by Sierra Dean
He looked wilder now, like he was coming unstrung.
“I don’t care what you need.” I moved to leave the hall and return to our table, but his arm shot out, blocking my passage.
“Just kiss me so I know.”
“Move your arm.”
“Not until you say yes.”
“And what is it you think a kiss will tell you, huh? Do you think you’ll kiss me and it’ll be like I’m a princess in a Disney movie? Somehow one smooch is going to be all it takes for me to love you again? Get a clue, Lucas. I’m never going to love you again. Not ever. And no kiss, no matter how good, is going to make me—”
His lips crushed against my mouth as he held my jaw still, stealing the kiss I hadn’t wanted to give. He tasted like desperation and longing, and when his tongue caressed the seam of my lips, instinct commanded me to open for him. Sexual compatibility hadn’t been a problem for us. I’d wanted his body since the first night we met.
But being good in bed didn’t mean we should be together.
The problem was, as he kissed me my wolf responded. She stirred. At first the response was bristling and angry, like she wanted to claw through the lining of my stomach so she could attack him.
Rip out his throat, she commanded. He betrayed us.
He deepened the kiss, leaning the weight of his body into me, and I tasted it. The cinnamon. It was buried deep, so, so deep, and it came to me like a memory of a dream, dull at first but then roaring up to the surface.
And the moment it hit my tongue, my wolf went still with a quiet Oh. She had been leashed just like that. Because the man in front of me was her king, and instead of fighting his authority, she was now willing to bow before it.
My fangs grew longer from the combined panic over being trapped by a werewolf and the unfortunate desire kissing him had created. It had been a long time since I’d let myself be properly kissed, and he was a master with his tongue.
I bit his lip.
He swore and stumbled backwards, holding a hand to his now-bloody mouth. “What the fuck, Secret?”
“I said no, and when a lady says no, you better fucking respect that.” In case biting him hadn’t gotten my point to sink in, I slapped him hard across the face.
“You felt it. Tasted it. Don’t pretend you didn’t.”
I had. I’d tasted the cinnamon. And now looking at him, it still filled my mouth with its familiar spiciness. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter. I felt your wolf, and I made her obey me. You’re still my mate. Still my wife.”
“Don’t you ever say that word to me again, do you hear me? Not ever. You had your chance to make me your wife, and you threw it away. Don’t pretend you want to be my husband now. Fuck you.”
Without his arm to block me, I turned on my heel and walked back towards the restaurant, fighting back the tears threatening to fall. I wouldn’t cry, not because of Lucas Rain. He’d gotten the best of me too many times.
But my wolf didn’t care about my emotions. She only knew what she’d felt. And to her, he felt like her mate.
Dumb bitch.
Chapter Nineteen
I woke at nightfall wrapped in Holden’s arms.
After we’d left the restaurant with a rushed excuse, I’d gone back to the hotel room with him and dragged him into our bedroom. At first he’d assumed I was in the mood for some rough-and-tumble sex inspired by dinner with an ex-lover. But when I’d burst into tears, all notions of naughty business had vanished.
He’d held me until sunrise, when daylight forced me into a blessed and much-needed sleep.
With a new night upon us, I hoped to be able to put my encounter with Lucas out of my mind.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Holden whispered.
I couldn’t pretend to still be sleeping since he’d obviously sensed me rise.
“No.”
“Did he do something?”
I twined my fingers with Holden’s and snuggled deeper into his embrace, needing a false sense of security more now than I had in a long time. “Doesn’t he always?”
“Need me to beat him up for you?”
I tried to laugh but it came out as a half-sob, and I struggled against the urge to start crying again. I’d already ruined the hotel linens with my blood-tinted tears; it wasn’t like I was going to make it any worse.
But I hated the idea of crying about him two nights in a row, not when I’d managed to be unfeeling about him for so long.
“I need to work. I have to figure out what Sutherland was looking for. Really looking for.”
“Are you sure you don’t need some pick-me-up sex? I’d be more than happy to provide. I’m generous like that.” He kissed the back of my neck, his lips tickling the fine hairs growing there.
“As fun as that sounds, I need to focus on something other than sex. Or love. Or relationships. I need something gritty and unpleasant.”
“I don’t know what love is like for you, but it doesn’t get much more gritty and unpleasant.” He gave me a firm squeeze, and his sharp inhalation told me he was smelling my hair. It was a rare occasion for him to use his lungs, but I’d caught him taking in my scent a few times in the past. It was sort of sweet, in a weird way.
“We have to get up,” I told him.
“No we don’t.”
“Maxime,” I said, not quite shouting since it wasn’t necessary to raise my voice. “Tell Holden we have to get out of bed.”
The young man poked his head in the door, then seeing our twined limbs and rumpled sheets, he politely averted his gaze. “Holden, Tribunal Leader Secret would—”
“Just Secret,” I reminded him.
“Secret would like me to inform you she must get out of bed.”
“Max, when did you lose your sense of humor?” Holden asked.
“On the contrary, I find this exceptionally humorous. However I am bound to do as the lady asks.”
“Be careful with that one. When she asks you to jump, it’s usually off a bridge.”
I elbowed him in the ribs.
Maxime had been busy while Holden and I were in bed. He’d spoken to the hotel concierge about Sutherland, and learned my father had asked about rental spaces in the city. Maxime didn’t know if he’d meant rental property, or storage space, but a bellhop brought us the same list of phone numbers they’d given my father.
Eight pages double-sided of potential properties. Not exactly the most fruitful start to our hunt. Since Holden couldn’t use the thrall over the phone, we couldn’t ask for a list of the numbers Sutherland had called, but we’d be able to get it later when we left for the evening. It might help us narrow down which of the spaces he’d contacted.
Unless he’d used a cellphone, in which case the trail would have gone dry before we’d even started following it.
After a quick shower I rifled through the weekend bag Holden had packed for me. Plenty of outfits that would have been appropriate for a meeting with the council, but not for going out investigating.
“Did you pack me any jeans?” I shouted.
“I’m sorry, are we going to a farm? No, I didn’t pack you any jeans.” I could hear his scorn even though I was in the bathroom and a closed door blocked the space between us.
“Did you pack me anything jean-like?”
The bathroom door jerked open, and instead of replying he sneered at me. “What is wrong with you?”
“So many things. Mainly, I chose to fall in love with a snobby, fashion-police vampire who refuses to pack me comfortable clothing.” I smacked him in the chest with a leather bustier—one I’d bought to impress Desmond—and prodded him with one finger. “What kind of investigating am I going to do in that?”
“I can think of a few things you could investigate in it. But need I remind you, you were perfectly capable of wielding a sword while wearing it, so don’t try telling me you can’t make do with the things I put in there for you.”
“I’m going to look like a dominatrix.” I s
cowled into the bag. “Everything in here is black. And leather. Do I own this much leather?”
“Since you started working with the Tribunal? Yes, you own that much leather.”
I lifted a skimpy lace thong from the bottom of the bag and held it up with my forefinger. “And this? You packed this because of how authoritative it would make me look?”
“No, I packed it because you have a sexy ass, and I thought that would be a nice way to display it.”
“Ugh.” Digging farther in, I found something that felt like cotton instead of leather or lace and jerked it out.
Desmond’s New York Yankees T-shirt. The one I’d commandeered months earlier that was so well-worn it should have been see through in places. I raised my gaze from the shirt and looked at Holden with both my eyebrows up as high as they dared go.
“Don’t give me your shocked look,” he said. “You like the shirt, so I packed the shirt. Don’t read so much into it.”
I hugged the shirt to my chest, knowing he was perfectly aware of who it belonged to and why it meant so much to me. “Thank you,” I whispered, sniffing the blue-and-white tee. These days it smelled mostly like me, but Desmond’s scent still lingered.
I suspected now he might sometimes put it on to refresh his mark on it, knowing I liked to wear it. It was the only way to explain how the smell never completely faded.
“But you are not wearing that.”
“Oh come on.”
“No. Absolutely not.” He reached into the bag and handed me a small fistful of items, then snatched the Yankees shirt away from me.
He’d chosen a low-cut tank top with panels of sheer black material down the waist and back, with leather accents creating small capped sleeves. The other item was a leather pencil skirt, but since I actually liked being able to move I put it back in my bag and returned to the leather pants I’d worn the day before.
Still a lot of leather, but at least I could run in this ensemble.
In his wisest decision all evening—aside from the shirt—Holden didn’t scold me about opting for pants. He gave me a look that said he wanted to say something but was wise enough to keep his opinions to himself.
At the front desk, Holden was able to coerce the on-duty clerk into printing off Sutherland’s call list. I wasn’t sure he’d needed to use the thrall on her. She took one look at his brown eyes and cheekbones and she was a goner. His ability to compel her didn’t hurt, but I honestly wondered if it had been necessary.
Cross-referencing the list we’d been delivered to the calls from Sutherland’s room narrowed our search down. He’d made three calls to the same number over two nights, and when I compared the number to the rentals list, it matched with a warehouse in the Tenderloin district.
“What the hell would he be doing looking for a warehouse rental when the council had one available for him to use?” I asked.
“If he was trying to hide something from the Tribunal, it stands to reason he wouldn’t want to use council property to do it,” Holden answered, though I’d come to the same conclusion myself.
“The council monitors the main warehouse carefully. It was outfitted with a state-of-the-art video surveillance system when they started renting it out. Sutherland would know he was being watched there. It wouldn’t matter if he had nothing to hide, but if he was up to something, he’d avoid that space like the plague,” Maxime explained.
As of right now, all signs were pointing to my dad being a council-cheating rogue. Awesome, I had two scumbag parents. I was batting a thousand in the positive role-model department.
Seeming to read my disappointed expression, Holden said, “We don’t know anything for certain yet. Maybe he had a reason to fear going back to the council warehouse. It’s been used by them for decades, so if he was worried about being followed, he might not go back there.”
“True. But we still don’t know what he found, and we can’t check out the Winchester house until tomorrow.”
“You want to go look for him in the Tenderloin, don’t you?”
“That is easily the worst name for a neighborhood I’ve ever heard.”
“Says the woman who lives in Hell’s Kitchen. In a city with a Meatpacking District.” Holden winked at me.
“Don’t be cheeky. It doesn’t suit you.” But my smirk gave me away. My stupid mouth was always ruining things in one way or another. “Yes, I want to go find out if he rented a space. He might have left something there that could tell us where he went. I’m willing to take any clues right now.”
“What if they tell you something you don’t want to know?” Holden asked.
“Like my dad being a traitor? You’ve met my mother, do you honestly think finding out my father is a rogue would be the worst thing to ever happen to me?”
Unless he decided to stick a bullet between my ribs with his bare hands, my dad was going to be Father of the Fucking Year compared to my mother.
Chapter Twenty
“Are you sure this is the right address?” I squinted at the crumbling edifice of the U-Save Studio Rentals building.
The apartment complex that had fallen on me days earlier had looked sturdier than this place. I was worried a powerful sneeze might knock the entire structure down.
But it had survived near-daily earthquakes over the last several decades, meaning it had to be made of stronger stuff than I was giving it credit for.
“Yes. I’m a hundred percent sure. Just like I was the last three times you asked.” Holden stuffed the paper with the address back into his coat pocket and followed my dubious gaze upwards.
“It’s a shit-hole,” I said.
“A very apt description, yes.”
“Why would someone who has the financial backing of the council need to rent a shit-hole?”
“We aren’t paid in cash,” Maxime explained. “We all have credit cards that draw from a central pool. Any purchases Sutherland made would be accessible by the council. He’d have used his own money for this, and I doubt he has much. Most of the young ones haven’t learned to build outside savings. This was probably all he could afford.”
Cans rattled near the side of the warehouse, and a man emerged, pushing a shopping cart full of garbage. He wore a heavy overcoat—which I was learning was a summer necessity in San Francisco—and had long hair matted into gray-brown dreadlocks. Having seen the people of this city, I couldn’t tell if he’d been homeless so long his hair had come to look that way over time, or if he was just a hipster from the Mission with terrible style.
He grunted at us and opened the lid of a nearby garbage bin, rummaging inside for cans and bottles to add to his collection. He kept right on muttering as he worked, completely unconcerned by our arrival. I wondered what things he must see on a daily basis to make the three of us look right at home here.
As we approached the building, a group of five people in their early twenties stumbled out from inside. Two girls—whose hair looked strikingly similar to that of the homeless man—and three young men all came to a halt in front of us. They reeked of cheap beer and pot.
“Heeeyyyy,” one of the girls said, her tone loopy. “Watch where you’re going, ’kay?”
I couldn’t tell if it had been a threat or a concerned gesture. Was she telling us to watch our step inside, or berating us for getting in their way? With her high and saccharine voice it was impossible to know.
They all began giggling like maniacs and mimicking her ’kay over and over until she was blushing furiously, her cheeks a bright pink that made her look young and far too sweet to be out here at night.
People thought the only thing they had to fear in the night was other people. Sometimes I wished they understood how much there was to be afraid of in the darkness. It wasn’t that I wanted to strike terror into the hearts of mortals, but I did wish they knew more. Really knew what was out here in the streets with them.
“Guyyys.” She staggered a step as she lurched along with them. “Isss not funneeeee.”
Maxime’s n
ostrils flared, and he tilted his head as he watched her go. The way his eyes narrowed I knew what he was thinking. He was imagining how easy it would be to follow them. To wait until the girl lagged behind again, stopping to catch her breath from all the giggling. In that moment he could grab her and pull her into a back alley. She would never remember what he did to her.
I knew what Maxime was thinking because the same careful expression colored Holden’s face too. I knew, because I was thinking the exact same thing.
We were all predators, and no matter how domesticated you try to make a predatory animal, it will always have the instinct to hunt.
Inside me, my wolf was imagining how fun it would be with a pack, trailing the group from both sides and picking them off one at a time. She was no better than my vampire half. Every part of me craved the chase, and I didn’t give myself enough outlets for that anymore. I used to make do by hunting and killing rogue vampires.
What did I have now?
I was a killer by nature, and I’d managed to find myself locked in the nicest cage imaginable. But it was still a cage, and I was still denied my only release.
I shuddered and shook the feeling off.
The homeless man had stopped rattling his bottles and was staring at us with renewed interest. His eyes—visible even through the cloak of night—were an icy blue and showed no signs of warmth. They did, however, convey a sharp awareness I hadn’t previously believed the man had. He wasn’t drunk or crazy. This guy was watching us very carefully.
A pit of worry gnawed at my belly, overriding the guilt I was accustomed to feeling there. Something was off about the homeless man, and this whole place gave me a serious case of the willies.
“Let’s go.” I refused to take my gaze off our observer until we were inside the building.
The warehouse had been modified from one large space into individual units. We were greeted by a seemingly endless hallway with a series of doors on either side.