his muscle shirt.
Nicorette didn't mix with liquor. Go figure.
As he spit the fist-sized wad of gum out of his mouth, however, he decided that that was more a space issue.
Yup, this time, as he took a pull, everything went as planned, the vodka heading down into his gut smoothly, his other addiction taking the wheel.
Going over to his computers, he took off his weapons and his damp shirt. Then he sat down and signed in to three of his Four Toys. Security-cam feeds popped up on one monitor, the Internet on another, and a blog he had been following on the third.
Damn Stoker hadn't been posting much on her site--which was the outcome V had engineered, to quote Rhage.
After Vishous had wiped Miss Jo Early's feeds of all the vampire links she had been putting up and commenting on, and then scrubbed her short-term memory, that little threat had been neutralized. Sort of. He and that woman were probably going to have to cross paths again. She was about to have a big problem in her life, and he hadn't decided how to handle it yet. He'd wanted to bring the trouble up to Wrath, but then this shit with Jane had hit and...
Whatever. Jo Early was about to learn firsthand why she was so fucking interested in vampires, and he supposed he hadn't mentioned it to anybody because he was still debating whether or not to get involved.
Miss Early was a half-breed, the product of a human and a vampire, and she was about to go through the change. She didn't know it yet, however. Or he was assuming she didn't because there was no sign she had reached out to the species--and by law, if a half-breed surfaced, the King had to be told.
So what to do. She was going to die without help.
Hell, she was going to die anyway in all likelihood--and V was hardly the Good Samaritan type. The problem? She would probably seek medical help when she collapsed--or end up in the back of an ambulance on a siren-run to St. Francis's ER because someone else called 911 on her behalf.
Which would lead to medical tests that would show all kinds of anomalies, fuck them very much.
God, humans were such a fucking pain in the ass, and the only reason coexistence with them was possible was because they thought vampires were a myth. Hard evidence to the contrary was not a good thing. If the war with the Lessening Society had been a bitch? Going rounds in the ring with Homo sapiens was going to make that shit look like a cakewalk--
Down the hallway that led to the bedrooms, the door up from the underground tunnel swung open.
"--goddamn know-it-all--"
Jane entered like she was in a bare-knuckle argument with someone--except she was alone and talking to herself as she disappeared into their room.
Her room. His room. Whatever.
Vishous slowly stood up from behind his computers.
Sounds that suggested she was pulling things from out of drawers with the delicate touch of a professional wrestler were the background to more of that muttering. And then a couple minutes later, she came out with a duffel bag on her shoulder. She had changed from her scrubs into a pair of blue jeans and a Patagonia jacket, and she marched forward as if she had no idea he was there.
That changed quick. As she came up to the archway into the living room, she stopped dead and looked at him with a startle that had her jumping back.
He put his palms up. "Sorry. I'm here."
Her eyes shot to the front door. Then she took a deep breath. "That's f
ine. This is your house. It's not a big deal."
There was a long pause, and as he stared at her, he decided he'd never seen her so exhausted. Her blond hair was a mess, there were dark circles under her forest green eyes, and her shoulders were sloped. Given all of that, he was surprised she was wasting energy on being fully corporeal. Then again, she was clearly pissed off at something and probably wanted the satisfaction of stomping around.
Ghosts just hovered.
"How are you," he said cautiously.
"Okay, and I'm going."
Closing his eyes, he cursed. "Can we please talk?"
"We just have. See you later--wait, what is that?"
Vishous popped his lids. "What's what?"
"On your arm. What the hell did you do to yourself?" She dropped her bag and clomped over to his computer desk. "That's a nasty wound--it looks infected."
He had no interest in anyone checking out his pretty new piece of body art--not even her. But if it served to keep them both under the same roof for a little longer? Fine. He'd play patient to her doctor.
Funny how all that anger he'd felt when they'd argued at the penthouse was gone. In its place, he felt hollow. Which made sense. She'd taken something of him with her when she'd announced she was out of his life.
Turning his shoulder toward her, he shrugged. "It doesn't hurt."
Jane bent in, her brows going tight. "When did this happen? A couple of nights ago?"
"No. It was more recent than that--"
As he hissed when she touched the wound's tail end, she gave him a bored look. "I thought you said it didn't hurt."
"Maybe a little."
"Come on. Into the bathroom." When he just stood there, she grabbed his wrist and pulled at him. "Let's go. I'm not leaving until this is taken care of."
Fine, he thought as they went down the hall to their--his, hers, whatever--room. Hopefully they could talk while she--well, there wasn't anything to clean. But maybe she had some ideas to reduce the swelling, though.
God, who in the hell would have thought that talking would be a goal of his with a female. Then again, Jane had always been different.
And because of that...she made him different.
EIGHTEEN
"Okay. Yup. I love you, too, Vovo."