by Andrea Speed
Not what he wanted to think about right now.
The receptionist had obviously told Jay what he had said, because she cleared her throat and gave him a look that was positively arctic. “You can go in now.”
He folded up the paper and put it on the coffee table before getting up and tipping an imaginary hat to her. She didn’t look at all amused. He went ahead into Jay’s inner office.
It was fairly expensive, like he’d expected it to be, but it also had a cold sterility to it that was anything but friendly. The window wall on the far end of the office let in light that was filtered and gloomy, and cast Jay in partial shadows. He was standing up behind his heavy oak desk, his plush leather office chair (was it one of those massage ones?) shoved off to the side. He was a tall man, maybe six three, and while he had fairly broad shoulders, Paris still could have kicked his ass. He wore a dark Armani suit with a white shirt and a red “power” tie, his dark brown hair in a short bristle cut that looked more military than commercial, his neck thick and his face round, almost puffy, although he was in general good shape for a businessman. He had the general look of a star high school quarterback ten years after his glory days. His eyes were small and pale, and seemed a little too far apart, divided by a Roman nose that was easily the biggest and most natural in the entire Bishop family. “You have five minutes before security throws you out,” he growled. Well, a human attempt at a growl—not very impressive. Roan briefly considered giving him a real growl, a lion’s growl, but decided to save it for later.
“Well then, let’s skip the foreplay, shall we? You undoubtedly know what I’m referring to with regards to Thora, so why don’t you tell me your side of it.”
“No, I have no idea why you’re here,” he replied, his voice clipped and ball-shriveling cold. Roan could almost see icicles forming in the air between them. “My sister was a liar, Mr. McKichan, an inveterate one—she lied every single day of her life. She could have told you I was an alien for all I know.”
Jay believed what he was saying, and yet Roan was fairly certain he was exaggerating. His open, flagrant hostility toward Roan simply made him suspicious, although maybe Jay was always that way; maybe that’s why Matt was so afraid of him. “She claimed you molested her as a child.”
He snorted in disgust. “Her favorite lie. She always cast herself as a victim in her own drama.”
Again, Jay believed this, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t lying. In fact, he didn’t say he hadn’t—he just said she was lying. He knew enough lawyers to know that wasn’t an actual denial. “You didn’t like your sister very much, did you?”
His eyes narrowed, and Roan could almost feel the pressure of his gaze. Jay didn’t like him either. “My family is my family, and I stand by them. She was my sister, even if she was a pathological liar. I don’t know how well you knew her, but she was a very troubled girl, and she never got all the help she needed. I’m not surprised she committed suicide.”
“So you think it’s a suicide?”
Jay smirked, ever so slightly. “You’re one of her loser drug buddies, aren’t you? You made up being a detective.”
“Nope.” He took out a business card and walked over to his desk. He held it out, but Jay wouldn’t take it, so he dropped it face up on his desk. “There are some anomalies surrounding her death. I’m just making sure they’re looked at.”
Jay glanced at the card without moving his head. Roan could almost feel a solid wall of smug coming off him. “There’s no case here, rent-a-cop. You were not hired by family, and you will not be allowed to smear us. Is that clear?”
“How do you know I wasn’t hired by your family?”
“I know everything that goes on in this family. And we would never need the likes of you.”
“You’re hurting my feelings here, Jay.”
He wasn’t amused. Roan didn’t think he would be. “If you’re trying to extort money from us, it won’t work.”
“Extort money? Extort you with what? I’m simply repeating what Thora claimed. Unless there’s some substance to the allegation….”
Jay stabbed a button on his phone, but never broke eye contact with him. He was eye-fucking Roan in a major way—and not a good way either. “Sheree, please send security up immediately.”
“Do I frighten you that much?”
He moved his finger off the button, but otherwise he didn’t move—hell, he didn’t even blink. That was creepy. “If I see you anywhere near my family or near here again, you’re a dead man. Is that clear?”
Roan tried hard not to smile, but that just made him want to laugh, so he split the difference and chuckled. The eye-fucking from Jay not only continued, but got worse. “What the fuck are you laughing at? Do you think I’m joking?”
“Absolutely not. I’m sure you’re quite serious. But do you have any idea how often I’ve been threatened with death? At this point, it just strikes me as kind of sad—the last card of the desperate man.”
Jay leaned slightly over the desk, as if trying to intimidate him with his height advantage. (Good luck!) “I don’t fuck around with bottom-feeders like you. Leave my family alone, or you’re history.”
“Bottom-feeder? Interesting choice of phrase. Are you at all familiar with pier twenty-seven?”
Jay’s arm shot out, going for Roan’s neck, but he didn’t have a chance. Roan’s reflexes were much better, and he grabbed his wrist in midair, turning Jay’s arm until the palm of his hand was open toward the ceiling. A bit more of a twist, and he’d have had Jay on his knees on the floor. From the slight reaction in Jay’s eyes, he knew it too.
“You don’t threaten me, and you really don’t touch me. Do you think you’re fucking around with just another member of the proletariat? If you can’t buy me off or intimidate me, you’ll physically threaten me? Chew on this, Jay: I’m not a normal anything. And if you’re going to take a shot, you’d better make it good, ’cause you’ll only get one.” Roan let his arm go, giving it a shove for emphasis, and turned and stalked back toward the door. When you almost got into fisticuffs with your witness, the interview was over.
“You’re finished,” Jay snapped, his voice low and angry. That was the remarkable thing about Jay—he was so tightly controlled, it was almost like he didn’t feel much of anything at all.
“Am I?” Roan turned to face him, and called up his own rage and disgust. He really hated this fucker. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with, do you?”
“A smug, fucking asshole.”
“Yes, that. But you forgot an adjective.” He used his rage to force a change, centered around his eyes. He’d never done it before without changing the rest of his face, but he was willing to give it a shot, and he figured it must have worked, because he could hear the bones creak along his jaw and his vision changed. Roan had recently learned he was slightly farsighted with lion eyes, but he could see much better in the dark. “Inhuman.”
It must have worked, because Jay’s face paled beneath his fake-bake tan, and the hate in his eyes was washed away by sudden fear. “What the fuck…?” He took a step back, needlessly straightened out his jacket, and attempted to put his mask back in place. “What the fuck are you?”
He let his face go back to normal, ignoring the slight ache in his jaw and the small shock of an infant headache behind his eyes. Damn, he hoped it was worth it. “Someone you really don’t want to fuck with, Jay. I’ll see myself out.” And he did, walking out of the office and ducking into the elevator ahead of the security goons.
Did he have anything? All he knew was that Jay wasn’t afraid of anything—except when Roan’s face had changed, he was afraid of that. But who wouldn’t be? Either Jay was so confident in his superiority he had no fear of anything, he was a total sociopath, or he hadn’t killed Thora. Molested her maybe, but not killed.
It was pouring when he left the building, and he was sorry he hadn’t brought his hat as the water pounded down, drenching him as he walked to the parking lot where he’d sta
shed the GTO. He was so lost in thought, trying to figure out Jay, that he didn’t notice he wasn’t alone until he heard the crunch of gravel under someone’s shoes, and looked up to see someone standing on the passenger side of the car, someone wearing a hoodie that they had pulled up over their face but was now soaked through anyway. No matter in either case, as he knew by the smell of his cologne that it was Trey. And he was holding a Glock 9, the barrel pressed up against the passenger window, and since Roan was standing on the driver’s side with the keys in his hand, that was a good straight shot. Finally, Matt had an ex-boyfriend who knew how to use a weapon properly.
“Get in the car,” Trey snarled. “You do or say anything I don’t want you to, and I’ll blow your fucking head off.”
Roan had known Trey would go off on someone at some point. He’d just never considered the possibility that he’d go off on him.
15
The Gentle Art of Making Enemies
ROAN obeyed Trey, doing as he was told, because frankly he wanted to know what this was about. Paris had told him Trey’s alibis had checked out, so why was he doing this?
Trey sat in the passenger seat, keeping the gun trained on him at all times. Although Roan sat in the driver’s seat, Trey told him not to start the car, as he wanted Roan to keep his hands where he could see them at all times, which meant glued to the steering wheel. Roan thought that was clever of Trey to be so paranoid about him—had he learned not to underestimate him from the whole trying to run them down thing last night?
Rain pounded on the roof, and Trey shivered from cold as the water dripped off his chin from his soaked navy blue hoodie and landed with a soft plop on the wet legs of his jeans, but he never stopped glaring evilly at Roan. “I’m not gonna let you do it,” Trey sneered, his voice sounding odd as he tried to still his chattering teeth.
“Do what?” Roan kept his voice low and even, like they taught all cops to do when dealing with hysterical or unstable people. Always sound like you were unaffected and in control; getting them to believe it was all you needed to do.
“You know damn well, you fucking faggot! I’m not gonna let you frame me!”
“Frame you?” Holy shit, did he have a paranoia disorder? That might explain some of the violent tendencies. “Trey, why would I frame you?”
“Because you’re a fucking freak,” he spat, with a surprising amount of venom.
Roan pondered this. Was Trey projecting—did he assume he’d do such a thing because Trey himself would do such a thing? Or had a gay man once screwed him over royally, and not in a good way? Or did he have a persecution complex—did he assume everyone would make him a victim if given a chance?
“I’ve already cleared you from the suspect list. Your alibi checked.”
“What?”
“You’ve been cleared, Trey. This is a pointless display.”
He stared at Roan for a very long moment, the rain the only sound. Trey’s look was cold and belligerently hateful. “You’re full of shit.”
“No, I’m not. Why do you think I’m here? I was questioning Jay Bishop.”
There was something slightly unfocused about Trey’s eyes, and although it was difficult to smell over damp cloth, flop sweat, and too much aftershave, there was a fermented alcohol scent about him. It was faint, though, odd—vodka? Maybe Thora wasn’t the only one who drank Aqueducts. “You could be workin’ with him.”
That got a genuine laugh out of him. “Oh yeah, he and I, we’re really tight. Ask him.”
“I bet you are.”
“If you get out of my car now, I won’t tell the cops. I’ll forget this ever happened. Just get out and walk.”
He snorted and waved the gun barrel. “I’ve got the fucking gun, asshole. I give the orders.”
“I really don’t think that falling back on American foreign policy is helpful at this moment.”
“What?”
Okay, so Trey wasn’t down with the jokes. Many crazed gunmen weren’t. It was like sense of humor was the first thing to go out the window, followed by general sense and restraint. Roan sighed, and tried hard not to roll his eyes as he looked at Trey, shivering in his wet clothes, although his gun hand was admirably steady. “What exactly is it you want from me?”
That question shouldn’t have confused him, but somehow it did. He was a man of impulse, one who didn’t think things through, one who simply acted. That was really catching up with him now. He came to a decision, his gun never wavering from its chosen target. “I want you to knock it the fuck off. I didn’t kill Thora. I’m not a faggot.”
Roan shook his head, feeling pity for this train wreck of a human being. “What does sexual orientation have to do with anything?”
“I don’t want you or your fucking whore of a boyfriend telling people I am. ’Cause I’m not!”
“Fine, you’re not gay. Now get the hell out of my car.”
It happened so fast that, while Roan saw it coming, he was so surprised by its suddenness that even his inhuman reflexes didn’t jump to intercept it. Trey smashed the butt of his gun into Roan’s face so hard that Roan heard a crack of bone and felt a hot, angry surge of pain in his cheekbone. “You don’t talk that way to me!” Trey was shouting, as he raised the butt of the Glock to bludgeon him once more. “Nobody talks to me that way!”
Trey had picked the worst time and way to freak out. Roan had just done a partial transformation up in Jay’s office, and the lion was still very close to the surface. Close enough that the sudden pain sent it out, and Roan found himself scrambling to hold it back. On the inside.
On the outside, Roan snarled and grabbed the wrist of Trey’s gun hand as he seized Trey’s throat with his other hand, and slammed Trey’s head back so hard against the passenger window that there was a clunk deep inside the door, something breaking. Trey’s eyes bulged until they looked like they might fall out of their sockets, and the stink of sudden fear was like vinegar as Roan heard himself growl, “You do not touch me.” The words didn’t sound like they were made by a human—it was a gravelly sound, painful, a growl roughly modulated into approximating human speech. He felt his lips skin back over teeth that were shifting in his mouth with a familiar creak of his jawbone, making the pain in his already-broken cheekbone flare anew, like acid burning beneath his skin. He literally saw red as his vision flattened out, and Trey came into sharp relief. Trey’s fear suddenly didn’t smell quite so repulsive to him, and Roan started fixating on a throbbing vein in Trey’s neck as he squeezed it, his fingernails digging crescents into Trey’s flesh. Trey tried desperately to pry his hand off his throat, but Roan was too strong.
Trey’s mouth opened and closed, like he was trying to say something, but nothing came out but a rusty squeak. His face was flushing dark as he struggled to catch a breath and was unable to, and Roan was dimly aware he was strangling Trey, that he didn’t have claws, although the muscles in his fingers were jumping, feeling like they were trying to trigger the change.
It was almost impossible to will it back; his face was throbbing like an open wound and his nerves were already frayed, but he managed to somehow do it, easing up on his chokehold and making himself stop growling. His throat ached, although not as much as his face. “You should have never hit me,” he grumbled, his voice still raspy. “Pain brings it out.”
Trey was gasping in breaths like a drowning man finally dragged to shore, and he had to fight to find his voice. “You’re… you’re a monster….”
“No, I’m a lion. And if you’d just stopped being a fucking mental case, you’d never have had to find out.” He looked to see what had happened to Trey’s gun, and found it resting on his side of the dashboard. He didn’t remember throwing it there. He grabbed the Glock and with practiced ease pulled out the ammo clip and put the safety back on.
Trey continued staring at him like he was a gelatinous alien that had just oozed out of a meteor crater in his garden, blindly groping for the door handle behind him. Roan glared at him. “You get out whe
n I say you get out, or I drag you back in here. You won’t like it if I have to drag you back in here.”
Trey suddenly stopped reaching for the handle, and sat with the quiet wariness of a man who knows he’s going to die and doesn’t like it, but knows he can’t fight it. He may have pissed himself, but it was impossible for Roan to tell if that was what he was smelling, or if the smell of Trey’s fear had simply soured as Roan pulled the lion back. His face was aching even more now.
“Are you going to kill me?” Trey asked, in a small, raspy voice. He seemed oddly sober now, and was shivering twice as hard as before.
Roan snorted. “No, I’m not you. You need help, Trey. I mean serious psychiatric help. What the fuck is your damage?”
“I don’t… I’m not….”
“That was a rhetorical question,” he snapped, an inadvertent growl punctuating the last syllable. He was still angry, still in pain, his nerves frayed like old wires, and the lion continued lurking just beneath the surface, waiting to come out again. He knew he couldn’t actually feel it pacing, and yet he still thought he could. “Did you have anything to do with Thora’s death? Tell me now—if you’re lying, I’ll know.”
“No. I told you no. I’m not lying.”
Roan nodded. He wasn’t. “Do you have any idea who might want to? Anyone in the group who might have had a grudge?”
Trey was quiet for a long time, but in a strangely thoughtful way. Roan couldn’t quite believe it, but that one moment of physical violence had broken him. No, scratch that—not the violence; Trey probably thrived on violence. It was what he had seen in Roan’s face, the distortion in his jaw and eyes, the strength in the hand that had nearly crushed his throat, that rendered Trey obedient. He understood that he had finally come up against a more unstable creature than himself… which really didn’t make Roan feel all that good. Yay him, he won the violent bastard sweepstakes.