“I’m his fiancée,” Rebecca said.
Fiancée? Fiancée.
Raphael’s eyes widened a fraction. He hadn’t wanted me to know, but it was too late. She had let the cat out of the bag.
“How lovely,” I said, sweetness dripping from my voice. “I hadn’t heard the announcement.”
“We’re engaged to be engaged,” Rebecca said. “We’re waiting until the end of the physical year to officially announce.”
“You mean fiscal year?” Dear God, she was a moron.
“Yes, that’s what I meant.”
Raphael slid his hand over Rebecca’s fingers tipped with hot pink acrylic nails.
I closed my eyes for a long second. “Congratulations to the happy couple.”
“Thank you,” Rebecca said.
Raphael toyed with a lock of her hair.
That did it.
“I see you’ve upgraded to the deluxe model,” I said. “Must’ve set you back quite a bit.”
“Worth every penny,” he said.
“You always had expensive tastes.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He shrugged his muscular shoulders. “I’ve been known to slum on occasion.”
I will kill you. I will hurt you, you wretched bastard. “Be careful with that. Sometimes slumming can be dangerous for you.”
“I can take care of myself,” he said and winked at me.
“What are you talking about?” Rebecca asked.
“My car, doll.” Raphael picked up her hand.
No. No, he wouldn’t.
He kissed her fingers.
Every nerve in my body burst on fire.
“You seem like such a well-matched couple.” I smiled at them. “Physically and intellectually. Rebecca is so stunning.”
“Don’t forget loyal,” Raphael said. “And loving.”
So is a dog. “I’m sure your mother is simply delighted with you both.”
A muscle in Raphael’s face jerked. My goodness gracious, I’d hit a sore spot. Aunt B, his mother and the head of Clan Bouda, was a legend. Boudas were wild, and she ruled them with sweet smiles and razor-sharp claws. One look at Rebecca and Aunt B would have an instant apoplexy.
Raphael’s eyebrows furrowed. “My mother’s approval isn’t necessary.”
Aha. “Does she know that?”
Ascanio approached, carrying a coffee mug on a platter, with a small jar of sugar and a cup of cream.
“She is a terrible woman,” Rebecca said.
Ascanio froze.
I stared at Raphael. Are you going to let it slide? Honestly? Aunt B was his mother, but she was also his alpha, and Ascanio was a member of the clan.
Raphael leaned toward Rebecca, his voice intimate but firm like steel wrapped in velvet. “Sweetheart, never insult my mother in public.”
“She insults me. And you don’t do anything about it.”
Ascanio focused on Raphael, waiting for a cue. Aunt B ruled the clan, but Raphael was the male alpha.
Raphael leveled a warning stare at Rebecca, but it had no effect.
“She’s rude and spiteful—”
Ascanio picked up the jar of sugar and emptied it over Rebecca’s head. The white powder spilled over her hair and dress.
She gasped and jumped off the chair.
“Oh no!” I opened my eyes wide. “I’m so sorry. Teenage boys are such a clumsy lot.”
“Raf!”
Raf? What was he, her poodle?
“Why don’t you go outside and wait for me in the car,” Raphael said.
“But—”
“Go outside, Rebecca.”
She marched out of the office, pouting. Raphael’s eyes sparked with a deep ruby glow. He looked at Ascanio, as if deciding what he should do about him. The boy ducked his head and said nothing, his gaze firmly affixed to the floor.
Ascanio was a talented young shapeshifter, but I had fought beside Raphael. He could go through a room full of Ascanios in seconds and leave none of them alive.
“Ascanio,” I sunk so much quiet menace into the word, the boy froze, as if petrified. “Did your alpha look like he needed help?”
Ascanio’s voice was clipped. “No, ma’am.”
“Go outside and wait until I come to get you.”
Ascanio opened his mouth.
“Outside. Stay in the back lot. Don’t speak to Rebecca.”
He clamped his jaw shut and took off. A moment later the back door closed.
Raphael had shattered my heart into tiny little shards and they were hurting me. Never in all of our time together had he so much as mentioned engagement. And now he had found a pretty, empty-headed idiot and he was going to marry her. Why her? What was she giving him that I hadn’t?
The answer came to me in a painful burst. She was there for him. I hadn’t been. I’d shut him out. I’d thought he would wait while I sorted myself out. My own damn fault.
I leaned forward, my voice steady. “Are you high?”
“What?”
“Did you smoke something before you decided it was a good idea to flaunt her in front of me? Maybe you ate some weird-looking mushrooms?”
He smiled at me. It was a brilliant Raphael grin, sharp like the edge of his knives.
“You know I could kill her before you could stop me.”
“No danger of that,” he said. “That would mean you’d act like a shapeshifter and we all know that’s not going to happen.”
Ouch. “My memory must be malfunctioning. I don’t remember your being this cruel.”
“People change,” he said. “Did you expect everyone to pause their lives while you were having your little pity party? Was I supposed to sit there and wait like a good boy, until you were ‘in a good place’?”
It hurt so much, I was beginning to go numb. “I didn’t bar my door. My phone still worked. If you wanted to get in touch, you could have.”
“Please! You think I have no pride? I loved you, I cared for you, I offered you a place in the Pack beside me, and you betrayed everything that was important to me. How did that turn out for you, Andrea? Was it worth it?”
I winced. “No. It wasn’t.”
“My door wasn’t barred either.”
He had saved it all up since the night we’d fought. Now everything was coming out.
“You betrayed me, you let the Order treat you like shit, and then you hid in your apartment. That wasn’t the Andrea I knew. I thought I could count on you. I thought you had my back.” His face was a furious mask. “I would’ve done anything for you.”
I would have done anything for him, too. If it had been him in that Wolf House, I would’ve run there so fast, the entire Order wouldn’t have been able to stop me. My other self was howling in my ears, loud, so, so loud…
“You spat on everything I am. You picked the knights over my people, which means you picked your precious Order over me.”
I was shaking, straining to contain myself. My body struggled to counteract the stress, betraying me.
“Anything to say?”
“I’m sorry I hurt you.”
“Too little, too late. I’m tired of waiting for you to stop running away from who you are. You want to know what the best thing about Rebecca is?”
His eyes were pure ruby and they burned. I was hanging on by a thread.
“She isn’t you.”
My humanity tore and the other me spilled out.
Raphael stared at me, suddenly silent.
The shreds of my clothes fluttered around me. I had this curious feeling that I was watching it all from some point above my head. My arms still rested on the table, but now soft sandy fur with a scattering of brown spots covered the hard muscle. I knew what my face looked like: a meld of human and hyena, with a dark muzzle and my blue, human eyes above it.
Most shapeshifters had two shapes, human and animal. The more talented of us could maintain a warrior form, halfway between animal and beast. I didn’t have an animal form. There were only two choices: my human self and my other me,
neither human nor hyena, but an odd creature in between. I was beastkin. My father had started his life as a hyena, caught the Lyc-V virus, and turned into a human. For that, other shapeshifters hated me and some tried to kill me on sight.
I examined myself sitting there. I’d held back for so long. I’d been good for so long. I always did as expected. I followed rules and regulations. Look where it got me. Being good hurt.
“I didn’t mean that,” Raphael said.
Why had I wasted all my time pretending to be someone I wasn’t? I was tired, so very, very tired of standing on my own brakes. I felt…right. I felt free. I hadn’t felt like this since I’d lost control and slapped Aunt B. She had backhanded me right down two flights of stairs, but it was worth it. It was so worth it.
What did I have to lose anyway?
I took a deep breath and let the old good Andrea go. Magic coursed through me, making me stronger, sharper. Scents filled my nose, stole through my mouth, and expanded my lungs.
“Andrea?”
I tilted my head and looked at him. He’d brought another woman into my office. Whatever made him think I would stand for that?
I opened my mouth and showed him my sharp teeth. Most shapeshifters couldn’t speak in a half form, but then I wasn’t most shapeshifters.
“You meant every word. I told you I was sorry. I took responsibility for my actions. It is over now.”
My voice was deeper, permeated with the rough notes of a growl.
“This office is my territory. If you bring your woman here again, I’ll consider it a challenge.”
He leaned forward, inhaling my scent. His upper lip trembled, betraying a flash of his teeth. “Been studying the Pack’s Law?”
I laughed and heard an eerie hyena cackle in my voice. “I don’t have to study. I know all the laws.”
“Then you know you can’t attack a human.”
“Who said anything about attacking a human? If you bring her here again, it will be your fault. I’ll beat your ass and not even your mommy will be able to stop me.”
Raphael leaned closer, his eyes glowing. “Promises, promises, honey.”
I snapped my teeth at him. “I’m not your honey. Your honey is out in the parking lot.”
The beginnings of a snarl reverberated in his throat, but his eyes were puzzled. He wasn’t sure what to make of me.
I wanted to bite something. I wanted to rend and carve things with my claws and get rid of my hurt. I wanted him to leave. But if he left, we would have to do it again. I still had a job to do. This sonovabitch would not keep me from it. I would get the information I needed and I would not let him bother me any further.
I picked up the pen with my clawed hand. “I find your scent disturbing. Let’s finish this up so I can air the place out and get you and your girl candy out of my life. The Blue Heron building. How did you buy it?”
He stared at me.
“We have four dead people. Your people. Do try to keep up.”
Raphael leaned back, studying me. “It was a sealed bid auction.”
“Were there any other buyers?”
“Yes. It was a very valuable building.”
“Do you know who they were?” A sealed bid auction meant that each of the participants submitted a confidential bid for the building, but Raphael would’ve done his homework and researched other buyers to know how much to bid against them.
“I can give you the top three,” he said.
“I’m all ears.”
“Bell Recovery. Kyle Bell has been in the business for a long time. He does decent work, but he’s expensive and slow. I can usually underbid him.”
I wrote it down. “What’s your relationship with him?”
Raphael shrugged. “We don’t like each other.”
“Was he bitter that you outbid him?”
“Kyle exists in a state of bitter.”
“In your opinion, would he stoop to murder?”
Raphael shook his head. “No. Kyle makes a lot of noise and stomps around. He might get his people to rough someone up, but he wouldn’t get into anything that required outside help, like magic snakes. He doesn’t trust anyone.”
So Stefan had already told him about my visit. “Got it. Next.”
“Then there is Jack Anapa of Input Enterprises.” Raphael leaned forward, resting his forearm on the table. His scent was scraping against me like fine-grain sandpaper. “Anapa is an ass. He has mountains of money and he plays with it.”
I squinted at him. “Don’t like him much?”
Raphael grimaced. “He dabbles. He dabbled in construction, he dabbled in shipping, now he’s dabbling in reclamation. He’ll get bored and move on; for him it’s a game. For us it’s business.”
“Was he upset at losing the bid?”
“Initially he won it, but his permits weren’t filed properly, so they went to me as the second-highest bidder. A skyscraper has a lot of mercury. It’s in the thermostats. When a building crashes, mercury drips to the bottom. Before you can reclaim a building, you have to prove to the city—”
“That you’re qualified to safely remove it,” I finished. “I remember.” I was with Raphael once when he filed for permits. “Would you say Anapa is capable of murder?”
“Yes. But I don’t think he’d murder my people. He doesn’t seem to have the motivation. I was there when he lost the bid. He was looking over some papers his assistant shoved under his nose. He waved his hand and said, ‘Yes, yes. C’est la vie.’ Oh, and he invited me to his birthday bash before he left.”
Interesting. “The third bidder?”
“Garcia Construction. I’ve known the Garcias for a long time. They were in business for about ten years before I started. It’s a family-operated business. They mostly took medium-sized reclamation jobs and didn’t get very ambitious until about two years ago, when Ellis took over the company from his father. They went big real fast, too fast, and bought rights to a huge apartment complex.” Raphael grimaced again. “It was a monster of a building. I wouldn’t have taken it.”
“Too expensive?”
“Not too expensive to buy, but too expensive to reclaim. The way it fell, you’d have to shift a ton of rubble before you got to anything decent. Too many man-hours. Ellis started it that May and last February the Garcias were still digging in it when a section of it collapsed. Killed seven workers. Apparently Ellis had sunk all his resources into the building and let the insurance lapse. The insurance companies hate us. The premiums are through the roof. The Garcias did the right thing and paid out the death benefits anyway, out of their own pocket. The company was finished after that.”
“So how can they afford to bid on Blue Heron?” I asked.
“Word is, they got a substantial investment. This was their comeback attempt. They are decent, hardworking people, Andrea. They wouldn’t kill my crew.”
“Somebody did, Raphael. What about the seller?”
“The city of Atlanta.”
That was a dead end for sure. “Did you know about the vault?”
“No.” He scowled. “Rianna, one of the guards, just had her baby three months ago. It was her second day back on the job. Nick is her husband. You remember Nick Moreau?”
“Nick the carpenter? The one that redid our, no, I’m sorry, your kitchen?”
Raphael nodded. “Yes.”
I remembered Nick. He’d cracked jokes while he had installed the cabinets and showed me a picture of his wife and told me she was the most wonderful woman on Earth. He’d said they were trying to have a baby and if it was a boy, they would name him Rory, and if it was a girl, they would name her Rory, too.
Raphael had teased him that they were setting the baby up to be made fun of, to which Nick had pointed his hammer at Raphael and told him that if he wanted to name babies, he would just have to make some of his own.
“Was it a girl?” I asked quietly. “Baby Rory?”
“It’s a boy,” Raphael said.
And now his mother was dead
. I would get those bastards. I would find them and make them pay.
I got up. “Thank you for your cooperation. We’re done. I’ll inform you when I have a lead.” This interview is over. Get the hell out of my office and out of my life.
“Do that.”
Raphael rose and left.
Work was the only thing I had left. Everything else was gone now. I would find the murderers. I would find them if it was the last thing I did. I had to do it to prevent them from killing anyone else, to offer their victims vengeance and solace, and most of all I had to do it to prove to myself that I was still worth something.
I pulled out a phone book and tracked down the three addresses of the bidders.
His scent was still here. I snarled at it, but it refused to vanish.
Hurt and frustration bubbled in me. I was keyed up too high, my skin was on too tight, and I wanted to shoot something just to vent all the pain boiling up inside.
So Raphael had replaced me with a seven-foot-tall dimwit, so what? Good riddance. I was better off on my own.
The back door opened with a faint creak. Ascanio walked into the office and froze.
“What?” I asked.
He opened his mouth, his eyes wide.
“Speak!”
“Breasts,” he said.
Female shapeshifters didn’t have breasts in warrior form. There was no need for them. They were either flat-chested or sported rows of teats. I had breasts. They were covered with fur, but they were recognizable adult female boobs.
“It’s not your first time seeing a pair, is it?”
“Um. No.”
“Then do act like you’ve been around the block before.”
Ascanio closed his mouth with a click.
“Don’t test Raphael,” I told him. “If you do, he’ll cut you into itsy-bitsy pieces and leave them in a pretty pile on the floor.” I decided I liked my beastkin voice. It was deeper, more powerful, and sounded better. In an attractive female monster kind of way.
“Oh, I don’t know.” He gave me a look suffused with teenage arrogance. “I think he might find it difficult.”
“No, he won’t. We once fought a dog the size of a two-story house. Raphael ripped one of its heads off.”
Ascanio blinked. “One?”
“It had three.” I got up and pulled a change of clothes from my bag. My other me was about twenty-five percent larger, but my long-sleeved T-shirt had a lot of stretch in it. I pulled it on and put on my pants. They were more like capris now and they were tight on my calves. “I’m going out.”
Gunmetal Magic (kate daniels) Page 5