Edge of Night
Rae Morgan
Emma Sinclair
Sherrill Quinn
Published 2007
Evanescence
By Rae Morgan
*
Welcome to the Darkness
By Emma Sinclair
*
Damnation
By Sherrill Quinn
Evanescence
Rae Morgan
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Cheri, Jenn, Bonnie, and Sherry, my wonderful critique partners. I couldn’t have done it without you.
Chapter One
Where in the blue blazes was she?
Kai Axton glared at the entrance to the bookstore-slash-coffee shop as if imagining her walking through the door could make it so.
The day had turned dark grey with the incoming frontal system off Lake Michigan. His mood matched the cold front, a mood that had gone from warm anticipation a few hours ago to icy disappointment. When he’d arrived at his usual time of three o’clock, he’d expected the proprietor Sian York to greet him with a smile, a freshly baked blueberry scone, and a cup of coffee as always. Kai’s employees teased him about his addiction to the food—and the woman. And they were correct. He looked forward to his daily fix, needed it like a junkie needed his next hit of smack. For the last six months, he’d counted on Sian being here for him. She never went anywhere during shop hours. But she had today.
Where in the hell was she?
Kai turned toward the relatively new clerk, a twenty-something female with strawberry pink hair and more metal in her face than a prepubescent teenager with braces. Now, what was her name again? Zoe, maybe?
“Zoe,” he called out. The clerk turned toward him. Zoe, it was.
A brief, narrow-eyed look of speculation swept over him. Or, had he only imagined that? He blinked. Whatever he thought that he’d seen in her eyes was gone, replaced with a wide-eyed gaze of a person about to face her worst fear.
Most women were afraid of him. Fifteen years of wet work for the CIA had a way of marking a man, labeling him. His label read “predator.”
Oddly enough, Sian had never displayed one iota of fear in his presence. If anything, she treated him like a long lost and very special friend. Her presence extinguished the darkness in him. Around her, he almost felt human again, and not like the cold, hard weapon he’d been for so long—and often still was in his private security work.
Sian was magic. And Kai needed her the way he needed air, water and sustenance.
So, where the fuck was she?
“Yes, Mr. Axton?” Zoe finally replied, her voice creaking like a door needing oil. She coughed, clearing her throat, and then said, “Do you need more coffee?” She reached for the coffee pot with a trembling hand.
Sian’s hand never shook in his presence. She had an aura of calm about her that was almost unearthly. Well, she had until recently. For the last three days, his spider sense, his third eye, his gut, or whatever you wanted to call it, had been on high alert. During that time, his imperturbable lady had displayed hidden, murky currents of unrest. Kai was concerned that her absence had something to do with whatever had upset her serenity. His sixth sense told him that there was danger out there. But from whom? From where?
“No, no coffee.” He’d drunk three cups during the two hours he’d waited for Sian to return to where she belonged. The caffeine jolt had exacerbated his edginess. “Tell me again where Sian went.”
Zoe frowned. “I told you two hours ago that she didn’t tell me.”
Just a hint of asperity tinged the girl’s tone. Not as frightened as she looked. Good, he’d rather have her pissed at him than scared. He’d managed never to hurt a woman, not even during the worst of his fieldwork.
“Just tell me what she said when she left,” he asked, then added, “please.”
The young woman’s forehead scrunched in concentration causing the rings lining her right eyebrow to clink against one another. She tongued the metal piercing in her lower lip, a nervous habit he’d noticed on previous occasions. “Said something about an appointment downtown and that she’d be back before the store closed ... but if she didn’t make it back, I was to lock up and ask Gus at the newsstand to walk me to my car.”
“I’ll walk you to your car, if she isn’t back.”
He knew that Zoe parked in the same garage as Sian and he did, which was almost six long blocks away. The shop closed at six o’clock. Stores and businesses in this neighborhood tucked between Cabrini and River North never stayed open late. It wasn’t safe for any woman, or any man for that matter, to walk around alone after dark. Nightfall came early in Chicago in November. And with nightfall came the predators. His lady should not be out after dark.
Some indefinable emotion colored the young woman’s face. “Thank you, but it’s too much trouble...”
He interrupted her protest with a growl. “I said, I’ll walk you to your car.”
Zoe’s tongue worked the lip piercing faster, then nodded, resigned to her fate.
Sian would never forgive him if her sole clerk got mugged. Kai hadn’t labored for the last six months, stretching even his unlimited patience to the limits, to gain Sian’s trust only to lose it over something as simple as walking Zoe to her car. Especially not when he’d planned to make the move to the next, more intimate, level in his relationship with Sian.
He’d see Zoe safely on her way and then he would wait for Sian to arrive. He’d trail her home, making sure she got safely into her flat above the shop. Then, he’d call and ask her out to dinner—to talk. To let her know that he wanted to get to know her more intimately. And to get answers, if he could, to some questions that had nagged him for months.
Questions like: Why had Sian opened a shop in this borderline neighborhood, and chosen to live above it? He’d asked her that once, but Sian had just smiled, shrugged, and said it was all she could afford. But that was bullshit. She had money. Her clothes, her car, this business, and its inventory, all screamed a comfortable income. Yet, she didn’t make enough sales in a day to support any of that. So, where did the money come from? And why did he catch a glimpse of a haunted look in her eyes as she evaded giving him a straight answer? Finally, why didn’t she ever go out of town to visit anyone? Or, have anyone visit her?
None of it added up, arousing all his digging instincts. He’d made it his business to seek answers to the conundrum that was Sian. Not that he really cared what he found one way or another. His soul had recognized his perfect mate. No, Sian was his no matter who she was or where she’d come from. She completed him, made him whole.
But even with all his resources, both legal and not, he’d hit a blank wall.
Prior to last year, Sian York hadn’t existed.
Oh yeah, someone had tried to set up a background for her, but Kai had been in the business long enough to recognize a fake identity. Hell, he’d had at least ten identities himself when he’d worked for the Company.
Sian York was a fake. But there had to be a valid reason for her hiding behind a false identity. He knew that if she shared that with him, he would be at third down with only inches to go to score on the more intimate relationship he needed from her.
For the hundredth time since Kai had entered the shop, he glanced at the door then at his watch. With each sweep of the second hand, his nerves and muscles readied his body for the unknown battle ahead. That there would be a fight to protect his lady was as certain as he knew his own name. That certainty and his ability to wait for approaching danger, then act instantly and decisively, came from his past training. The skills had been learned in some of the most dangerous jungles in the world—some urban, some not—skills that never went away, but mer
ely camouflaged themselves under a veneer of civilized behavior, lurking until they were needed again.
The forced inactivity ate at him like acid. He needed to do something, but couldn’t until he had the intel—or something happened. The feelers he’d put out and the favors he’d called in had yet to produce any information. Sian York, for all intents and purposes, did not exist, but he’d already known that. So, he’d urged his sources to dig deeper.
He had the sense that he was running out of time. Something had happened three days ago that had upset Sian—no, that had scared her. Was it notice of this damned meeting she’d gone to? Did the meeting involve something, or someone, from her secret past? Had some long ago trouble raised its ugly head? He’d get the answers tonight at dinner. She had to tell him. Had to trust him. Had to.
Whether she was ready to accept him as a lover or not—Sian was his. God and all the deities in the Otherworld knew that she’d become his from the first time she’d greeted him with a smile—and really looked at him. For too many years, he’d been invisible, a specter lurking in the shadows of a dangerous world.
But Sian had changed all that with a smile, with her warmth. She’d looked him directly in the eyes, eyes that he’d been told were dark, deep and pitiless, and still had invited him to share her world, to share the humor in the life around them. It was as if the sun had reached deep into his soul and melted the icy fortress around his heart.
He’d start his claiming of Sian tonight and hope to God he didn’t scare her away with his all-consuming passion. Sian was his sole chance at a future that he’d once thought might never come. A home. A woman to love. Children.
He’d be damned if some unknown danger would take that away.
* * * *
What Sian needed was a badass hero in her life. Someone like Superman, Batman, hell, any man who could protect her and stand for her against the past that again threatened her very existence.
Sian fought the exhaustion that came with the renewed fear and anger. She walked briskly down the dimly lit street, away from the parking garage, as if she could outrun her former life and the decisions that had dumped her into the U.S. Witness Protection Program. Protection? Ha! More like Witness Sacrificial Lamb Program.
A shuffling noise like that of soft-soled shoes on pavement sounded behind her. She glanced over her shoulder. Nothing there.
This was not like her. She never jumped at shadows or noises. But her nerves were stretched to the nth degree. Over the last three days, her fears about today’s meeting had eroded whatever calm she’d managed to cultivate since becoming Sian York. All that worry had not been unfounded.
A frisson of something primitive swept down her spine, interrupting her thoughts, then stealing into her gut. She chanced another look over her shoulder. Rush hour and the mad exodus of this no-man’s land had come and gone. The street was empty—no cars, no people that she could see. Hell, there wasn’t even a stray cat to break the monotony of the preternatural quiet. It was damn spooky and exacerbated the maelstrom of gloomy thoughts swirling in her head.
No, wait. Was there someone—or something—in the inky shadows of the doorway that she’d just passed? She could’ve sworn there was movement, just a glimpse of motion from the corner of her eye. Dark sliding over dark.
Sian blinked, shook her head, then refocused—and finally remembered to breathe. A shaky sigh escaped her cold, dry lips. There was nothing there, just the sooty blackness of a poorly lit entrance.
Yet some primordial instinct urged her to quicken her pace.
She wouldn’t be out on the barren street, jumping at shadows, if it hadn’t been for the damned meeting with her handlers from the WPP. They’d kept her late. If all had gone smoothly, she’d have been back to the store well before dark, well before the streets had become deserted.
The meeting had been anything but smooth. But it had been predictable. She’d been through it too many times not to sense that the meeting wasn’t just a check up on how she was doing.
Damn them all to Hell!
It wasn’t enough that they’d told her she’d have to move yet again, but they’d kept at her far too long. First one marshal then another badgered her with the same questions again and again as if she were the criminal and not the innocent victim in all this. Had she noticed anyone following her? Had she had any suspicious phone calls? Any phone surveys in which the interviewer seemed overly nosey or intrusive about her background? Had anyone suspicious been lurking around her shop?
Hell, everyone in her neighborhood was suspicious-looking. She was on the edge of the fricking damn ghetto known as Cabrini. And Cabrini for all Chicago’s efforts at cleaning it up for urban professionals was still a lodestone for gangstas, hoodlums and just plain badasses.
In a burst of independence and aggressiveness that had shocked even her, she’d out-and-out told her handlers, and their supervisors, that she’d neither seen nor heard anything untoward—and that she wasn’t moving again. The Feds had spent another two hours, pounding into her the concept that she had to move—or they’d throw her to the dogs. See if she’d like that.
Well, she would—like it, that is—and she told them so.
Sian had had enough of the government’s tender protective care. What had she gotten for testifying against her boss Tony Brucchi, a stone-cold killer, and the heir to a criminal syndicate masquerading as a legitimate business?
Five identities in five years.
Nancy. Brenda. Susan. Tammy. And Sian.
The witnessing of Brucchi’s crime and the consequential hasty journey into the netherworld of the WPP had sucked the very life from her, had relegated her to being as bland as the names they’d chosen for her.
By the fifth move and change of identity, she’d found her lost spine and asserted herself for the first time. She’d chosen Sian as her fifth name. She’d chosen Chicago as her new home. She’d figured that they owed her those concessions after all the abrupt moves in the middle of the night. All because they’d over-estimated the justice system and under-estimated her nemesis’s desire for revenge.
Brucchi was out on bail, pending a new trial—something that the Feds had told her would never happen. He was free, living a wealthy lifestyle, surrounded by his relatives and associates, whereas she was virtually a prisoner, torn from all that she’d known.
No, she wasn’t moving again. She liked being Sian York of Chicago, Illinois. So, today, she’d taken another step to regain her life and drawn the proverbial line in the sand. She had refused to budge.
The marshals had smiled, said they’d be in touch—and that she should start packing.
Like hell she would! There had to be another way. What she needed was a damn hero.
A sound like wind rustling through tall grass halted her desperate thoughts. Again, she checked her surroundings. Nothing.
Hindsight, commonsense and Murphy’s Law said that she should’ve waited until one of the marshals could escort her home. But she didn’t trust them. She wouldn’t put it past them to detain her. For her own protection, of course.
At the very least, she should’ve called someone to meet her at the garage and walk her home. With Tony Brucchi on her trail, it wasn’t safe to be alone on the street.
But who would she have called? She hadn’t made that many friends in Chi-town yet, at least not any that could handle themselves against someone from the Brucchi family.
The image of Kai Axton’s dark, dangerous face and large, solid and oh-so-capable-looking body popped into her head. Yeah, Kai could handle Tony and his thugs, probably with one hand tied behind his back and without breaking a sweat. His whole essence screamed lethal competence. It was that combination of tall, dark and dangerous that had instantly attracted her. When Kai was around, she felt safe. Something she hadn’t felt for a long, long time.
But they were just casual friends, plus she didn’t know Kai’s phone number. She could never ask for Kai’s help. She didn’t dare risk the deeper relationship nee
ded to ask for his protection. Bill, the last man that she allowed too close, had taken a bullet meant for her. His death had nearly destroyed her sanity. She couldn’t take that chance again. Not after Bill.
Sian’s footsteps echoed loudly on the quiet street, too quiet for a large metropolitan city like Chicago. She slowed her pace and listened—for what?—she wasn’t sure. The back of her neck itched like crazy. Another quick sweeping glance revealed deserted, dimly lit streets, traffic lights seemingly stuck on red, and closed and shuttered businesses and warehouses. Nothing moved, but something inside her said “hurry up, hurry up.”
Thank God, she only had a couple of blocks to go.
Sian started to jog-walk. Her feet hitting the pavement sounded like booming thuds in the cold, thin night air. Frosty little clouds puffed rapidly from her mouth. She shivered and pulled the lightweight jacket more closely around her. Winter had finally arrived.
Incipient hypothermia was even more of a reason to get home and safely inside.
She was less than a block away.
“Hey there, pretty lady. You want someone to warm you up?” The low, rough voice chilled her even more than the frigid lake winds. His hand grabbed her from behind, digging into her upper arm, and pulling her to a dead stop.
The voice belonged to a young man dressed in dark clothing and a stocking cap. A knife in his free hand glistened in the weak street light. He must have stepped out of the last alleyway she’d passed. Good to know that her itching neck was reliable. Too bad she couldn’t have made it to safety.
Sian looked over her shoulder. Her captor wasn’t alone. She’d sensed that also. She wished her gut had been wrong. There were three others, similarly dressed and all armed with a weapon. Two guns that she could discern and at least one other knife.
The men smiled the kind of smiles that hyenas flashed just before tearing into their prey. Each of the men was much bigger than her five-feet-one-inch height and one hundred ten pounds. And even if she were of Amazonian proportions, she was just plain outnumbered.
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