moment, with the man I’d fallen deeply in love with.
I gripped Ren’s arms, and I don’t know how I ended up on my back, but he was over me, and the tips of his fingers were trailing down the side of my face and over the curve of my jaw. I was finding it hard to breathe.
Ren brought his mouth to mine. The kiss didn’t start off slow. He nipped at my lower lip, causing me to gasp. As my lips parted, he took full of advantage of that. He still tasted of mint, and as his tongue curled around mine. I reached up and dragged my hand through his messy, silky hair.
A thousand questions were whirling in my head. There was so much we needed to talk about, but I couldn’t think beyond the way he felt and tasted, of how his body felt on top of mine.
I jerked when his cool fingers coasted over the skin of my stomach and up my side, to the strap of my bra. His lips left mine, trailing down my neck. Eyes closed, I tipped my head back, giving him more access. His hand closed over the cup of my bra, causing my back to arch. My hips rose out of instinct, moving restlessly against him.
I paused, my eyes fluttering open. I didn’t feel him, which was odd, because for Ren there was normally no hiding how interested he was, and he was always interested. Was he really into this or—Oh gosh, I stopped that mess of thoughts from continuing, but I planted my hands against his chest. “Do you . . . do you want to slow down?”
“Stop?” He shifted then, sliding a strong leg between my thighs, hitting that spot with shocking accuracy. “That’s the last thing I want to do.”
“You don’t—”
His mouth silenced my questions, and he was kissing me again like before, leaving little room for thought.
Ren’s hands got involved again, and his touch had warmed, so when I jumped this time it was because his fingers had made their way under the cups of my bra. “Amazing,” he murmured, sliding his other hand down to my hip. He urged me to move, and it really didn’t take much. I rocked my hips, riding his thigh as I slipped my hands under his shirt.
His mouth lifted. “Do you want—?” A knock on his front door drew his attention. He turned his head, looking over the back of his couch. A moment passed and then his eyes found mine. “Ignore it.”
I was down for that.
Ren’s fingers shoved my bra aside. The knocks got louder. His thumb coasted over my nipple.
The banging at the door continued, this time followed by a voice. “Ren, if you’re in there, I need you to open this damn door right now.”
Vaguely recognizing the voice, I groaned under my breath as I pulled my hands out from underneath his shirt. “You should probably get that.”
Ren made a low, growly sound in the back of his throat as he lifted himself up off of me. It was a little scary and kind of hot, even though I wasn’t entirely sure he was that into what was going on.
He swung his legs off the couch and rose swiftly. I sat up and fixed my bra so I didn’t have a boob hanging out, then tugged my shirt down. Ren was by the door when I peered over the back of the couch. He opened it, and I saw immediately why I had recognized the voice.
Henry strode right on in, brushing past Ren. His gaze cut to where I was peeping over the cushion, and he sneered in a way that made me feel like he was a second from spitting on the ground. “Well, that fucking explains why you haven’t been answering your damn phone.”
Ren shoved the door shut then turned, facing Henry.
“Where in the fuck have you been?” Henry demanded. “Kyle said you were reliable and that we could count on you. So far the only thing we can count on is you spending your time getting fucked.”
My brows rose. “Hi, Henry.”
He twisted toward me, giving Ren his back. “Thought you haven’t heard from him, huh?”
I smiled tightly, deciding I didn’t feel like clarifying that I hadn’t heard from Ren until an hour or so ago. I was really beginning to not like this guy’s attitude.
“This is bullshit,” Henry snapped, his gaze drifting over my face like he could actually see what he’d just interrupted and he was disgusted about it. Now I was feeling pretty insulted. “Ren, you cannot be ser—”
Henry’s neck twisted abruptly to the right. I straightened, pushing off the back of the couch as I noticed Ren’s hands on either side of Henry’s head. Then Ren removed his hands, and Henry folded, smacking to the floor with a deafening thud.
Ren had snapped Henry’s neck.
Chapter Nineteen
The sound of bone snapping echoed in my head, bouncing off my skull. A moment or two passed and Ren looked up, exhaling heavily. “He is quite annoying.”
My mouth dropped open.
“Well, he was quite annoying,” Ren clarified as he glanced down. “Not so much anymore.”
I exploded off the couch like a detonated bomb. “What the hell?”
Confusion flickered over his handsome face before his features smoothed out. “Ivy—”
“You just broke his neck!” Holy crap. Holy shit. I shot around the couch, my stomach dropping to the floor when I saw Henry lying there, arms splayed out, eyes glazed over, his head twisted at an unnatural angle. “You just freaking killed him.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I did.”
Blinking, I tore my gaze from Henry and looked at Ren. “That’s all you have to say? Yeah, you did? Ren,” I all but shrieked, “you just killed him!” I pointed at Henry just in case he was confused about who I was talking about. “Holy shit, Ren. Why would you do something like that? I mean, yeah, he was annoying, but you can’t just kill someone because he has bad timing.” I bent over, grabbing my knees as my stomach churned. “Shit, Ren, we’re going to be in so much trouble. So much—”
“He knew what you are.”
I stiffened like steel had been dropped down my spine. “What?” I whispered.
“He knew that you were the halfling,” he repeated. “He had to die.”
Maybe it was the shock of everything—Ren unexpectedly returning and being okay with what I was and then snapping Henry’s neck like it was a twig—because I suddenly wanted to laugh, but nothing was funny about any of this.
“How?” I croaked out. “How did he know?”
“I don’t know,” he answered.
My brows furrowed. “Then how do you know he knew? And if he knew, then that means Kyle knows. And if they know, then how am I still standing here? They’ve had ample opportunity to come after me.” I scrubbed my hands down my face. “They don’t seem like the type to wait around.”
“They will if they believe you will lead them back to the prince,” Ren replied, kneeling at the side of Henry’s body. He reached into the pocket of the man’s tactical pants and pulled out a cell phone. “After all, they wouldn’t want to just take out the halfling.”
But taking me out would be an end to one of the major problems we faced. At least temporarily, until the prince located another female halfling. But with me out of the picture, they’d have more time to figure out how to kill the prince. Having a special stake was only going to get them so far.
Ren shoved Henry’s phone into his pocket and rose. “I’m sorry that this bothered you, but it had to be done.”
I inhaled sharply. Did it? If Henry knew what I was, he was a danger to me. So was Kyle. I got that. I also got that Ren was protecting me, but he’d just killed a man and it hadn’t even fazed him.
“I need to take care of the body,” he said, stepping over said body. Then he was in front of me. I jerked when he curved his hand around the nape of my neck. “I should do this alone.”
I was at a loss for words, my heart beating so fast I felt sick.
“It’ll be okay. I promise.” He lowered his head, kissing me, but I didn’t feel it. My entire being was numb. “I’ll catch up with you later,” he said.
I found myself nodding and then I slipped free. I gathered up my weapons and started to pass Ren, but he caught my arm. My gaze flicked to his. “You know I had to do this, right?” he asked.
I
nodded, even though I wasn’t sure of why I was nodding. All I knew was that leaving his apartment was a good idea, because I needed to get out of there and think.
“I’ll catch up with you later,” he repeated. “You meet me back here?”
“Okay,” I managed to force out as I lowered my gaze, staring at his throat.
Ren let go and I beat feet across the room. At the door, I stopped and looked back at Henry’s body. All I kept thinking was that this man, this human being, was dead by Ren’s hands. Literally. Sometimes humans get caught in the crosshairs when it comes to fighting the fae, and they get killed. Other times a human gets fed on too much, they get out of control, and have to be . . . put down. I hated that—hated that part of my job more than anything, but it happened. This though . . . A shudder rolled through me. This was different. No matter how I wanted to spin it. Whether Henry knew I was the halfling or not, this was in cold blood.
And I never, not even once since the moment I met Ren, had thought he could so efficiently, coldly, end another human’s life. No way. I thought about the day in the Quarter when the guy was killed in the street and Ren had been unable to save his life. That had gutted Ren. I’d seen it in his eyes. Ren was like me in that way—pained when a human life was lost, unlike some of the other Order members.
But he hadn’t even batted an eyelash at this.
~
Once I was out of the warehouse district and standing near Palace Café on Canal, I snapped out of what felt like a bizarre trance. That’s how I’d felt since I was at Ren’s place. Like I was under some kind of spell and was only capable of walking out of his apartment and getting into a car. My head had been strangely empty, but now as I started walking toward Royal, the numbness vanished. Reality was the chilly wind whipping down the street.
I took deep, even breaths. Okay. What went down back there had seriously happened. Ren had killed Henry and right now he was most likely disposing of Henry’s body. My hands opened and closed at my sides. Part of me wanted to vomit a little, but that wasn’t going to solve much. I didn’t even know what would solve this.
Turning onto Royal, I wasn’t even sure where I was walking. I just needed to keep my legs moving so I could make this right in my head, because right now everything was the furthest thing from right.
I needed to get the facts straight. Henry was a danger to me. Ren rectified that threat. That was all that had happened. It wasn’t like Ren had . . . had murdered someone.
But hadn’t he?
I stopped walking and moved until my back was pressed against the cool stone of a building. I squeezed my eyes shut and cursed under my breath. I couldn’t make this right in my head. My stomach roiled.
I loved Ren. I was in over my head, under water and drowning in love with him, but what he’d just done didn’t sit right with me. I opened my eyes. It didn’t match what I knew about him. It would’ve been one thing if Henry had done something in that moment to prove that he was an immediate danger, but he hadn’t.
“Okay,” I whispered to myself. “Time to focus.”
I might not know how to feel about what Ren had done, but I knew I wasn’t okay with it. We needed to talk about it, even though deep down I knew talking wasn’t going to magically fix anything or bring Henry back to life. I didn’t know what else to do though.
I wish Val were here.
I sucked in a breath as a sharp pang lit up my chest. The truth was, if Val were still alive and she hadn’t betrayed us, I would’ve called her. She’d been the type of friend, or at least I’d believed so, that would hide a body with you and go down in a ball of flames by your side.
But Val wasn’t here anymore, and it wasn’t like I could call up Jo Ann. That poor girl would have a heart attack. I had to deal with this by myself.
I pushed away from the wall, starting to walk again as I packed away what Ren had just done. If he was right about the other Elite members knowing what I was and using me as bait to lure out the prince, it was no longer safe for me to be here. The ticking clock over my head had sped up.
My phone ringing cut off my thoughts. Digging it out of my purse, I saw that it was Brighton. A flash of guilt caused me to wince. I’d totally forgotten about Merle and everything.
“Hey,” I answered, scanning left and right as I stopped at the corner. A police officer was across the street, and a small group of people were huddled in a half-circle. I could see two straight legs on the ground.
“I’ve found something,” Brighton said, her voice pitched with excitement. “Finally, I’ve found something.”
It took me a moment to catch up. Her mom was missing. Community of fun loving faes. Right. “What?”
“One of the old hand-drawn maps of the city shows a totally different city,” she said.
I frowned as I crossed the street. “What does that mean?”
“It means exactly that,” she said, sounding out breath. “At first I thought I was just looking at a normal map. It has a lot of the landmarks and businesses, but holy crap, you’re not going to believe this. They are everywhere, and they were right under our noses the entire time.”
A horn blew, and I placed my hand over my other ear. “Brighton, you’re going to have to give me more detail, because I have no idea where you’re going with all of this.”
She took an audible breath. “Okay. Sorry. It’s just . . . This is big, Ivy. So big.”
Laughter spilled out from a restaurant as a door opened, and I sidestepped a slow-moving couple. “Details, Bri.”
“It wasn’t really the map that caught my attention at first. There are dozens of these hand-drawn things, but one of them had these strange markings in front of certain homes and businesses. They looked like crudely drawn wings, and I remembered seeing the same thing in one of Mom’s journals,” she explained. “It took me forever to find the journal it was in, but those wings on those buildings symbolize a safe haven for the fae.”
I almost stopped in the middle of the street. “Are you sure?”
“That’s what it says. Now, we know that the fae obviously have some kind of network in the human world. It’s the Order’s responsibility to ferret out locations where they’re clustered together, but I don’t think these locations are the kind my mom wrote about—the good fae.”
“Wait,” I said. “I don’t get it. If your mom knew about these places, then the rest of the Order had to, right?”
“I can’t answer that, but that’s not all,” she added in a rush. “I think I know where my mom is. There’s this house—a mansion really—that keeps popping up on all the maps. It has that symbol drawn on it. Mom had circled it on another map, too. I know that’s not the best evidence, but I . . . I just have a feeling.”
“A feeling?” I repeated.
“Yes. I know it sounds stupid, but I just know that’s where she is,” Brighton insisted.
I bit down on my lip. The conversation with Brighton was all over the place, much like my life right now, and a “feeling” really didn’t mean anything, but she was desperate to find her mom. That meant she would probably go knocking on the door of this house. “Where is this place you’re talking about?”
“Okay, so that’s the weird part,” she said, and I waited. A moment passed. “It can’t be where it says it is on the map.”
My brows lifted. “Explain.”
“I’ve double-checked and triple-checked the location,” she said. “And I keep coming up with the same place. This mansion is located over on South Peters Street.”
“Really?” I was trying to think of what was down there, but all I could muster up were images of old warehouses. Definitely no mansions.
Brighton drew in another deep breath. “It’s where the Market Street Power Plant is.”
My lips parted wordlessly and I paused to think. “That huge, abandoned and creepy-ass building on Peters Street?”
“Yes,” she said. “I told you. I’ve compared the different maps. Some of them show a different city—places th
at, as far as we know, don’t exist. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
That didn’t entirely make sense. “Are you going to be home all day?”
“Yes. Where else would I be?”
I stopped beside a delivery truck. “I’m going to swing by. Just promise me you will not go to that plant. Okay? I’ll check it out first.”
She didn’t answer.
My hand tightened around the phone. “Promise me, Bri. There are a lot of crazy things going on right now, and the last thing I need is you getting kidnapped or falling through a rotten floor. I’ll be
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