She noted the sense of loss in his eyes and the fury buried just below the surface of his skin. “You love her, don’t you?”
Greer seemed surprised by the frankness of her question. It was his turn to look for distractions. He looked around the shop, taking it all in as if the magic solution to their problem could be found on one of the shelves filled with the strange accouterments of the past.
“Look at me,” she ordered.
A shimmer of mercury rimmed his blue irises. “You’ve chosen her. You’ve bonded with her, haven’t you?”
He released his resignation with a chest-hollowing rush of air, the exhaustion from the denial finally sending up a white flag. “This was not a choice.”
“I’m still trying to figure out how all this happened in the first place. This imprinting. That’s what we’re talking about, right?”
His eyes leveled on hers. “The old-fashioned way.”
The conversation lulled for a moment as Ava wrapped her head around “the old-fashioned way” meaning. Then she reached for the same book she’d referenced the morning Alex came to see her.
“Alex says otherwise. I don’t mean to give you a lesson on the birds and the bees, Greer, but it’s all right here in the book.” She pointed to the section in Rituals of the Gods that detailed—with clinical precision—the method required to trigger imprinting. “Are you telling me you’ve found a different way?”
Greer said nothing as the truth snaked its way into Ava’s head. Her lower lip dropped a bit as her mouth formed an unintelligible word. Half a word, really. “Wel—” Her head twisted as a scenario ran through her mind, and then she gave him a look that could melt the skin off of a crocodile’s back like butter. “What did you do, Greer? You didn’t—”
“No, damn it! I didn’t force myself on her!” His hands raked over his head with a sound similar to a foot blowing through a pile of dried leaves. “Why does everyone keep pointing a finger at me like I’m some sort of…deviant?”
“Everyone?”
“Alex practically called me a rapist. In fact, she did. And you’re over there handing me my lunch with those eyes.”
“Well, Greer—”
“And Leda.” His head shook back and forth. “I can just see the inquisition coming.”
Ava held her tongue and waited for the drama to pass. She knew Greer would never hurt Alex, but things of this nature where just that—nature—and nature wasn’t always democratic or sensible where the power of instinct was concerned. People often made bad decisions where natural instinct came into play, and if that were the case here, he’d made a very bad one.
“She came to me,” he said. “I knew there was something…wrong with her that day. Even Sophia knew it. At first I pushed her away. But then I saw what I wanted to see. I let it happen, Ava. God help me, I let it happen.”
“I’ll ask you again, Greer. Do you love her?”
He looked at her with a resolute gaze. “She is my breath. My annoying, stubborn, infuriating oxygen.”
“Well, I guess that’s as good a description of love as any,” declared Ava.
“That’s not the point, is it? We both know I can’t give her what she needs. There’s a shelf life on this relationship.”
“Because she’ll grow old and you won’t?”
He looked genuinely surprised by the comment and wondered if he seemed so shallow that Ava would think him capable of such callousness.
“I don’t give a damn about that, but I doubt she’ll feel the same way. She’s more than earned her right to a family—a normal one.”
“Oh, I think it’s a little premature to determine what Alex’s future should look like. We don’t even know what she’s capable of. She’s not exactly normal, is she?”
He thought about what to do next. Where to start. Right now he just needed her back. They’d figure the rest out later, one daunting task at a time. For all he knew, she’d never let him near her again and the dilemma would be resolved.
“Maeve would sever my cock if she were alive to see this.” He glanced at her apologetically. “Pardon my candor.”
“Maeve would approve, Greer.”
The bell on the door rang as Patrick strode in with a paper bag tucked under his arm. “GS, good to see you.” He flashed the bright smile of a young man without a care in the world. “How’s that little firecracker doing?”
Ava shot Patrick a warning look to stifle any further reference to Alex. He didn’t know that Alex’s life hung in the balance, and any indirect flirtation—remote or otherwise—might get his ass handed back to him, due to Greer’s instinctual urge to oust any competition.
“Now that’s a boy Maeve might approve of,” Greer muttered.
Patrick pulled a six pack of Guinness from the bag and headed for the kitchen in the back room. “Anyone up for a draft?” he asked, followed by a rambunctious grin. “Don’t worry, Auntie, just keeping them cold until we close up.”
She shook her head. “That boy has another ten years of carousing to get out of his system before he earns any mother’s approval.”
Greer headed for the door. “Thomas and the others will be at my place soon. I told them to pack their toothbrushes. No one’s going home until we find her.”
“Greer,” Ava called out as he reached for the door, “you’ll get our girl back, won’t you?”
“If I don’t, you’ll never see me again,” he replied as he walked out.
Greer stepped off the elevator and looked around his quiet house. Except for the barely audible ticking coming from the clock on the fireplace mantel and the sound of muffled traffic beyond the exterior walls, the place was as quiet as a morgue. He felt utterly alone for the first time in years, and exhausted from lack of sleep. Not that he needed sleep to survive, but rest was a universal requirement for just about any species, human or otherwise, and he’d had none for the past two days.
Even before the events at Battery Park, his rest had been sporadic as he reconciled with his new state of perpetual desire, and his responsibility to the woman who’d made him that way. His men were also in need of a well-deserved break. They were loyal, and every one of them would drive themselves into the ground before conceding defeat or giving up.
They loved her, too.
Sophia was standing at the kitchen counter when he looked through the doorway. Her wrist began to rotate mechanically as she whisked a bowl of oil and herbs into an emulsified foam. The whirling stopped when he approached and looked over her shoulder. He was usually considerate in giving her advance notice when guests were coming for dinner, but his mind had been elsewhere, and he’d failed to tell her that morning that the dinner table would be full for one more night.
His hand found the center of her back as he gently gave her the news. “We’ll order pizza,” he said after apologizing for wasting her time cooking whatever she had in the oven, assuming it wouldn’t be enough for all his men. “We can have it tomorrow night.” Leftovers were always better the next day.
Her expression remained neutral as she let go of the whisk and opened the oven door. With a thick pair of oven mitts, she bent down and removed a large cherry-red pan from the center rack.
“I know you,” she muttered. The word pizza rolled off her tongue with a touch of contempt. “I make enough for ten. You got more guests than that, then you order pizza.”
He glanced at the large wooden bowl on the counter filled with enough salad to feed an army of rabbits. He kissed her on the cheek and left the kitchen so she could continue preparing the meal she’d foretold. Sometimes he wondered if she knew him better than he knew himself.
Although she’d said nothing over the course of the last two days, the abduction had taken a toll on her, too. Sophia wasn’t one to interfere in her employer’s business, especially when it concerned matters that were not of this world. But she wasn’t a stupid woman, and nothing went on in Greer’s house that she didn’t have some degree of knowledge about. A missing woman was no small thing,
and Sophia had grown to love Alex just like the rest of them.
Greer went to the library and knelt next to the pictures that still littered the floor. Sophia had known better than to disturb them, because this wasn’t just a pile of randomly thrown trash on the floor. This was a discarded heap of emotions that needed to be tended to by the discarder.
He bent down to clean up the creased and torn images. The door opened and Sophia poked her head through the crack. “Come in, Sophia.”
Her feet stopped next to his legs, and he could hear the creak in her knees as she descended to the floor next to him. “Thank you, Sophia, but I’ve got this.”
She picked up one of the photographs and studied the young girl with the bright red curls. “Miss Alex?”
“They are all of Miss Alex,” he replied.
She ignored his protests, and the two of them collected the pictures and put them in the envelope he pulled from the desktop.
“What you going to do with that girl when you find her?”
He looked at her strangely. Partly because the question was asked with such a definitive assumption that she would be found, and partly because he had no idea. He was so focused on just getting her back that he had no idea where the two of them were headed after she was back. “That’s a good question, Sophia.”
Her lips tightened into a flat line, and he could see her Catholic wheels turning as she nodded her head.
“Do not judge me, Sophia.”
She said nothing more as she gripped the edge of the desk to stand back up.
“We’re living in the twenty-first century,” he reminded her, rising to help her back to her feet.
She headed for the door to finish preparing dinner. “I been with you for a long time, Mr. Sinclair, and I see a lot of women come and go from this house. They walk out that door with moons in their eyes.” She turned to look at him before leaving the room. “Alex isn’t like them, but she got moons in her eyes, too.”
He threw the envelope on the desk and collapsed into the leather chair, Sophia’s words still ringing with truth in his head. She was right about Alex being different. She was also right to disapprove of the way he was handling the whole situation. For a change, he was the one who needed to pick a side and jump.
Sophia came back into the room. “I forget to tell you. That girl came by this afternoon.”
He waited for her to expound on “that girl”, but she just stood there with a flat expression.
“Can you be more specific, Sophia?”
“The one with the big blue eyes. Alex’s friend. Kathy or—”
“Katie?”
“That’s the girl. She was worried because Alex didn’t show up for work today.”
“Fuck.” He glanced at Sophia with a silent apology for his sailor’s tongue. “What did you tell her?”
“I told her Alex wasn’t home. Is true, yes?”
He hadn’t even thought about Shakespeare’s Library, or the fact that Alex would probably be fired. The truth was, he hated the idea of her working for minimum wage when it was so damned unnecessary. But he also knew she didn’t do it for the money. She needed the independence and the sense of normalcy.
“Sophia,” he said, his eyes apologetic for what he was about to ask. “I would never ask you for this if it wasn’t important. I need a favor—a big one.”
The four men assembled in the dining room, settling in for another long night of trying to locate their missing girl. Considering the circumstances, Sophia’s beautiful spread of food went barely touched.
It wasn’t just fatigue that kept their appetites low; it was the underlying thought running through each of their heads that Alex was probably cold and hungry in some dingy cellar or basement. How could they indulge in a beautiful meal with that at the forefront of their minds?
Sophia stuck her head in the room now and then and noted the ignored food. She didn’t take it personally, because she understood that it had nothing to do with the quality of the meal.
The one thing they didn’t ignore was the bottle of wine in the center of the table.
She replaced the empty bottle with a full one. “Drunks are useless,” she grumbled, shaking her head, speaking from the experience of spending years living under the same roof with one.
Greer reached behind him and opened the cabinet door. “You’re right, Sophia.” He pulled the bottle of Scotch from the cabinet and set it on the table next to the wine. “This will keep us sufficiently sober.” He handed the wine back to her.
She muttered something in Italian as she went back to the kitchen with the unopened bottle.
Greer poured himself a glass and slid the bottle across the table to Thomas. “What did you get out of him?”
The him he was referring to was the short bodyguard Isabetta Falcone never left home without. Demitri disappeared with his boss in the middle of all the mayhem at Battery Park, but the men managed to get their hands on the one who called himself Vito.
“Pussy cried like a baby when I gave him a little trailer of what we were about to do to him,” Thomas sneered, pouring his own glass of whiskey. “Too bad he doesn’t know shit. Looks like Isabetta keeps her boys stupid.”
“Probably the only smart thing she ever did,” Rhom added. “Unfortunately, it leaves us with nothing.”
“We got one thing out of him,” Thomas said. “Isabetta has been spending a lot of time down on Mulberry Street. Little Italy. The idiot said Demitri has been escorting her down there. Says he doesn’t know why, but she’s been real hush hush about it.”
“And you believed him?” Greer asked.
“I think he’s too stupid to be trusted with anything significant. So yeah, I believed him.”
Greer polished off the remainder of his glass. “Fuck.”
Bear stuck his head around the corner and vocalized something between a purr and a meow. He brushed against the molding as he strolled into the dining room with his tail pointed to the ceiling.
“Is that the same cat?” Loden asked.
Greer glanced at the orange tabby. “Yeah, that is interesting, isn’t it?”
Bear had grown at a record rate. But considering the company in the room, a kitten with a robust growth spurt wasn’t that unusual.
He hopped on top of the sideboard cabinet and began licking his paw. He groomed himself for another minute and then looked at each of the men sitting at the table. The intelligence behind his bright green eyes was unsettling, not because it was unusual for a cat to show some real smarts, but because Bear seemed to be contemplating each one of them individually.
He started with Rhom and then moved his eyes around the table to Thomas. Then he methodically looked at Loden. When he reached Greer, he stopped and released something between a word and a purr through his closed mouth. A half meow escaped his throat as his head lurched and began to pump back and forth like the piston of a machine.
“Shit,” Loden said as he pushed back in his chair. “That cat’s getting ready to hurl.”
The pumping of his head got faster, and a clucking sound came up from his throat. Bear’s mouth stretched into a wide cat grin, revealing his snow-white incisors as his tongue jetted out of his mouth and strained toward his feet.
Something pushed its way up his throat and over the top of his tongue. The object landed on the smooth mirror-like finish of the mahogany sideboard.
“What the fuck is that?” Thomas asked.
Greer looked shaken, trying to resolve what he was seeing on the cabinet. It was a piece of bone, the one he’d cut from his own back twenty years earlier. “It’s Alex’s charm.” He looked at the cat and then back at the bone. “She never lets it out of her sight.”
“I guess she left it home this time,” Thomas pointed out. “The cat must have liked it, too.”
Before Greer could disagree and explain why he knew that wasn’t true, Bear started to lurch again.
Loden winced. “Shit, he’s doing it again.”
Another object hurle
d out of Bear’s mouth and Rhom got up to look at it.
“Ah, man,” Thomas groaned, “don’t touch that shit.”
“I’m not picking it up. Jeez.” Rhom looked closer and examined the dry, neatly-folded piece of parchment paper without a drop of cat saliva on it, and read the word stamped on the front. “Adelina’s.”
Greer was standing now. “What the hell is that?”
“Best damn cannoli in the city.” The men turned to look at Loden who seemed to be the only one in the know. “Adelina’s. What? You never been there?”
The four men went still, and Thomas, Rhom, and Loden each turned to look at Greer. In unison, all four men said the two words that glued the pieces together.
“Little Italy.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
The bed I woke up in was considerably more comfortable than the last one. The sheets smelled of real lavender buds, and the thick comforter reminded me of a giant marshmallow painted with irises and periwinkle.
I lay there with my back to the mattress, staring at the ceiling while the memory of the past few days crept back inside my head. I was in Daemon’s apartment. We were eating chicken but I couldn’t remember what happened next. This was the next, me waking up in this strange bed with these strange smells, and no memory past the taste of chicken in my mouth.
There was an open door to my right, and I could see a countertop and a veined floor that looked like marble. The bathroom.
I pulled the bedding back. I was wearing a long nightshirt and underwear but no bra. The thought of him undressing me made me sick. I examined myself hesitantly for any marks or tenderness, anything that might tell me he’d finally finished what he’d started.
There were none.
A sliver of light slipped through either side of the accordion shade covering the window. Based on the intensity of the glow, it was either morning or early evening just before dusk.
The marble in the bathroom was cold against my feet as I stepped up to the counter and looked in the mirror. The girl looking back through the reflection was barely recognizable. She had the same auburn hair, and the blue eyes with the faint speck of brown in the middle of the left iris. But her cheeks seemed shallower and the brightness of her eyes had dulled. The face staring back at me had aged years in a few short months, a steep price for peeling back all the layers hiding the real woman underneath.
The Blood Thief (The Fitheach Trilogy Book 2) Page 25
