by Lara Adrian
As Ozzy wiped away the running ink and blood from the final details, the shop’s young apprentice took the opportunity to stop cleaning equipment and come over to have a look. Nine-year-old Eddie’s freckled face lit up as he took in the finished design.
“Fuckin’ righteous, Oz!” the street-wise kid exclaimed. Ozzy had taken in the former juvenile delinquent last year, much the same way he had Nova a decade ago. Eddie grinned through snaggled teeth and a scabbed lip healing over from a recent brawl at school. “Man, I cannot wait until you let me have my own chair and iron.”
“And I can’t wait until you clean up the storage room and swab down the toilet,” Oz said, not missing a beat. “Watch the fucking cursing, while you’re at it.”
Ozzy was more father than boss, a role the old man had somehow slipped right into, even though he had no children or family of his own.
Like any sullen son, Eddie grumbled over the reminder of his chores. As he shuffled to the back of the shop to do as he was told, Nova paused her own work, glancing over to admire her mentor’s most touching tribute.
“Beautiful work,” she said, giving the old man a warm smile of approval.
Ozzy grinned with pride--a rarity--then went right back to finish cleaning and dressing the fresh ink.
Nova turned her attention back to her client, just as a dark-haired, muscular man in black fatigues walked up to the smoked glass window of the studio’s entrance door.
No, not simply a man, she realized in that same instant.
A Breed male.
A vampire.
Even worse, one of the members of the Order.
He came inside, large and menacing, even without saying a word. Nova didn’t startle, but the human client in her chair flinched as soon as his gaze lit on the big, heavily armed warrior.
Given the backgrounds of the majority of Ozzy’s regulars, even if they’d been keeping their noses clean, none of them would be eager to cross paths with the Order’s cadre of lethal peacekeepers. Nova didn’t exactly welcome the intrusion either.
Before she could tell the Breed male he was obviously lost, Ozzy leveled a narrow look on the warrior from across the small studio. “Appointment only. No walk-ins. Got nothing for you, friend.”
The vampire cocked his head, unfazed, in the direction of the surly greeting. Thick, wavy brown hair set off striking, pale green eyes in a face too handsome and aristocratic for his rough profession. That unnerving gaze skated over Nova, then past her, settling on Oz. “I have a few questions for you and the other artists who work here.”
The accent wasn’t English like hers, but American. Boston, if she had to guess. His voice was cultured and deep--as firm as the muscles she could see rippling under his fitted black combat shirt and thigh-hugging pants as he strode farther into the studio, refusing to take the hint that he wasn’t welcome.
Nova’s inner hackles rose in warning. She sent a glance toward Ozzy, whose challenging stare had flattened into a glare now.
“Question-asking requires an appointment too,” he told the warrior. “Right now, we’re booked up until sometime after hell goes glacial.”
While Ozzy confronted the warrior, his client made a casual, if hasty, exit out the back door of the shop. The guy in Nova’s chair seemed to want nothing more than to flee too, and likely would have if she hadn’t already gone back to work on him.
Ozzy stood up, crossed his tattooed arms over his chest. “Unless you’re here for ink, you got the wrong place, friend. Even then, you got the wrong place.”
The warrior grunted, dark amusement in the sound. “Not very helpful.”
“Helpful ain’t my line of business,” Ozzy growled.
“What about you?”
It took Nova a moment to realize he was talking to her. She lifted her head and was blasted by his shrewd green gaze. Those eyes bore into her, as piercing as any needle.
She watched him take in her two-toned hair and the dozens of piercings that studded the rims and lobes of her ears. She didn’t blink as his gaze moved down, over her tattooed shoulders and full-color sleeves that continued down onto her gloved hands, her extensive body art accentuated by the black leather vest she wore to work that night. It zipped up the center, showcasing even more tattoos that rode the faint swells of her breasts.
She couldn’t care less what he thought of her or all of her ink and metal. She wasn’t intimidated by his stare or his certain disapproval.
“What about me?” she tossed back at him irascibly, as his prolonged visual appraisal continued.
Finally, his eyes returned to hers. “I’m looking for an artist who did some specific work on someone recently. Maybe you know something about it that could help me.”
He held his expression neutral, carefully so, but the dark power in his stare was unmistakable. This man, this Breed warrior, didn’t have to resort to bellowing or brute force to get what he wanted.
No, he was all the more dangerous for the way his calm demeanor coaxed her interest, her trust.
And just because he was attractive and cool-headed didn’t mean there wasn’t a monster lurking behind his knight-in-shining-armor good looks.
She’d gone up against worse than him and emerged unscathed.
Well, mostly unscathed.
“Nova’s busy with a client, as you can see,” Ozzy interjected. “She don’t have time for your questions either.”
Intrigue sparked in the Breed male’s eyes. He was intelligent, to be sure, but at the moment, Nova read a note of suspicion in his keen gaze. “If the Order were to shut this shop down tonight, you’ll both have nothing but time on your hands.”
Ozzy snarled under his breath, but let the warrior continue. Without waiting for permission, the vampire took his comm unit out of the pocket of his black fatigues and flashed a photo on the device’s display. “This look familiar to anyone?”
It was a close-up of a tattoo, an incomplete piece. The Celtic cross portion of it was older, a finished work, but the star behind the cross was only an outline with partial coloring applied.
“Not sure? Here’s a different shot.”
The warrior clicked to another photo, this one taken slightly farther away. A wide enough angle to show the full length of a man’s bare arm from below the short sleeve of a sodden, dark T-shirt to the tips of his thick fingers. Against the colorful ink and black lines of his many tattoos, the man’s skin was unnaturally ashen and waxy.
Cadaver-white.
Nova’s pulse kicked up a notch.
“This body was fished out of the Thames about an hour ago,” the warrior confirmed. “No ID on him. JUSTIS is checking for criminal records to see if they can identify him that way, but it’s doubtful they’re going to find anything. All we know for certain right now is that whoever put that star on him was likely to be one of the last people to see this guy alive. If not the last.”
Nova set down her tattoo machine and blotted the ink on her client’s pec. “Let’s break for a bit,” she murmured to him. “Go on in back. I’ll come get you in a few minutes.”
“Nova.” Ozzy’s voice vibrated with warning.
“It’s okay,” she assured her overprotective boss and mentor. “I can handle this.”
The Breed male was determined to have some answers, and as well-meaning as Ozzy was, his lack of cooperation was liable to get them all arrested. Or worse.
After her client had shuffled to the break room and it was only Oz and her left to contend with their unwanted visitor out front, Nova walked over to the counter where the warrior stood. “The star is my work.”
He didn’t seem the least surprised to hear it, didn’t even blink at the admission.
Up close, his face was even more captivating than she thought. Sharp cheekbones, strong, proud jaw line. Green eyes the color of palest sage. “Tell me what you know about the dead man, Nova.”
Her name on his lips sent a shiver of awareness through her that she had to fight hard to ignore. She shrugged. “I can’t
tell you much, other than he was a real asshole. Came in here late last night, drunk, belligerent.” An errant lock of her chin-length hair slipped from behind her ear and into her face, but she ignored it, her hands down at her sides, encased in ink-stained gloves. “As we told you, we don’t take walk-ins. That goes double for intoxicated walk-ins. But this guy was insistent. No matter what we said, he wouldn’t leave.”
“Seems to be a pattern lately,” Ozzy muttered, still glaring at the warrior.
“Like I said,” Nova went on, “the guy came in late, just about the time we were closing for the night. He refused to leave without getting some fresh ink--something about commemorating friends who’d recently passed.”
Now the warrior seemed surprised. One of his brows quirked in reaction. “He had a lot of tattoos, from what I saw. I’m no expert, but seems to me he had some hardcore art on him. Death scenes. Kill counts. Some kind of affiliation mark...”
Across the studio, Ozzy cleared his throat.
“I wasn’t looking at him that closely,” Nova said. “I wouldn’t know what other ink the guy had on his body. Even if I saw it, I’d make a point not to notice. That’s what we do in this line of work, especially with the kind of clients that come through that door.”
The warrior gave her a slight nod. “Why didn’t you finish the tattoo?”
“I didn’t have the chance. I didn’t like working on him. When I told him as much, he got upset. Really upset. He stormed out in a rage, and he didn’t come back.”
“Son of a bitch left without paying too,” Ozzy grumbled.
Those penetrating green eyes hadn’t strayed from her for an instant. They studied her, made her skin feel too warm, too tight under his stare.
“Besides demanding a tattoo to memorialize his dead friends, then storming off before you could finish the work, did the victim say anything else to you, Nova?”
He did it again, spoke her name in that smooth, deep velvet voice that made her forget for a second that he was not only one of the Breed, but the Order as well. A dangerous combination that she couldn’t afford to get too close to, for a hundred different reasons.
“Look, I don’t know what more I can tell you,” she said, impatient to be done with the conversation and get back to her work. Back to her life. “I didn’t spend much time talking to the guy, or looking at him. I didn’t want to. I just wanted to do whatever it took to get rid of him.”
“Kind of like you’re doing with me?” the vampire drawled knowingly.
Nova stared at him, refusing to take his bait. Ozzy didn’t give her the chance anyway.
He walked over to join her at the counter. “I got a business to run here, and Nova’s got a customer waiting on her out back. Like I told you, we don’t take walk-ins and we don’t have time for questions. Least of all, questions about our clientele. If the Order wants to conduct some kind of investigation, I’ll thank you to do it on your own turf, on your own time.”
It took the warrior a moment before he acknowledged with a tight nod. “Fair enough.”
He reached for a pen that lay on the counter, and jotted something down on an errant scrap of paper. He pushed the note toward Nova. “In case you change your mind and want to talk more. You can reach me anytime.”
She kept her arms at her sides, her eyes steady on the shrewd gaze that seemed more suspicious than he was letting on.
Finally, the warrior turned and walked out of the shop.
Nova stood unmoving as he stepped out the door and into the night. Then she waited some more, until she was certain he was gone and wouldn’t be coming back.
Only then did she reach out to retrieve the scrap that held his bold, efficient handwriting.
He’d written down a phone number and his name.
Mathias Rowan.
Nova stared at the note for a long moment.
Then she crushed the paper in her gloved fist, and dropped it into the trash bin under the counter. She had no intention of ever calling the number.
If she were lucky, she’d never run into the warrior again.
She glanced over at Ozzy, her voice quiet as she spoke. “Do you think he believed me?”
CHAPTER 3
She lied to him.
Mathias had known it even before he left the tattoo shop a couple of hours ago.
Hell, he’d known it almost as soon as the petite, pierced, walking, talking work of art had opened her tough little mouth.
Mathias’s Breed senses had lit up about a block from Ozzy’s studio, and the imprint of violence had only grown stronger the closer he got to the door.
Something bad had occurred inside that shop last night.
Something more volatile than a simple confrontation between Nova and the angry drunk later pulled out of the Thames by Gavin Sloane’s unit.
Whether it was the man’s actual murder or an event leading up to it, Mathias couldn’t be sure. His ability didn’t translate into such neat black-and-white terms. But after talking with Nova and her surly old boss at the tattoo shop, Mathias was certain the pair were hiding something.
He meant to have the truth.
To get it, he needed to talk to Nova again--preferably without the old man there to hover over her like a snarling guard dog. It was obvious the pair’s relationship went deeper than colleagues or friends, and based on the shop owner’s age alone, Mathias doubted a fiery twenty-something like Nova would be sharing the man’s bed.
No, it was a protective, familial kind of bond between them, not physical. Why that should stir even a small sense of satisfaction in him, he didn’t want to consider.
And there was more to the young woman than met the eye too.
A lot more, Mathias was certain.
She was young, but a hard one to rattle, hard to figure out. The myriad tattoos and piercings were more intriguing to him than off-putting, giving her an unusual beauty he found hard to ignore.
There was something about her--those layers of secrets in her eyes and on her skin--that made the investigator in him curious enough to know more, even if his tastes typically ran toward more conventional-looking females. The kind who were attractive enough to be on his arm or in his bed, but easy enough to forget once his work called him back to the only true passion he’d known.
As for Nova, first and foremost, she was a person of interest in his quest to learn more about the dead man.
If he found her to be a person of interest in any other sense, he wasn’t about to let that stand in the way of his duty.
The narrow, dark side alley where Mathias stood now shadowed him from view, but also gave him a clear visual path to Ozzy’s shop on the other side of the main street. He’d been watching the place all this time, waiting for the opportunity to find Nova alone.
The client she’d been working on when Mathias was in the shop had exited twenty minutes earlier. The last appointment of the night would have arrived five minutes ago, except the burly dock worker had experienced a sudden change of heart mere steps away from the door and fled without bothering to cancel.
Even though humans had more or less gotten used to the idea that they shared the planet with vampires, it was still amazing what the sight of sharp fangs and glowing amber eyes could do to even the most hardass members of their population.
Mathias smirked as he pushed away from the brick wall he’d been leaning against and stepped out onto the main street.
He should call his friend in JUSTIS to clue him in on what he’d encountered earlier that night.
At the very least, he should have alerted his fellow warriors to the situation.
Instead, he approached the tattoo shop with silent purpose, prepared to do whatever it took to make Nova talk to him, confide in him about what really happened between her and the man later found stabbed and floating in the river.
Mathias needed to earn her trust if he could.
Or pull the truth out of her some other way, if her trust proved elusive.
He walked in, glad to f
ind her alone in the shop. She had her back to him as she replenished a handful of bottles and bandages at her station. No sign of Ozzy. His station was neatly closed up, his stool pushed under his work table.
“Be right with you,” Nova called over her colorful shoulder.
“Take your time. I’ll wait.”
She startled at the sound of his voice, but in the short moment it took for her to whirl around, she hit him with a forbidding frown. “What do you want now?”
A dozen answers sprang into his mind uninvited, none of which he was willing to speak. “I had a few more questions for you about the altercation that happened in here last night.”
Her frown deepened. “I didn’t say anything about an altercation.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. I didn’t.” Her English accent was cool with challenge, even if her gaze was cautious as he strode through the studio, over to her station. Mathias hadn’t noticed what color her light eyes were earlier; now he stared into baby blue irises ringed with indigo. She folded her arms over her breasts. “If that’s all you came to ask me, then I’m sorry you went to the trouble to come back.”
He met her flat look with an easy smile. “No trouble at all.” He took a seat on the client’s chair in front of her.
“You can’t sit there. You can’t stay.”
“Why not?”
Her chin hiked up a notch. “Because I’m working here. Because this is Ozzy’s shop, not the Order’s interrogation room.”
“We don’t have an interrogation room, actually. It’s rare we have to resort to that. Folks tend to confess long before we feel the need to haul them in for a formal interrogation.”
He was joking--pretty much. But she didn’t so much as smile. No, she was taking this all very seriously.
Deathly serious.
Mathias glanced around the empty shop. “Anyway, I don’t see Ozzy now. It appears it’s just you and me, Nova.”
“He’s here,” she said. “He’s upstairs in his apartment. And in case you didn’t hear him the first time, we don’t appreciate anyone coming in here asking questions about our work or our clients.”
