by Lisa Edmonds
“Any sign of Stevens?” I asked.
She shook her head. Like Matthias, she wore an earpiece so she could listen to the security teams outside. “No sign of him. Trust me, I’d tell you if there was.”
“Maybe this was too obvious of a setup,” I ventured. “He’d have to know we wouldn’t be dumb enough to show up at Charles’s place practically wearing targets around our necks unless it was part of a plan to draw him out.”
“Of course he’ll know it’s a setup.” Arkady leaned back in the booth, crossed her legs, and sipped her tequila. “Part of what I’ve been doing the last couple of days is reading everything the Court has dug up on Stevens, from his military record to his involvement with fringe ‘Human rights’ groups since his brother died. This is about the psychology of a man who’s not just bent on revenge, but to whom a trap is a challenge—especially a trap laid by women. He has a history of domestic violence. He never went to jail for it because the women always dropped the charges, but his misogyny is another factor I’m counting on. The only thing better than what we’ve laid out tonight would be if it was Adri Smith instead of Matthias with us. If he lets us leave here unscathed, it’s a blow to every part of his ego. He won’t be able to walk away, even if he knows it’s a trap. And that’s why we’ll get him.”
“I hope I’m right about Stevens wanting to look me in the eye,” I confessed. “If he does decide to snipe me instead from the building across the street, my last thought in this life is probably going to be ‘Oops.’”
She smiled without humor. “I think you’re right, for what it’s worth. He didn’t open fire on Mr. Vaughan’s vehicle the other night until he was in sight of its passengers. He could have taken them out before they’d known what hit them, but then what would be the point?”
We sipped our drinks and waited for word from the security teams outside. I wondered if Arkady was thinking about Fortune. My own thoughts kept drifting back to Sean. Part of me felt guilty for being here while he was lying drugged in a cage, but there was a Court researcher working on finding out about the cuff and I had no doubt Kim Dade would get the answers many times faster than I could. Since I could do little to help Sean until I got some answers from Kim, I might as well stay busy and do whatever was in my power to eliminate a different kind of threat.
As for setting myself up as bait against his wishes, I reminded myself that it was better to have the situation resolved so he wouldn’t have to deal with Stevens once we got the cuff off. He’d have enough on his plate dealing with Jack. I was surrounded by Court security and I had my magic.
To distract myself, I sipped my Scotch and scanned the people sitting at the tables and in the row of booths behind Arkady. I saw no empty chairs anywhere. I made a mental note to compliment Charles on the bar’s success. It might not be my scene, but I recognized a well-run and high-quality establishment when I saw one. In this city, it was no small feat to reach this kind of success and maintain it.
As my eyes passed over the couples and small groups in the booths, I caught sight of a red-haired woman in a green cocktail dress sitting with her back to me a couple of booths away. She was slim, wearing diamond drop earrings that had to be several carats each. She gestured dramatically as she spoke to her companions and a diamond tennis bracelet sparkled on her wrist. But that wasn’t what made me pause with my drink halfway to my mouth.
It was her ring.
She waved her right hand and the ring glittered. From here, it appeared to be made of white gold with black diamonds forming an M.
I put my drink on the table before I dropped it.
No, it can’t be her.
Just as that desperate thought crossed my mind, she turned and signaled to a passing server, allowing me to see her face in profile.
Time seemed to slow and then stop. I went cold all over faster than if someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over my head. My heart pounded in my ears loudly enough to drown out everything else.
I suddenly knew who my grandfather had sent to the city to lead the war against Darius Bell: his oldest daughter, Catherine Murphy Atwood. My mother’s sister.
My aunt.
17
As much as my mother had abhorred my grandfather’s cabal and everything he did, Catherine had always embraced her role as one of his lieutenants. Though I was her only niece, I had never been anything more than a tool or a weapon to her, something to be used in whatever way was needed to make money and gain more power for the syndicate. I was not allowed to refer to her as “Aunt Catherine,” only Catherine.
In the days and weeks after Moses murdered my parents, I’d tried, out of desperation, to turn to Catherine for love and comfort, but there was none to be had. I’d realized later that she blamed me for my mother’s death, since my parents had been attempting to flee with me when Moses was tipped off to their plan and burned them alive. Her sister’s horrible death had been my fault, as far as she was concerned, and if she’d treated me with indifference before my mother died, her coldness had become outright hatred afterward.
Like Moses, she was a high-level fire mage. Unlike Moses, she’d never tortured me herself; she left that to others. But she didn’t mind watching, and she hadn’t offered any care after. She also didn’t have blood magic, which was why she thought Moses was reluctant to name her as his successor. The real reason was that she didn’t command the same level of fear that he did, and since the big cabals ran on fear and loyalty, that was a serious strike against her case for becoming the new Davo. She was a perfectly competent lieutenant, however, and followed Moses’s orders to the letter.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Moses would send Catherine here, but it should have. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Catherine was less well-known than some of Moses’s other senior lieutenants, despite being his daughter. She stayed under the radar. People underestimated her and her ruthlessness. She would be able to go unnoticed for longer than the others. If Darius Bell was looking for Moses’s people in the city, he wouldn’t be looking for a woman in her mid-fifties who could pass as anything from a teacher to a lawyer without attracting attention. She could smile convincingly at bank managers, hotel concierges, even restaurant servers, and no one would suspect who she was or what she was capable of doing.
Catherine ordered another round of drinks for her group. The server scurried away to the bar to put the order in. I wondered who she was sitting with. I didn’t recognize the man across from her, but I couldn’t see who else was in the booth.
I had to regroup before Arkady or anyone else who was watching us wondered why I was staring at that booth and its occupants. There would time enough later to think about Catherine and the danger she represented. For now, I needed to be thinking about our current mission to catch Kent Stevens.
I picked up my glass and took a much-needed drink. “How long do you think we should stay here?”
Arkady raised her shoulder in a half-shrug. “An hour at least. If he’s not here, he may be watching this location via some kind of surveillance camera. If he saw us go in, he’ll be headed this way. He’s probably already staked out several ways of approaching the bar. We need to give him time to get here.”
“That makes sense.” I picked up the menu and glanced at the first page. My stomach growled, reminding me that I’d had nothing to eat since the breakfast burrito Sean made this morning. That meal felt like an eternity ago. “Some of these appetizers look interesting. Are you hungry at all? I could snack.”
“I am actually starving to death.” She picked up her own menu and read through the options. “Seared tuna, mini-croquettes, artisanal cheeses…what I wouldn’t give for a pepperoni pizza,” she muttered.
It was hard to ignore Catherine and I didn’t want anyone from her group noticing me looking at her. I scooted over so she was no longer in my line of sight. “Well, the croquettes sound good, and I’m thinking the meat and cheese board is the closest we’re going to get to a pizza. Unless you think the thi
ng I can’t pronounce with the marinated olives sounds good.”
“No, I do not.” Arkady raised her hand.
Anthony materialized almost out of thin air. “What may I bring out for you?”
“We’re hungry,” Arkady told him. “How about two orders of the croquettes and a meat and cheese board? What else do you recommend?”
He didn’t even blink at the amount of food we were ordering. “I can highly recommend either the empanadas or the seared tuna.”
“Empanadas. Thank you.”
He left in the direction of the kitchen.
I reached for my water. “Well, you read my dossier, but I know next to nothing about you. How did you end up working for the Court?”
“It’s kind of a long story, but the short version is that I got kicked out of the Army for punching my CO when he tried to pressure me into sex. After that, I went into private security while I got my PI license.”
“Did you like private security?”
She nodded. “I did, actually, though I liked the investigative work a lot more. I worked with a friend of Fortune’s, and when the Court let it be known that they were looking for investigators, I sent in my résumé and Fortune put in a good word. I interviewed with Mr. Vaughan and Bryan Smith, and then with Niara and her head of security, Nadya.”
“Have you met Valas?”
She shook her head. “I’ve spoken with Juliet LaRoche, Valas’s daytime representative. I haven’t been invited to actually meet Valas yet, though I understand that she ultimately made the decision to hire me. I hear she’s quite impressive.”
“That she is.” And also more than a bit terrifying.
We chatted about the members of the Court until our food arrived. Mindful that there was a chance our booth was bugged and our conversation was not private, we kept the conversation light. Once the food arrived, however, if anyone was listening all they would have heard was the sound of two hungry women eating everything in sight.
Anthony reappeared as we were finishing the last of the meat and cheese tray. He looked suitably impressed by the way we’d cleaned our plates. “May I bring you anything else? Perhaps a dessert?”
Arkady covered her mouth to hide a burp. “I think I’ll pass. Alice?”
“No, thank you. Could you point me toward the ladies’ room?”
He smiled and gestured grandly toward the back of the club. “Allow me to escort you.”
“Me too,” Arkady added quickly. Apparently I wasn’t allowed to use the bathroom by myself.
We slid from our booth, purses in hand, and followed Anthony along the booths to the end, where two hallways branched in opposite directions. Anthony indicated the hallway on the left. “Second door on the right, ladies.”
The bathroom was worthy of a two-page spread in a design magazine, but I couldn’t really appreciate it fully until I’d relieved my bladder. While we were in the stalls, someone else entered the bathroom and took the stall farthest from the door.
Business concluded, I flushed the toilet, double-checked to make sure my undergarments were in place and my dress wasn’t tucked into my underwear, and emerged from the stall to find Arkady already washing her hands at the sink.
I joined her. “This place is really nice,” I said as I washed my hands. The soap smelled like lilacs.
Arkady took a folded paper towel from a basket and dried her hands. “That was the best tequila I’ve ever had. I was about to ask Anthony how Mr. Vaughan knew what my favorite drink was, but then I realized there’s probably nothing about me that Mr. Vaughan doesn’t know, down to my bra size and what kind of ice cream I have in the freezer.”
“More than likely.” I took some lipstick from my bag and applied it as the toilet flushed in the last stall. “You don’t seem upset about that.”
She took out her own lipstick. “Bra size and favorite ice cream flavor, no. But every girl has secrets she wants and needs to keep buried, and there are some invasions of privacy I won’t accept. This is a good job, but it’s a job. I won’t hesitate to walk away if certain lines get crossed. I made that pretty clear.”
I wondered what kinds of secrets Arkady might have buried and how she intended to keep the vamps from digging them up. I knew all too well what a minefield secrets were. I hoped she would have more luck protecting hers than I’d had.
The stall door opened and Catherine emerged. Our eyes met in the mirror.
Hers were the same gray as my mother’s had been, the same as Moses’s were. Mine were dark brown, a gift from my dad, my mother had always said. She’d loved my brown eyes. I’d never understood why, really, until I figured out that the things she loved most about me were the things that weren’t part of the Murphy family legacy. I’d always thought my eyes were a darker version of my dad’s, but now I had to question that given what the mirror had revealed to me. Perhaps they reminded her of my biological father, Daniel.
I dropped my lipstick back into my purse and stepped aside to allow Catherine to reach the sink.
“Excuse me,” she said, reaching for the soap dispenser and turning her attention to washing her hands.
The sound of her voice made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I hadn’t heard her voice in more than five years, but it sounded exactly as I remembered it.
I wanted nothing more than to run from that bathroom and then away from the bar as fast as I could, but I forced myself to smile at Arkady and walk leisurely out into the hall, as if I couldn’t sense my life crumbling around me.
“Is it about time to leave?” I asked as we returned to our booth and slid into the seats.
She checked the time. “It’s been a little over an hour. Let’s give it another fifteen minutes, shall we? I’ll let them know we’re almost ready to leave.”
As Arkady texted the security team, Catherine walked past me on her way back to her table. Her hand passed within inches of my arm. I held still as she went by.
I looked nothing like her niece anymore, thanks to surgery. My magic was unrecognizable under so many layers of spells. There was absolutely no cause for her to suspect I was even alive, as far as I knew, much less reason to think I might be here now in the same bar, mere feet away. It was sheer paranoia to think that she had passed by me so closely on purpose to try to sense my magic or that she’d gone to the restroom at the same time I had to engineer an encounter.
It was equally paranoid for me to think the reason her attractive male companion had glanced at me twice since we’d come back to our seats was because she had mentioned me. At any other time, I would have thought his glances were simply admiring a woman in a bar, but I couldn’t help but wonder.
He caught my eye and smiled. I gave him a slight shake of my head to indicate that I wasn’t interested and turned my attention to Arkady, hoping for an all-clear signal to move out. The sooner we were out of here, the better.
Arkady raised her eyebrows. “Is someone checking you out?”
“Yeah, but he’s not my type. Plus I’ve got a werewolf boyfriend, you know?” I realized I’d just referred to Sean as my “werewolf boyfriend.” Suddenly I was a character in a teen shifter romance. Ugh. I picked up my Scotch and tossed back the remainder.
Arkady tilted her head, listening to the voices on her earpiece. “Well, we have people in place all around. The net is set. I’ll have Kirwin bring the car to the front.”
“Let’s walk to the car.”
She studied me. “That was not the plan.”
“New plan. Let’s make the bait super-shiny.”
She sent a text, received one, and then sent another. “They don’t like it, but they’re ready. The SUV is parked in a lot two blocks to the north.”
My heart raced in anticipation. “Then let’s go.”
I’d once told Charles that I was addicted to danger, and it was true. I needed the adrenaline, the risk, and yes, even the pain of fights. Thanks to my grandfather, I’d known little else since I was a child. The need for danger had become a part of m
e. I couldn’t get rid of it any more than I could my magic.
Until Sean, I felt most alive when my life was on the line. Now I felt that way when we were together, too, but I still felt compelled to run toward danger rather than away from it. Sean would need to accept that about me, as difficult as it would be for him to do so. He could stand beside me if he wanted, but I wouldn’t be left behind or kept safely put away. It just wasn’t in me.
As much as I’d enjoyed our conversation and my drink, Arkady and I were here on a mission. Catherine’s sudden appearance had unnerved me, but that was a problem I would have to think about and deal with later. Right now, we had business outside.
We got up from our booth and headed out to meet it.
“Why the hell didn’t it work?” I demanded.
Arkady tapped her foot, clearly irritated, as Matthias drove us back to my house. Kirwin had received a request for him to return to Northbourne, so we’d left him at 1792. Most of our drive had been ominously silent.
“Heck if I know,” she said finally. “I thought we had him figured out. There’s no way he could have resisted that bait if he saw you, and I would have bet real money he’d be there. It’s the obvious best spot for him to find Vaughan or you. We’ll just have to try again tomorrow, I guess.”
I didn’t punch the seat in frustration, but I wanted to. I worried that I might bust the leather upholstery wide open if I did. I’d spooled magic during the walk, preparing to face Stevens, and now all of that power sizzled on my skin, refusing to be put back in the bottle.
Like me, Arkady was restless and short-tempered. I was starting to think she might love a good fight as much or more than I did, and we were both all wound up with no one to pound. Maybe we could take turns punching my heavy bag when we got home.
I also hadn’t gotten a call yet from Kim Dade about the cuff, which gnawed on my already-frayed nerves. My fingers itched to call her, but she’d said she’d let me know as soon as she found something. A phone call would do nothing but interrupt her research.