by Jackie May
Table of Contents
TITLE
SOCIAL MEDIA
COPYRIGHT
JACKIE MAY BOOKS
DEDICATION
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
BOOK 4
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
ABOUT JACKIE MAY
by Jackie May
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Copyright © 2021 by Joshua Oram
Edition 1.0
Edited by Jennifer Henkes (www.literallyjen.com)
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN 978-1-7341812-3-4
BOOKS BY JACKIE MAY
NOVELLAS:
My Soul to Keep
Urban Fantasies
UNDERWORLD BOOKS:
Nora Jacobs Series
Don’t Rush Me
Don’t Cheat Me
Don’t Bait Me
Don’t Tempt Me
Shayne Davies Series
The Devil to Pay
Magic in Those Eyes
Heart and Soul
Just Dare Me (2022)
For Russo.
You love it, I know.
- Shayne
All the writing books say the most important part of a novel is the very first line, that it needs to set the tone for the rest of the story. So here’s my first line…
After pushing Brenner’s shirt up, I’m tracing my tongue along the deep lines between each of his rock-hard abs when both doors are suddenly jerked open, enormous hands yank Brenner out of the car, and I’m shot in the back.
ONE DAY EARLIER
After pushing Brenner’s shirt up, I’m tracing my tongue along the deep lines between each of his rock-hard abs, when he suddenly turns aside with a grunt.
I cock a brow at him. “What was that?”
“Nothing.” Smirking, he caresses my cheek.
“Wait, are you…?” I plunge my face into his flat stomach. Brenner bucks with an involuntary shout. I gasp. “You’re ticklish.”
“No.”
“You are!”
“Nope.”
We lock eyes—a silent challenge given and accepted. Peering into his sparkling green irises, daring him to blink first, I walk two fingers across his abs. His whole body stiffens in response, pushing a tiny grunt from his compressed lips. He narrows his eyes in concentration.
“Uh-oh,” I coo. “The serious face. This is serious.”
Seriously stunning. Like a flash of revelation, it occurs to me that Brenner is devastatingly beautiful. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always noticed him—from the moment I first laid eyes on him, he’s been unforgettable to me. But even during these last few months, when I pined for him, threw myself at him, I still wasn’t seeing him the way I see him now. I’m completely obsessed with the striking contradictions of his face—grim but gorgeous, tortured but tender. An angel raised by demons.
Still holding out, Brenner furrows his brow, trying for a menacing glare, but all I see are sensual eyes crackling with a carnal intensity I can’t wait to unleash.
“Ohhh, a tough guy, huh?” I lower my voice into a breathy, sultry murmur. “Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen. He’s not the good cop. He’s…the hammer.” Making a five-point claw with my fingernails, I dig them into his rippled stomach. His jaw clenches, and his entire torso begins to quiver, but still he holds, piercing my soul with a fierce look.
I allow him one more instant of perceived control before twisting my clawed hand against his belly. As soon as I do, he bucks wildly, shouting, and immediately retaliates with fingers tickling at my ribs. Convulsing violently, I burst into a full-on Julia Roberts laugh. I’d have flipped right off the side of the bed if Brenner hadn’t pinned my arms and rolled on top of me, straddling my waist. “Guess I’m not the only one.”
I run my hands up his chest. “See, but it’s fine to be ticklish in the ribs. Keep your ribs. But the abs? No, no, no.” I unbutton his shirt. “I need those. So we’re gonna try this again, and we’re gonna keep trying, until you can take it for as long as I can give it. And that”—I spread his shirt open—“is just for starters.”
Pushing the shirt back over his shoulders, I admire several cuts and bruises in various stages of healing across his chest. Tattoos of chemical formulas ring the sides of his neck, permanent souvenirs from his time undercover, the angel masquerading among devils. He got out alive, only to fall straight into the deep end of the underworld, where he both lost and found. Lost his sister. Found me.
Brenner swoops down, sliding his arms under my back, pressing our bare chests together. The skin-to-skin contact shoots a ripple of ecstatic goose bumps all the way down to my curling toes. As always, it’s freezing cold in our bedroom. Brenner is as warm as a fleece blanket, and cozier, too. I want to wrap myself up in him.
He goes for my lips, softly at first, but then parts them, deepening the kiss with more feeling than I expected. This had started as a playful romp, but now we’re headed—for the third time this weekend—toward the full treatment.
Anxiety flutters in my chest—those nagging butterflies. I ignore them, pulling hungrily at Brenner, chasing his lips when he pulls back, moaning when he then presses down on me with surging eagerness.
My pulse races, even as those butterflies grasp at my runaway heart, trying to pace it. I shrug them off, glibly proclaiming the futility of trying to hold my feelings back. Hello, this is me we’re talking about. You flash yellow lights, I say, Speed up. Red lights? Run them. High fastball? Swing for the fences. Only one card in the whole deck that could give me the winning hand? Bet everything. I’m fast enough, I’m strong enough, and Lady Luck owes me. So it may be naïve, but I say, What the hell? If you’re going to plunge, might as well do it with style. Make it a swan dive.
And so, closing my eyes, tilting my head back with a gasp, I let go. I let my heart plunge into ecstasies and rapture through bright, unguarded bliss at the hands of the only man who’s ever made me feel this way. Fire. Fire, not only across every inch of my skin, but streaking hot through my heart and soul, blasting from my mouth with heavy, panting breaths.
“Shayne,” he rasps, slowing himself. I open my eyes to see him searching my face with a look of complete helplessness. “Shayne…”
He can’t say it. He doesn’t have to. I know exactly what he’s feeling, because I feel it, too. And the butterflies are screaming, Enough is enough! Yes, it’s a beautiful swan dive, exquisite form, but dammit to hell, don’t you see the ground rushing up at you? Open your eyes! I close my eyes, and I stop Brenner’s lips with a kiss that says everything we haven’t been brave enough to put into words. Not that words could even do it justice anyway. Only certain classic song lyrics come close.
Can’t Fight This Feeling.
Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.
Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.
With a sharp intake of breath, Brenner pushes away from me. He scrambles off the bed, stumbles into the wall, and slides down in a heap. Shocked emotion stings his eyes.
I push hair out of my face. “Jay, what? What is it?”
He’s trembling. Chest heaving. This is wrong. This is very wrong. I freeze, as though facing off with a cornered feral animal. Any movement will send him scampering from the room.
He blinks hard, regaining some semblance of control over his emotions. “Black chin.” Another hard blink. “Black chin. It’s there. It’s right there. I remember it clearly, but…”
“Remember? Remember what? What black chin?”
“The vampires.” He shakes his head, correcting himself. “The revenants that killed Haley. One had…” He hovers trembling fingers over his chin. “Black, like a stripe—maybe a tattoo—from his bottom lip, down his chin and neck.”
“Okay…” I don’t know what else to say. My heart is convulsing with fright. This is bad. This is… One of his eyes twitches, a storm overcoming his expression. This is that broken part of Brenner, triggered by some memory. “And you’re thinking about that now?”
“I didn’t remember. I never remembered…I mean, until now, even though…but I can still remember not remembering.”
Fragmented thoughts. Twitchy. Overwhelmed. I remember first meeting Brenner like this. I remember describing him to Agent Hillerman as spazzy. I laughed about it back then. What a spazzy hot mess.
I don’t laugh about it anymore. Rushing to his side, I wrap my arms around him, pressing my cheek against his chest. I feel his hammering heart. He holds me tightly, massaging the back of my neck, as though I’m the one who needs consoling. “Shayne, this wasn’t there. It wasn’t there, I’m telling you. But it’s supposed to be there—I saw him that night. There were three vamps, but only one that I saw clearly. Pale gray skin; white, cataract eyes; sharp fangs, all bloody. I shot at him.”
“I’ve heard all that. You’ve always told it that way.”
“But that wasn’t everything. I mean, that was everything I remembered, ever since I first met you. I’ve played it out over and over in my mind, and there was never a black chin. Until now. It’s like…watching a movie you’ve seen a million times, only now somebody has added a part that wasn’t there before. Just now, it just popped into my head.”
My heart sinks. Ever since I first met you, he said. Ever since he first met me…on the same night master vampire Henry Stadther compelled Brenner to forget everything he knew about vampires and the underworld. The next day, I forced Henry to reverse the compulsion, to restore Brenner’s memories.
“The compulsion,” I say, pulling back to look Brenner in his haunted eyes. “When Henry Stadther restored your memories, he must have held that part back.”
“The black chin.”
“It must mean something to him. Henry was fine with you remembering everything else, just not that one thing.”
The obvious one-word question—Why?—hangs in the air between us. But when Brenner voices it, I’m surprised to find that we’re thinking of different whys: “Why now?” he asks. “Why did the memory suddenly come back?”
The answer is very simple, and very bad. “There’s only one way a compulsion could be released without him being here in person, touching you.”
Brenner’s eyebrows raise. “He’s dead?”
I nod. “Like, just now. Somebody just killed Henry Stadther.”
I feel Brenner’s body tighten with repressed energy. This will revitalize the search for Haley’s killers. He wants to go. He wants to go now, go at this hard, and he won’t stop until he finds that black chin. Brenner will throw himself at this the only way he knows how: all caution to the wind, a bull in a china shop. My anxious butterflies scoff. More like, china in a bull shop. A human doesn’t belong in the underworld. He’ll be crushed. You can’t possibly keep him.
“I know,” I say to both the butterflies and Brenner, “I know, you want to jump on this—”
“Let’s go to the Agency.”
I grasp both sides of his collar, as though jerking on a dog’s leash. “We will.”
“Let’s go.”
“No, but—”
“This changes everything. Henry Stadther was hiding this. He knew something about those revenants.”
There, Brenner’s just given me an inch. I’ll take a mile. “Exactly! He knew something, and now he’s dead, Jay. Do you know how hard it is to kill a master vampire? Do you have any idea how long he’s lived? It’s…this is huge. Whatever happened, it’s a kick to the hornet’s nest. All the most powerful underworlders in Detroit will rampage for better positions on the food chain. Trust me, we don’t want any part of that.”
“What, so we do nothing?”
I shake my head. “No, I’m saying that this is way bigger than us, so we have to play the table, not the cards.”
Sighing, Brenner leans his head back against the wall, obviously frustrated to hear yet another of my endless poker analogies, or metaphors, or whatever the hell they are. I have to suppress a sigh myself. This is such a perfect moment for me to slug him in the shoulder and call him a jerk, even though on the inside I’m thrilled that Brenner finally feels comfortable enough to be exasperated by my bullshit. It’s such a real boyfriend moment.
“This is high stakes, Jay,” I explain. “Lots of players in the game. We’ve got a seat at the table, but we’re small fry. Everybody else has a way bigger stack of chips than us. We make one mistake, we’re out. So we hold our cards, and we wait.”
Brenner throws his hands up. “Wait?”
“Stay out of the crossfire,” I continue. “Play the table. Let the big stacks knock each other out. They’ll do most of the work for us. Some of those big stacks are on our side. The Agency is working on this.”
“Are they, though? We haven’t heard a thing.”
“A rogue necromancer creating revenant vampires? That’s top of the pile, trust me.”
“We should be working it. I don’t care what they say.”
“I’m not saying we won’t. I want to nail those bastards as much as you do.” I tug on his collar to emphasize my words. It’s such a fine line I have to walk on this issue. We both want the same thing. Our reasons, however, are very different.
Gently, Brenner pulls my hands from his collar. “It’s mine, Shayne.”
I’ve heard this before. On this subject, I know better than to fight him, even if I disagree. “I know.”
His eyes kindle with an iron will. “When we get to it, they’re mine for the killing. It has to be me.”
Well, I might have passed on the opportunity to revel in his real boyfriend moment, but I simply cannot deny myself a real girlfriend moment, so I lay the guilt on real thick when I say, “Right, it has to be you, even if that means getting yourself killed. Because it’s either you or them, right?”
Brenner eyes me cautiously, wary of a trap. “That’s right.”
Too easy. His ass is mine. “Oh, that’s right, huh? It’s you”—I poke him hard in the chest, my voice dripping with contempt—“or it’s them?” I turn my palms up. “Nobody else?”
Brenner exhales, breaking eye contact with me.
Now that the advantage is won, I soften my voice. “I get how important this is. You blame yourself. You think you owe a debt. Here’s the thing. The person you think you owe…I’m sorry sh
e’s gone. But I’m not. I’m right here, Jay. For me, it’s not either you or them.” I pull his chin toward me, so I can look into his eyes. “It has to be you that comes out of this. I don’t care about them.”
The air crackles between us. My heart soars with the intimacy of the moment. At last, after what seems like a lifetime, I’ve finally satisfied a small part of my aching need to make Brenner understand what he means to me.
In response, he says something I’ll never forget. Pulling his face away from my fingers, he says quietly, “But I won’t be me. Not really. Not until they’re gone.”
I feel the bitterness of an odd jealousy. His heart doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the pursuit of those monsters. He just said as much to my face. The butterflies swarm with a vengeance, chittering at me with I told you so, and This will end badly, and Run while you still can!
But I’m fast enough, I vow, mentally stomping my foot. I’m strong enough. And Lady Luck…I want to shake her in desperation. Threaten, beg, put a knife to her throat. You owe me.
“We can’t seem too eager,” I say sullenly. “Give me tomorrow to poke around the office, see what I can find out.”
Pulling me to him, Brenner folds his arms around my shoulders. As I grasp desperately at him, more classic song lyrics come to mind, though not as upbeat this time.
“Give Me Just One More Night.”
“Everytime You Go Away.”
I don’t know much…
I can’t help but finish that one: I don’t know much…but I know I love you.
The nagging butterflies slump in dejection.
It’s still dark when a cryptic text from Nick Gorgeous awakens me, ordering me to get up, get ready, and “await further instructions.”
I roll out of bed. “This is it, Jay. Something’s definitely go—yeee!” The ice-cold floor shocks my feet. I hop from foot to foot. “—definitely going down. That was Nick.” I fall backward on the bed and kick both legs high as I pull jeans over them.
Brenner mumbles, “I’m on it, I’m…some coffee…going…” His sleep breathing resumes.
Outside, a frigid breeze cuts right through my Detroit Tigers jacket. Any normal person would wear half a dozen layers against this arctic freeze, but my inner fox will have none of that. Too much like a cage. What if I suddenly need to shift? So I just have to deal with chattering teeth and numb fingers. It doesn’t help that I’m borrowing an old truck with a heater on its last breath. It will warm up eventually, but only after filling the cab with air that smells like burnt farts.
