“Your nails are filthy,” Andre said; the words came out of his mouth before he could think better of them. But then, her nails were filthy, and it wasn’t quite five in the morning. He couldn’t be expected to achieve lawyer levels of diplomacy this early.
Emma looked up, her brown eyes soft and vulnerable for a moment before the familiar toughness seeped in. “Yeah ... well, that’s the least of my problems,” she said, letting her gaze roam over his suit as he sat down. “You’re looking pretty. As usual.”
“Thanks. Due in court later this morning.” Andre smiled, deliberately ignoring the derision in her tone.
Emma didn’t care for him, and that was fine. He didn’t really care for her, either, but his cousin Jace had asked him to take “excellent” care of his wife’s little sister while he was away, and that’s what he intended to do. Even if she was a little ... rough around the edges for his taste.
He might take hygiene to obsessive-compulsive-disorder extremes, but she didn’t take it nearly far enough. She was usually clean, but the girl neglected all the little touches that made a pretty woman beautiful. An eyebrow wax, makeup, highlights, and some intense exfoliation could have made Emma the type men dropped their briefcases and turned to stare at. As things stood, she was more the type some beefy biker would throw over his shoulder and drag back to his seedy apartment.
Which made Andre wonder ...
Did her “trouble” involve a man? If it did, if some Southie piece of shit had messed with his cousin’s wife’s sister, he was going to have to call Uncle Francis. He didn’t dirty his hands with that sort of thing anymore, but he couldn’t deny that he’d want a man who hurt one of the women in his family castrated or worse.
Realizing that Emma might have been hurt, remembering how small and frightened she’d sounded on the phone, made him feel like an ass. She looked okay—aside from the filthy hands—but he knew better than most people that some scars couldn’t be seen by the naked eye.
“So ... what’s up? Are you okay?” He deliberately softened his tone. He and Emma might be total opposites and suffer from a case of mutual antipathy, but they were family now. He owed her protection and civility if nothing else. “You aren’t hurt, are you?”
“No, I’m not hurt. I’m just a disgusting girl with filthy fingernails,” she said, her sarcasm offering assurance her words didn’t. Emma’s smart mouth was clearly in working order; she couldn’t have been hurt too badly. “I don’t see how you can stand to sit across from me.”
Andre inclined his head, giving her the point she was obviously looking for. “Sorry. I’m an asshole.”
“You are an asshole ... but I appreciate you coming.” She paused, eyes darting back to her coffee. The cup was completely full. It didn’t look like she’d taken a sip. “I didn’t know who else to call.”
Andre sighed. He really was a jerk. At thirty-one, he was more than a decade older than Emma and—despite working in the bounty-hunting business with his cousin Jace during his undergrad years—Andre hadn’t experienced one-third the violence she had endured in her life.
Jace had never told him the entire story, but Andre gleaned from their conversations that Emma had nearly died when she was a baby in the same cult ritual that had left Sam blind. He knew that she’d had a very rough childhood in a halfway house upstate. And that was before she’d spent nine months locked in a basement, the prisoner of some psycho who thought she could help him pacify a bunch of invisible demons.
She’d been through all that without losing her mind and had even retained her sense of humor—a dry, cynical one, but a sense of humor nonetheless. So she had a tendency to bait him and get on his last nerve. So what? He should be above responding in kind. He should know better than to pick fights with a messed-up kid. He was an adult.
Allegedly ...
“You did the right thing.” He reached across the table, encircling her slim wrist in his hand and giving a gentle squeeze. “I’m always here, anytime you need me.”
She looked up, eyes narrowed, as if searching for the punch line in a bad joke.
“I’m serious,” he said, thumb rubbing back and forth against the bare skin at her wrist. She felt so much softer than he’d imagined she would, her narrow bones delicate and fragile in his hand. “You’re family. Anytime you’re in trouble, you can call me. And I promise not to be an asshole next time.”
“I don’t know if that’s possible.” Emma pulled away from his touch, crossing her arms at her chest, brown eyes rolling toward the ceiling. “For you, anyway.”
Andre laughed and motioned to the waitress staring at him from behind the greasy counter that he didn’t want to order. He’d rather lick his own shoe than willingly put anything made or washed in this establishment in his mouth.
“Well, I’ll at least try. How’s that?”
“Thanks.” She smiled, a tight twist of her lips that quickly faded. “But I don’t really care if you’re nice ... as long as you get the job done.”
“What kind of job?”
“I ... I found a body ... behind the bar.”
“You what?” he asked, looking around, making sure no one was listening to their conversation. But they were seated a good distance from the other patrons, and Emma’s voice was a soft, husky whisper that didn’t travel.
“I found a body, a dead body. Behind the bar.” Her hands returned to her coffee cup, clutching it like it was the last thing she had left to hold on to. “I stuffed it between the Dumpsters.”
“What?” The stupidity of touching a corpse was ... epic. He had to fight to keep his voice calm and even. “Why didn’t you call the police?”
“I couldn’t. The guy was Death Ministry.”
“And?” It was all he could do not to grab her by her scrawny shoulders and shake some sense into her. Relations between the Death Ministry and the Contis were at an all-time terrible. The last thing they needed was someone close to the family implicated in a gang-member death. “That’s even more reason to call the—”
“No, I ... just ... I couldn’t.” Her voice was infected with a healthy dose of pure fear. “I’m not sure how he died.”
“You’re not sure how he died? What do you mean you’re not sure how he died?” he asked, already knowing he wasn’t going to like her answer. He’d heard that tone before, usually right before people told him—
“I think ... I’m worried that ... I think maybe I did it. That I killed him.”
Right before people told him that they were in some kind of deep legal shit they expected him to dig them out of.
Damn it. He’d gone back to school to get his master’s in taxation law for exactly this reason. He was sick of dealing with the criminal element—his family included. He might cook the books and bribe a judge or two when the occasion called for it, but he didn’t mess with murder and mayhem anymore.
Not even for blood relatives, let alone a cousin-in-law by marriage.
“I’m sorry.” Andre flicked an imaginary piece of dirt from his sleeve. “I can’t help you. I—”
“Please.” She grabbed his hand when he tried to stand, her strong fingers threading through his in a way that was surprisingly intimate.
How long had it been since he’d held hands with a woman? Months, maybe? Even longer, perhaps? He’d had a couple of women in his bed this week alone, but he hadn’t held hands with a single one. As a tried-and-convicted womanizer, Andre knew better than to give a female any evidence that he might be looking for more than fun of the horizontal variety.
Or the vertical variety.
He’d had Terry in the shower last night, pressed up against the slick wall, driving inside her until they both screamed, their wellpleasured voices echoing off the tile. Just thinking about it made things stir low in his body, and that all-too-familiar hunger sparked inside him.
He was going to have to figure something out for tonight. He couldn’t call Yasmin or Hannah again—they’d been over last week, and he didn’t like to issue inv
itations two weeks in a row—but most of his other go-to girls were out of town. But ... it was Wednesday. The sex addicts support group met on the Upper East Side tonight. If things at the office were quiet, he could make it up to the meeting by six o’clock. The group leader frowned on addicts facilitating each other’s dependency, but what Amir didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
And what did he really expect? That he’d get a bunch of sex addicts together in a room talking about their driving urge to screw and not have them hooking up as soon as they hit the streets? It was ridiculous. He expected far too much of people who would do just about anything to get laid.
“Please. Don’t go. I don’t know who else ... I don’t have anyone else,” Emma said, tightening her grip on his hand. For the first time, he noticed the flecks of gold in her deep brown eyes and the insanely thick lashes that framed them. She really did have a lot of potential.
But not that kind of potential.
Andre took a deep breath and eased back into his seat, pulling his hand from Emma’s. She was a kid and family and possibly a murderer; he shouldn’t be considering her potential for anything—aside from landing herself and the Contis in a huge mess of trouble.
“Okay.” Andre leaned close and whispered his next words. “But how do you ‘think’ you killed someone? Either you killed him or you didn’t.”
“Maybe in your world,” she said, the tension in her expression enough to make Andre’s jaw ache. “But for some of us, life is a little more complicated.”
“For some of who?”
“For people ...” She swallowed, clearly not thrilled to be saying whatever she was preparing to say. “For people who have been marked by aura demons. Sometimes we’re different. Things aren’t so black and white.”
Andre dropped his face into his hands, sending up a silent prayer for patience.
Great. She was going there, to the crazy head space where she and Sam had dragged half the men in his uncle’s operation. Conti Bounty now employed a dozen hunters who believed in invisible demons. They swore they’d been attacked by aura demons the night they’d helped save Sam and Jace at the museum last spring and couldn’t be convinced that there was any other explanation for what they’d experienced.
Andre suspected some sort of nerve gas, but no one seemed interested in his realistic, plausible theories. Even Uncle Francis—a man who didn’t believe in anything he couldn’t see, including God and germs—had taken to wearing a demon-protection pendant from the New Age store beneath his white dress shirts.
It was ridiculous. There was no such thing as invisible demons, especially invisible demons that could turn grown men into monsters or make a blind girl see. Uncle Francis swore he’d seen Sam and Emma’s big brother, Stephen, transform into some kind of demon-man hybrid, and Jace insisted that Sam’s eyes changed colors and she was able to see people on the verge of major change in their lives, but Andre had a hell of a time believing the stories. Any rational person would.
Demons were animals hunted for money or killed for the mind-melting effects of their various parts. They were flesh and bone, not myth and shadow. And they weren’t one-fifth as dangerous as the human monsters roaming New York. People killed thousands of other people in the city each year. The demons took down maybe a couple hundred, even in the years when harsh winters killed off many of the smaller demons the larger depended upon for food. Demons weren’t anything to be afraid of, as long as you stayed smart and sober and out of their territory.
People, on the other hand ...
“So, you’re saying the invisible demons made you kill this man?” He really didn’t want to think Emma was a killer, but people had been making up stories to explain away the horrible things they’d done for centuries.
“No, I’m not saying that at all.” She abandoned her coffee cup to grab a handful of napkins from the dispenser and promptly began tearing them into shreds. She would be a horrible witness. Her every action screamed “guilty conscience.” “I ... I don’t even know if I killed him.”
“Once again, I’ll ask: How can you not—”
“He and I were talking in the alley behind the bar.”
“Talking? Why were you talking to a Death Ministry—”
“Okay, fine.” Emma rolled her eyes, and her napkin shredding grew a bit more frantic. “We weren’t talking. He was the kind of guy I ... Let’s just say he met my needs.”
“Oh. Okay.” Andre stared dumbly at Emma’s hands for a second, shocked and the tiniest bit ... aroused by her words.
The shocked part was easy to understand—he’d come to think of Emma as a kid, like her sister and his cousin did. The aroused part was just ... wrong. Sex addict or no sex addict, he shouldn’t be turned on by the thought of Emma dragging some thug into an alley for a quickie.
But he was. God help him.
“And right after we’d finished ... talking, he started throwing up,” she continued, meeting his eyes, obviously having no clue she’d made him start looking at her full, soft lips in a way he never had before. “I was going inside to find someone to help him, but I passed out before I could reach the door.”
“What?” Perverted thoughts fled in the wake of concern. Once more Emma went from potential sex object to troubled kid. Silently, Andre vowed to keep her in the latter category, where she belonged. “How much were you drinking? You’re nineteen, for Christ’s—”
“I’m twenty, almost twenty-one.”
“That’s still not—”
“And I only had a couple of beers. It takes a lot more than that to get me wasted,” she said, sounding like the petulant near teen she was. “I don’t know why I passed out; I just ... did. And when I came to an hour later and tried to wake the guy up, I couldn’t. He was dead.”
Andre breathed a little easier. If what she’d told him was true, she had no reason to worry ... aside from the fact that the guy had died outside her place of business. “So he probably choked on his own vomit. Or maybe he overdosed on alcohol or a mix of alcohol and whatever else he might have been on. You didn’t kill him; you were—”
“We weren’t just talking, Andre.”
“Yeah. I gathered that, Emma.” Andre tried to ignore the odd thrill of intimacy inspired by saying her name. “I’m a big boy. I know how those things work.”
“I’m sure you do,” she said, meeting his gaze with those intense eyes of hers. “But you don’t know how I work.”
No, but I’d sure be interested in learning.
Andre silently vowed to attend the meeting uptown for reasons other than scoring a partner for the night. He obviously needed a meeting badly if he was having inappropriate thoughts about a girl like Emma at five o’clock in the goddamned morning.
“The aura demons ... they did things to me when I was a baby,” she continued, blissfully unaware of his thoughts. “They changed me. I’m not ... I’m not a normal girl.”
“Not a normal girl? You look pretty normal to me, except for the lack of fashion sense and—”
“This isn’t funny,” she said, loudly enough to make a couple of heads turn. She bit her lip, visibly forcing herself to regain control before continuing in a whisper. “I really think I killed that man.”
“I get that, Emma. What I don’t get is why.”
“The aura demons feed on the pain and suffering of humans,” she explained. “When my parents offered me as a sacrifice when I was little, the demons made me like them. I need the energy of other people to—”
“Emma, I’m sorry.” He had to stop this crazy talk before it went any further. “But I don’t believe in invisible demons. And I really don’t believe you’re some kind of life-sucking vampire—”
“How can you not believe in aura demons? Jace and Sam and your uncle—”
“My family and I are different in a lot of ways,” Andre said, digging out his wallet.
It was time to leave some money for Emma’s coffee and go call Uncle Francis to take care of the body behind the bar. Emma clea
rly hadn’t killed the man. She was insane, but she wasn’t a killer. Still, she’d touched the corpse, so this had to be taken care of right away. The police would check for fingerprints, and Emma didn’t deserve to go to jail.
And the Contis didn’t need a dead Death Ministry thug to be found behind a place of business where they had close affiliations—no matter what had killed the guy. It would be better for everyone if this body was never found.
“I love my family,” Andre continued, throwing a twenty on the table. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re crazy.”
“So you think I’m crazy?”
“Maybe confused is a better word.”
“I’m not confused.” Her hands fisted in the napkins she had ruined, her anger apparent to anyone who cared to look. “I spent two years in a children’s hospital when I was a baby. I almost died three times before I learned how to get what I needed from the people around me. I have to—”
“Okay, fine. You eat people. Can we go now?”
“I don’t eat people; I—”
“Then how does it work?” Andre asked, the part of him that had minored in psychology strangely intrigued. “How do you do this life-sucking thing you have to do?”
“I ... I start off by touching the person. ...”
“Okay.” He kept his face in the neutral position, an expression he’d mastered in his early years of practicing law.
“And then I sort of reach into their mind, their memories, looking for all the bad things they’ve done,” she said. “When I find the bad stuff, I pull it out.”
“With your hands, or with—”
“No. Psychically. I psychically pull the bad deeds, the bad karma—whatever you want to call it—out of them and into me.”
“All right.”
She sighed and drove her long, thin fingers through her hair. “You still don’t believe me.”
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