by Vivi Andrews
“You don’t seem to understand how to barter. I’ll give you two.”
“You don’t seem to understand that this isn’t a negotiation. Three. You’re a businessman. You must realize this is a good bargain for you. Three weeks in exchange for your life.”
“Three weeks of being good in exchange for anything sounds absolutely unreasonable.”
“Take the deal, Prometheus.”
“You already said you would help me.”
“I agreed to help. I didn’t say how hard I was going to try.”
He cursed softly. “Three weeks?”
“Three weeks of shining, angelic behavior and I will tear hell apart to reclaim your heart.” He would be one of hers, if he lasted the three weeks, and there was nothing she didn’t do for her people.
“Done.” The word held an eerie finality.
Satisfaction lurched against her, more forcefully than she’d anticipated. “Excellent. I’ll expect you at my offices first thing Monday morning. I trust you know where they are?”
He smiled. “You trust correctly.”
She nodded, trying to look professional, like his employer rather than a woman who had been undone by a single stroke of his index finger. “Good. Now unlock this door.”
One brow arched. “That door? Was it locked?”
The door swung open an inch, bumping against her shoulders and shoving her farther into the room. “Bastard.”
He bowed. “Until Monday, Karma. Sleep well, angel.”
He disappeared into a back room before she could make a satisfyingly dramatic exit. Skulking out with those words lingering behind him, taunting her. It was as if the bastard somehow knew she’d been plagued by insomnia her entire life.
She moved out of the door’s path and it swung open all the way. Deciding it was best to take advantage of the exit before Prometheus changed his mind, she stepped out onto the sidewalk, the night air closing around her. She didn’t bother trying to slam the door behind her. It closed on its own with a near-silent click.
The warm summer night should have been comforting after the over air-conditioned shop, but she felt a more distinct chill now than she had in the damn warlock’s presence. The man was a human furnace.
If he even counted as human without a beating heart.
Karma shuddered. What had she gotten herself into? Deals with the devil were dangerous to meddle in. Why had she said yes?
Because she was a good person and she helped people. Even those who didn’t particularly deserve it. Or because Prometheus had implanted the idea that she was a good person and helping him would somehow prove that?
She strode quickly toward her car, feeling more in control with each step away from the shop. That hadn’t gone exactly as planned, but she could handle it. She could handle anything. She was still in control.
No matter what Prometheus and his wandering fingers thought.
Chapter Five
Pandora’s Insomniac
Karma woke with a jerk, sucking in air with a hard gasp ripping her throat raw. She never came awake peacefully. The visions that chased her out of her dreams prevented that.
Gulping for oxygen, she rolled to study the illuminated face of her clock. Three-twenty in the morning. She’d managed to grab two whole hours of sleep this time. Not quite a personal best, but not far from it.
Karma untangled herself from the twisted covers and climbed out of bed, setting about the soothing routine of changing the sweaty sheets for fresh, crisp linens. She wouldn’t be getting back to sleep again tonight. Her heart rate gradually slowed as her hands went through the familiar motions, tugging and smoothing the cotton-and-silk blend.
She’d been Ciara this time. And she’d been drowning. Water had gushed into her nose and mouth, burning in her lungs, a searing pain radiating through her body as something held her under.
Since Ciara was one of her finders who spent the better part of her life floating in a pool to reduce the psychic dissonance caused by her gift, the dream was terrifyingly possible. Ciara was currently at odds with her new FBI handler, but surely he wouldn’t hurt her, or allow anyone else to. Though Karma had never met the man, so she didn’t have much to go on.
Instinct demanded she do something, but years of experience had taught Karma how to read the dreams, even if she couldn’t control them, and this one wouldn’t come true for several more days, if it came true at all. No need to call Ciara at three in the morning in a panic.
She’d learned the hard way when she was a teenager that people generally appreciated her “hunches” more when they weren’t accompanied by pre-dawn hysteria.
Karma looked down at the military precision of her made bed. Her hands had stopped shaking by the time she aligned the last pillow. Neat. Orderly. In control. So she could breathe again, master the fear that lingered.
The dreams always felt so real. Even if it never came true and Ciara escaped without a scratch, Karma couldn’t forget the feeling of water setting her lungs on fire.
If she told Prometheus about this, maybe he wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss her almosts. But she would never tell. Even her consultants didn’t know anything more specific than she had feelings and hunches. Her family knew because she’d started having the dreams when she was a child, but she’d never told another soul. She’d never even considered it. That telling Prometheus had even formed as a thought was…unsettling.
Which made sense in the way. Everything about the man unsettled her.
And now she was his boss. In a manner of speaking. Prometheus didn’t seem to be the kind of man who understood the concept of having a boss.
Prometheus. It couldn’t be his real name. Though as a woman named Karma, she couldn’t really cast stones. Her parents had each named one of their children—her sturdy, law-enforcement father picking Jake and her flower-child mother selecting something a bit more meaningful. Who had named Prometheus? He seemed like the kind of man who had sprung fully formed into the universe. Like Athena rather than the Titan for whom he was named.
Did he have a last name? What would he put on a W-2? Not that she could get him to fill one out, since he was working for her for good will rather than cash.
She needed to decide what she would have him do, something to show his soul wasn’t entirely tarred—which was a challenge not only because he was an ethical black hole, but also because she wasn’t even sure what he could do. What were the limits of Prometheus’s abilities?
And how could she ensure he really was cooperating? She’d have to assign someone to babysit him. Someone who wouldn’t be taken in or run into the ground by him. Her people were professionals, but Prometheus was a walking wrecking ball, chaos in human form. She needed someone to supervise him who would keep him in line.
It was only quarter past four when she finished her morning routine by sliding her feet into a new pair of Louboutins and pouring a second mug of oolong. She made her way up to the office. Living in the basement apartment beneath the Karmic Consultants offices was the ultimate convenience. Her commute each morning was a fifteen-second ride in the secure elevator that opened directly into her office. The efficiency was unparalleled. Do not pass go, do not take time to smell the roses. Her brother would have given her shit about her all work-no play mentality, but Jake was on his honeymoon with Lucy so he wasn’t here to be disappointed by her inability to goof off—even on a Sunday.
Because of the wedding the day before, she’d ignored all non-emergency messages and even in twenty-four hours they had stacked up. Karma settled into her Herman Miller Aeron chair and began putting her world in order, one email at a time, half her brain still considering the best strategy for handling the Prometheus problem.
She wished she could call Jake and talk it through with him. Her brother had done the original profile on Prometheus when she’d had him investigated after his name kept popping up in Karmic Consultants cases. But thanks to the matchmaking epidemic that had hit everyone she touched in the last year, Jake was t
emporarily out of commission as her primary confidant.
First Jake and Lucy. Then Jo and Wyatt. Mia and Chase. Ronna and Matt. Brittany and Rodriguez. Her consultants were pairing off at an alarming rate.
Next thing she knew Ciara would announce she’d fallen in love with her new FBI handler and—
A tickle at the back of her skull made Karma shiver as a new premonition seeped into her brain. Shit. Ciara is going to announce she’s in love with her new FBI handler. The question was, did that make her more or less likely to die by drowning later in the week?
Karma glanced at the clock that hung above her door, its graceful lines a perfect blend of art and function, like all the other objects in her work space. Quarter to six. Still too early to check up on Ciara.
At least this romantic hunch had been of the gentle reminder variety, as opposed to the bloody sledgehammer type that bludgeoned Karma in her sleep. When she was awake, she could batten down the hatches in her brain, keep the most vivid, gory pieces as bad feelings rather than a macabre play in which she was trapped as a doomed actor. Control. It all came down to control.
Karma pushed away from her laptop and went to her meditation corner, shielded from the rest of the room by a gorgeous Chinese screen. She slipped off her shoes and knelt, careful not to wrinkle her skirt. Incense made her sneeze, so she didn’t bother with it, her meditation space spartan and uncluttered.
Karma cleared her thoughts, working through the mental exercises and meditations that refreshed her balance and control. Lately she’d been forced to do them three or four times a day just to keep it together, but she refused to consider the possibility that the locks on the Pandora’s Box of power inside her were failing.
She finished her first cycle and decided to do a second round, just to be safe, when another scratch of foreboding teased the back of her skull. Prometheus.
Karma’s eyes snapped open. He was on his way here. Why was he on his way here? She’d told him Monday, damn it. She’d been counting on today to gather her thoughts and reinforce her mental defenses and now—
No sense bitching about it. He’d be arriving in ten minutes whether she was ready for him or not. Karma made it a point to always be ready for unexpected guests. Her internal early warning system made that possible; her unshakable desire to always be prepared and in control made it necessary.
She rose, smoothed the non-existent wrinkles from her skirt and slid her feet back into the Louboutins. Ignoring the sensation in her stomach that may have been mistaken for anticipation, she unlocked the doors to the outer office, flipped on the exterior lights, and put on a pot of coffee, since Prometheus didn’t seem to be the sort who would appreciate the reviving properties of a nice oolong.
She was back behind her desk, laptop tucked away in a drawer, hands folded on the dark marble surface when Prometheus let himself into her office without so much as a knock—just as she’d known he would.
He was dressed all in black today—black slacks, black shoes, black button-down shirt with the cuffs rolled to his elbows. All of it doubtless an intentional jab at her attempt to bring him over from the dark side.
He grinned, inky eyes twinkling as they locked on her seated behind her desk. “I see you were expecting me.”
Chapter Six
Home Field Advantage
“I was expecting you tomorrow.”
He grinned—another untamed, predatory flash of teeth that could almost pass for a smile. “I couldn’t wait another second.”
He seemed even taller than he had the day before—which was peculiar. He should have seemed smaller in the bright, expansive spaciousness of her office than he had in the cluttered, dingy surrounds of his shop. Perhaps it was seeing him in motion that made him seem larger than life. He’d been so still the previous night, but this morning he was a body in motion, testing every corner of her office, and her patience. He prowled the room, touching her things, trying to get a rise out of her.
“What are you doing here, Prometheus?”
“I’m so eager to be reformed I couldn’t wait a single day.” He flung his arms wide, throwing back his head. “I am your clay. Mold me into virtue.”
She arched a brow. “I’m not sure my skill as a sculptor is up to the task. The raw materials leave something to be desired.”
“I assure you I leave nothing to be desired. Thoroughness, that’s my motto.”
Karma did not blush. She was on her home turf. No amount of innuendo could fluster her. “I thought your motto was reckless endangerment in the name of freedom and fun.”
“Sounds wordy. Wouldn’t fit very well on a coat of arms.”
“Prometheus.” She made his name an epithet of impatience.
“Are you surprised I couldn’t wait until tomorrow? I only have two and a half months to live. I can’t waste days.”
So that was his new strategy. He was going to try to get her to budge on her terms by playing the my-life-is-about-to-be-cut-short card. He was on a clock. She could appreciate that. But her finders would be able to locate his heart in an instant and Rodriguez could doubtless summon the devil just as quickly. If Karma was indeed capable of impacting the link that connected him to the devil, curing him of his short lifespan shouldn’t take her and her people more than a single afternoon. It was hard to feel a sense of urgency.
And she might have had more sympathy for him if his predicament hadn’t been the result of his own terminal stupidity. Fatal recklessness.
“I suppose we can get started on your paperwork,” she conceded, feeling magnanimous—and hoping she could bore him into leaving. “Have a seat and I’ll get your packet.”
Karma rose, strode purposefully to the filing cabinets in the outer office—neatly organized thanks to Brittany’s boundless enthusiasm for menial office tasks—and collected one of the blank pre-hire packets. She returned to her office—half-expecting Prometheus to have commandeered the chair behind her desk—only to find he hadn’t obeyed her order to sit at all. Not surprising. What did alarm her was the fact that he’d managed to find the cabinet where she kept her personal family photos.
The interior of the carved cherry wood doors were lined with pictures of the people who meant the most to Karma. An intense feeling of exposure washed through her and she wanted to slam the cabinet shut on his fingers. Not that she hadn’t shown it to anyone else. Most of her consultants knew it was there. The only reason she kept it closed was because displaying personal photos on her desk diminished the professionalism of her space, but having Prometheus poking his nose in there was almost a violation.
“You don’t look anything like your father.”
He didn’t turn to face her as he said it, still staring into her personal life. Karma reapplied the starch to her spine and strode back to her desk. If she didn’t show him she was vexed by his invasion, he would move on to trying to annoy her another way, leaving her privacy private.
“Biologically, he isn’t my father,” she said with a matter-of-fact indifference she hoped would be the end of it. “We won’t bother with the tax forms since we’re merely trading services, but if you could fill out the first three pages—”
“That explains why your brother is so much darker than you are.”
“Jake is one-quarter African-American.” She tapped the packet on her desk, tidying the pages. “As you’ll see, everything is fairly straightforward—”
“Older or younger?”
Karma sighed. Apparently they were going to have a talk about her family. Lovely. “Older or younger what?”
“Is your brother older or younger than you?”
“Younger. Not quite three years. Any other trivia you can’t last another minute without knowing or can we get on with the paperwork?”
“I don’t do paperwork. So, did your mom get together with his dad after you were born?”
“Our parents met while she was pregnant with me and were married when I was four months old. The paperwork is necessary. Without it I won’t know ho
w to best use your abilities.”
“‘Our parents’. So you consider him your father even though you share no genetic material. What about your real father?”
“He is my real father.” Karma grabbed a pen. If he wasn’t going to fill them out, she would fill them out for him. “Full name?”
“I don’t know your father’s full name.”
“Your full name.”
“I’ll give you my full name if you tell me about your real father.”
“That isn’t an even trade.”
“How about a more general swap? I will answer all your questions without evasions, if you do the same.”
Such an open-ended bargain sounded even more potentially hazardous, but Karma was secure in herself. She was private, but she had no secrets. Nothing she was ashamed of. As soon as he realized he wasn’t going to get to her with his questions, that knowing her history wasn’t going to give him an advantage against her, he would give up and by then she would have the answers she needed to place him. “Deal. You start. Full legal name.”
“Pro-me-the-us. Want me to spell that?”
“That’s really your legal name? Sounds like your mother and mine—”
“I had it changed. Legally.”
Curiosity sharpened to a knife’s edge, but Karma ignored it. She didn’t need to know why he didn’t want to talk about his mother or why he’d changed his name, what it had been before or when he’d done it. None of that was pertinent.
She wrote his name on the blank. “Contact number?”
“Trying to get my digits without paying your share, Karma? It’s your turn. Who was your real dad?”
“Darren Cox. I don’t know who got my mom pregnant with me and neither does she, but my father raised me.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Contact number.”
He rattled off the numbers. “You don’t want to know?”
“It doesn’t matter. I have a father.”
His mouth tightened and he turned back to the cabinet. “Your mom got around, huh?”
