by Sierra Dean
“Lucas Rain is the werewolf king of the Eastern states.” I inclined my head towards the grumpy blond werewolf in the chair adjacent to the loveseat.
Holden nodded to Lucas. “Your highness.” I had never heard a royal address sound so belittling. It’s amazing what two hundred years can allow you to do with inflection alone.
“And Desmond is…” I struggled for a moment, searching for the most appropriate way to introduce him. “Lucas’s second-in-command.”
“Well, well…” Holden met my eyes, “…quite the lupine social climber these days, aren’t you?”
“At least one of us is making an advance.” I instantly wished I hadn’t brought up his stunted progression in the council. I was largely to blame for his stasis, and drawing attention to it in front of those he considered lesser beings was a low blow.
Lucas and Desmond watched the exchange without interruption, and then Lucas rose to his feet. He came to stand in front of me, looking down with a small smile.
“You’re okay,” I said again, hardly able to believe it even with him this close.
“Of course.” The warmth of his tone made it seem like there had never been any doubt, and perhaps there hadn’t. What I didn’t know about werewolves could fill volumes. Was last night’s fight to the death tantamount to nothing more than a big-dog pissing contest?
No, I couldn’t believe that. Marcus’s intent had plainly been to kill Lucas. That Marcus was crazier than a Batman villain and had murdered his own daughter didn’t make me feel any better about the rivalry. He would stop at nothing to take the throne away from Lucas, and maybe my soul-bonded wolf king was being foolish not to take the threat more seriously.
I ground my teeth but didn’t know if it was out of frustration or worry. Holden was watching only me, dismissing the wolves’ presence as if they were nothing more than furniture. I tried to catch Desmond’s eye again, but he had decided to use the vampire as an excuse to ignore me and was putting his role as my bodyguard first.
I sighed more heavily and looked at Lucas again.
“Can I have a word with you?” I said, which caught Desmond’s attention, his eyes flicking a quarter of an inch towards me. “In private.”
Lucas’s gaze traveled to my bedroom door, and I shook my head. “Out in the hall.” The smell of the bedroom would be a dead giveaway. It was one thing to suspect Lucas already knew what had happened last night, but there was no sense in literally rubbing his nose in it.
“Okay.” He opened the door and stepped back to let me exit first. Holden edged partway out of his seat, and Desmond took a half step towards him and growled.
“Boys, do you think you can call a truce for three minutes? I’ll be right outside, and I doubt he and I are going to kill each other.” I cast a wary glance at Lucas. Nothing in his face supported or contradicted me.
Holden and Desmond said nothing, but returned to their uneasy staring contest.
I stepped into the tiny hallway that separated my apartment from the street entrance stairs, and was only a little surprised to see Dominick standing there. What did surprise me was discovering how relieved I was to see the grinning blond werewolf alive.
“I’m glad you’re okay.”
“Ditto. Things got pretty gnarly in there.” Judging from his smarmy smirk, he wasn’t too shaken up by his near-death experience. “Did you take good care of my brother?”
I flinched and it must have shown because Lucas’s face became serious, and Dominick stopped smiling.
“He’s inside,” Lucas said. “Can you give Secret and I a moment, please?”
Dominick nodded and ducked into my apartment without another word, shutting the door behind him. Alone in the closet-sized hallway with Lucas, I was very aware of his physical presence. He was easily a foot taller than me, and standing this close to him in the cramped space, I had to force my gaze up to meet his eyes. With no one else around, I was anticipating the full wrath of his anger.
And why shouldn’t I? I’d betrayed him.
No matter how I’d justified it in the heat of the moment, Lucas had staked his claim first. It had been he, not Desmond, who told me about the soul-bond, and it had been he who led me proudly before his pack as a potential mate.
What had I, his would-be queen, done in return? I’d left him in danger and used the rush of fear and near death to excuse being unfaithful to him before I had proven myself worthy of his respect.
I reminded myself, flipping the proverbial coin, he had been the one who kept the secret of my soul-bond with Desmond to himself in order to monopolize me. And he had been the one who asked Desmond to protect me, knowing the bond would make it impossible for Desmond to let anything happen to me.
I was beyond conflicted. Did I feel bad about sleeping with Desmond? No. I didn’t regret it for a single second. And why should I? Two days ago I hadn’t known either of them, and now I was thrust into a world where people thought I was a princess and part of my destiny was to be with the men the fates had chosen for me. So I’d slept with someone I felt a strong attraction to, but I felt bad because it might hurt someone else.
I hadn’t asked for any of this. I didn’t want to be a princess and I didn’t want my future mate selected by supernatural forces. Denying that I felt something for both Desmond and Lucas would be a lie, but when and if I picked one of them, it would be on my terms. As it was, I wanted to have them both, which made me think it might be easier to choose neither and just stay single.
“Lucas…” I began, but wasn’t sure what to say next.
He met my eyes and all the tension in his melted away. Suddenly I was in his arms and he was holding me so tight I couldn’t breathe. I molded myself into the embrace, moving my arms around his back, which relieved the pressure on my lungs.
I laid my face on his chest and breathed in the warm, musky, living smell of him. Thoughts of staying single had vanished the second he touched me. His body was hot under my face and hands, and I resisted the urge to cry from relief no matter how badly I wanted to. My blood-tinted tears would give too much of me away.
“I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again.” He spoke into my bed-tangled curls. “I don’t know what I would have done if we lost you.” His use of the plural mirrored Desmond’s last night. “Desmond told me he thought he watched you die last night.”
So they had been talking before I woke up. How much had Desmond told him?
“I’m sorry,” I whispered into the softness of his shirt, apologizing for nothing specific.
His hand looped into my hair, wrapping strands around each of his beautiful, long fingers. I was willing to bet his parents had made him play piano, violin or guitar. Something to make good use of such tapered fingers.
He used my hair to tip my head back without being rough about it, then bent to kiss me. It was not like our first kiss at all. There was no politeness. Instead he kissed me with the intensity allowed only for situations like these. We had both thought, however fleetingly, the other might have died last night. The desperation and yearning in the way we kissed said more than we could convey with words.
Lucas backed me against the wall with a loud thump, and I was forced to stop his probing hands before I let us go further.
“Lucas, about last night…” I felt the foolish need to be upfront with him even now with his wide palm under my shirt and his mouth at my neck. The hallway smelled like frosted cinnamon buns, and my breath was coming in short, panting gasps.
“Forget last night,” he murmured into my skin.
The door to my apartment swung open and Dominick peeked out. Lucas and I both turned our heads to look at him, and I was relieved. Who knows how far I’d have gone without an interruption. History showed my self-control with werewolves to be somewhat limited.
“Sorry.” Dominick bowed slightly. “We heard a bang and thought we should see if you two were at each other’s throats. Guess we didn’t take into account…” His apology drifted as he smirked at Lucas’s hand plac
ement.
Lucas righted himself and removed his hand from under my top.
I remembered Holden with a blush, and realized he’d been able to hear every breathy detail. I grumbled at my own foolishness. The three of us returned to the apartment, and it was my turn to avoid Desmond’s eyes. Instead I focused on Holden, who was showing a hint of a grin. Sure, he would find this amusing. Vampires.
Lucas, too, was reminded of the vampire’s presence and Holden’s reason for being at my home in the first place.
“I’ll leave you to your business.” Lucas leaned in so his lips rested against my ear. Holden would still hear him, but the illusion of privacy was enough. “I’m relieved you’re safe after last night. I’m sorry you were put in danger. I know it put you in an unusual situation…” God, I wish having my life in peril was unusual. “Anything that happened as a result is understandable. Emotions were running high, after all.” He stepped back and nodded.
Had he just pardoned me for having sex with Desmond?
My face flushed and not from embarrassment. I was enraged. My choice to sleep with Desmond had been made logically. Well, as logically as a decision can be made with someone’s tongue in your mouth. And what’s more, it was made at least in part because of a metaphysical connection Lucas himself had alerted me to. I balled my hands into fists. Of course I didn’t want him to be mad about it, but would he expect Desmond to forgive him if he, Lucas, had been the one to bed me first? I doubted it.
He frowned and arched a brow. My anger must have confused him. Hell, it confused me. Didn’t I want him to be okay with it?
“Just go.” I indicated the open door. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Desmond smirk, a flash of humor so quick it was almost imaginary. At least someone found this situation funny. I suppose it wasn’t often anyone blew Lucas off.
I wanted to smile back, but it would ruin the effect of my incensed and unceremonious dismissal of the king.
After the werewolves left I felt like a fog had lifted from my senses, and I was able to see and think more clearly. Just being near them threw me off my game, and I was going to need to find my sea legs with this soul-bond thing if I had a hope in hell of surviving in a relationship. I couldn’t handle being so out of sorts.
I sat in the armchair Lucas had just occupied and stared at the vampire on my sofa. “What are you doing here? Sig gave me his orders. The Tribunal doesn’t expect me to have captured Peyton yet, so what do you want?”
“Aside from getting you in trouble with your wolves or catching you in flagrante?” It was apparent he found the situation hilarious, but I wasn’t laughing. “I came to help.”
I considered Holden to be my friend, and most days I liked him a hell of a lot. He was a great ally but was usually only around when it benefited him. I leaned back in the chair, watching him carefully. I didn’t think he was lying.
“Secret.” His voice was tight with impatience, which was a rarity for a vampire. “I know things have been, for lack of a better word, strained between us since my bicentennial.” That wasn’t a sentence you got to hear every day. “But we’re still the people we were when Sig assigned me to you.”
I laughed at him. If I was the same person I had been six years ago, I would be dead by now. The Secret of six years previous was a dim-witted sixteen-year-old with only the vaguest idea of how to keep herself alive.
“Okay, maybe not the exact same.”
“I get what you’re trying to say. Don’t strain yourself with the niceties. They aren’t your strongest gift.” I looked out the small window to the street outside. Feet passed by in a rush. Human lives without the slightest clue of the strange world existing all around them. How many of them would Peyton kill before I stopped him? “I really could use your help.”
“Any ideas of where to start?”
“I have one. But you’re not going to like it.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“I don’t like this,” Holden agreed.
We were standing in front of the seventy-sixth precinct police headquarters. It was a squat, ugly, concrete building made of two rectangular floors of offices and interrogation rooms, and a basement level for holding cells. The police cruisers were parked in a fenced lot behind the building.
“I told you.” Starting up the stairs, I turned to look at him. “You don’t need to come in. But trust me when I tell you no one in here is going to have a goddamn clue what you are. They’re all human. Very, very human.”
Begrudgingly he followed, hesitating at the entrance before walking in. An exhausted young woman sat at the reception desk and gave me a look of contempt when I cleared my throat in front of her. She softened when she saw Holden, and one of her hands flew up to fix the errant strands of her hair. As usual he appeared to have stepped out of a GQ article on making looking good appear effortless. An article he could have written once upon a time.
“How can I help you?” She ignored me completely.
I tried to draw her attention back to me by saying, “Detective Mercedes Castilla, please.”
“Who should I say is here?” Now that she was looking at me again, all the friendliness leached out of her voice.
“Secret McQueen.”
The girl rolled her eyes, believing it was a poorly constructed alias. I was getting pretty irritated with people who thought my name wasn’t real. I was going to have to thank Grandmere for taking my mother’s note literally when it said keep her a secret.
“And you?” She nodded to the vampire.
“Holden Chancery.” He smiled, flashing fangless brilliant white teeth at her. She met his eyes and became a lost cause. He had her enthralled in an instant.
“Of course.” Her voice had a dreamlike quality, totally entranced. If he told her to cluck like a chicken, she would do it. I’d seen baby vampires do some truly awful things once they discovered how to enthrall humans, but Holden had never been one to abuse the thrall for kicks.
The girl used her desk phone to announce us, then sat there grinning at Holden like a dog who had executed a new trick for the first time. Pitiful.
A few moments later Mercedes descended the stairs behind the desk and waved for me and Holden to follow her.
I had lied when I told him no one in the building would know what he was. Judging by the cold stare Cedes fixed him with the instant we sat down at her desk, she’d recognized straight away he wasn’t human.
“Cedes,” I said, a warning tone in my voice, “this is Holden.”
She was familiar enough with the work I did to recognize the name of my liaison. It didn’t do anything to make her like him, though. Mercedes hated vampires almost as much as the werewolves did.
“What brings you to my humble establishment?” She leaned back in her desk chair and pretended Holden wasn’t there. “I was hoping the next time I saw you it would be over cocktails and you’d be giving me the dirty details about Lucas Rain.”
Holden made a sniggering sound that I tried to ignore.
“You know the girl, the one who said she was saved from a…” I lowered my voice, “…vampire?”
Cedes focused on Holden with a glare tainted by accusation, then looked back to me. She was a beautiful woman, but her job had etched her face with a shrewd, knowing patina that aged her more than necessary. She had almost-black eyes, and her dark hair was curly the way mine was not, with tight untamed coils. Her skin was honey bronze, but too many hours indoors without natural sunlight made it look sallow. The dark bags under her eyes and minimal makeup told me she was working hard on something. I just hoped it was something that could help me.
“Yeah, her name is Brigit Something. Stewart or Samuels. Something Anglo. Are you admitting you’re the one who saved her?”
“Off the record?”
“Sure.”
“It was me.”
“Yeah, I knew that.”
“I need to know if anything has seemed hinky since it happened. Anyone reporting attacks from similar assailants? Any bodies s
howing up looking a little pale?”
“You want to know if I suspect any vampire activity?” Her voice hushed. “Isn’t that really more your box of crayons, Secret? What’s going on?”
“I can’t tell you. The fewer details you know the better. But you’d be helping a lot of innocent people if you could tell me everything you know.”
Her face was grim. She laced her fingers together and leaned back. “Some big bad on his way?”
“Big bad is already here.”
Exasperated, she directed her full focus on Holden. He met her eyes, but to his credit didn’t use his powers on her.
“Now you listen to me, you pretty boy mosquito, because I’m only going to say this once. I don’t care how old or powerful you are. If anything, anything happens to this girl here, I will find a way to rip your pulseless heart right out of your chest. Comprende?”
Without missing a beat he coolly replied, “Detective Castilla, your Secret is safe with me.”
She blinked with surprise, and I groaned. “God, Holden. How long have you been waiting to use that line?”
“About three years.”
“And in three years you couldn’t find any room for improvement?”
“I like a good pun, what can I say?”
“Terrible.” I shook my head.
Cedes, in spite of herself, was unable to keep from smirking at his awful one-liner. She might not like him, but he had done his best to endear himself to her without stooping to mind tricks, and I appreciated it. With the exception of Keaty, Mercedes was my only human friend.
“Please, Cedes.”
“Okay. One of our undercover vice officers has been hearing that a lot of the girls are afraid to go with new johns. From what she’s been hearing, there are rumors about some handsome john who pays girls double or triple the normal rate, but after they leave none can remember what he asked them to do or why they were paid so well for it. Same rumor mill says a few of the girls haven’t come back at all. We had an anonymous call to come get a dead body, but when we got there it was gone. And we found a dead girl a few blocks away from Central Park. She was totally drained, but it was the fucking weirdest thing. It looked like she’d been ripped up by a wild dog before she was killed.” Her eyes were all too knowing. “Since we don’t know of any wild dogs loose in the city, you could say we’re a little mystified.”
