by Jenn Stark
“Is it that bad?”
“It’s bad enough,” he growled, and she thought, and not for the first time, she realized, about how much everything Warrick said sounded like a growl.
“You know, I get the feeling you got a problem with anger issues,” she said.
Warrick’s bark of laughter was so abrupt, so startling, that Maria jumped, spilling her water on her jeans.
“Oh!” The sudden burst of cold was almost as alarming as Warrick’s large hand palming a towel over the stain, a dry towel this time, the movement so fast, she couldn’t process. She must have seriously had her clock cleaned for her not to—
“Sorry.” Warrick’s mouth was close to hers, too close, his worried eyes scanning her forehead, her cheeks, her mouth, as if the spilled water had caused far more damage than it could have, since it’d hit her lap, not her face.
“It—it’s okay,” Maria said shakily, aware that she was staring at the man’s lips, but not so much caring at the moment. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
The lips quirked into a rueful smile, the expression so unexpectedly beautiful that Maria hiccupped a breath. What is my problem? People smile all the time!
“You couldn’t offend me,” Warrick rumbled and eased back slightly, as if he too realized that he was leaning in too close. “We’ve got to talk about this before you pass out, though.”
“This…” Unbidden, too many thoughts assaulted Maria, and none of them had anything to do with what she knew—knew—Warrick was talking about. He meant the attack in Sycamore Park, but all she really cared about was what had happened earlier: him standing in the shower with her, his arms wrapped around her body like he’d been doing it for a decade, her head resting on the broad plane of his chest. She wanted those arms around her again, she decided. She wanted her head on that chest.
No. That wasn’t why either one of them was here.
Maria shook her head again, trying to ward the thoughts away, and winced as her brain seemed to slide around inside her skull. She had to focus.
She told Warrick what he wanted to know. “I recognized three of the guys on you from La Noche, but I couldn’t tell you their names. I didn’t get that close a look at them, more of a feeling.”
“And the two men who targeted you?”
“No clue,” she said. “They had to be Noche as well, but they weren’t anyone I’d ever seen, definitely not anyone I’d seen talking to Jack. They zeroed right in on me, though. Probably someone connected to that Bonnie guy.”
Warrick’s gaze met hers. “Bonnie.” He seemed to savor the word, roll it around his mouth, almost making its utterance a ritual.
That was…weird.
“Yeah, that’s what they called the guy I…well, I didn’t really, well…” She blew out a long breath. “Jack wasn’t there for that, and I wasn’t exactly clear with Stan, so you don’t officially know this. And I’m only telling you because you need to know what really happened. It might get brought up.”
“Got it,” he said. “Go.”
She nodded tightly, then launched in. “Two nights ago, I was supposed to kill whoever the Guardia asked me to. I had a plan worked out—I’m a pretty good shot. They don’t know that. I know where to hit someone where they’ll bleed a lot but not die, at least not if someone makes an even passable attempt at first aid. I was still pretty nervous, though. I didn’t want to do the job, but with Jack picked up, it was that or do something less appealing.”
It was Warrick who nodded now, his golden eyes almost sort of…glittering. She really had been hit hard, she decided. Next she knew, there’d be Disney bluebirds fluttering around his head.
“Okay, so I get to the back room, Cedo’s there, he gives me the gun, the guys peel back, and there’s one of the dancers, drugged out of her mind. Only I wasn’t so much focused on her but on this Bonnie guy—I didn’t know his name then.”
Warrick spoke it again, and a shiver rolled down Maria’s arms. She narrowed her eyes at him.
“You know him?”
He smiled, a dangerous expression crossing his face. “Only by reputation. And so instead of shooting the girl, you shot him.”
“Well, that’s kind of debatable. A gun went off. The trajectory made it my gun, but I would swear to the death it wasn’t me who pulled the trigger. The more I think about it, the more I can’t reconcile it, but that first shot…” She grimaced. “Anyway, the guy went down, and I fired two more shots for good measure.”
“Because you didn’t believe you’d shot the first time, and the gun needed to feel like it’d been fired for you to pass Cedo’s test.”
“Right. And then—that was that. The girl started screaming, half the room emptied, and the other half stood staring at the dude on the floor. Who was not right.”
“Mm…” Warrick had lifted the towel again and pressed it against her head. It was still damp and surprisingly warm. It felt good. “Not right how?”
Maria let her eyes drift shut. “He bled out, which was bad enough. But it was, like, a lot of blood, and seriously messed up. Black and thick and kind of like liquid soot. Hell, it was hot enough to smoke, like it was on fire. I’ve never seen anything like it. And there was a lot more of it than there should have been, given where I’d shot him and how quickly he died. His heart should have stopped pumping that shit out—but it kept coming, a siphon of sludge.”
“Cedo see this?”
“Yup. He was convinced Bonnie was high or something, that he was killed by the combination of the drug and the gunshot, not the gunshot alone. He kept saying there was no way I could’ve taken him out.”
Warrick nodded. That answer seemed to satisfy him, so Maria continued. “He’s the one who warned me about Takio potentially targeting me.” She managed a wry grin and sighed wearily. “Score one for Cedo.”
“Score one,” Warrick agreed, though indignation flared through him, overheating his skin. If he didn’t watch it, the warmth he was transferring to the damp towel would end up scalding Maria. But there was nothing she was telling him that he hadn’t already known when he’d lifted that gun and aimed it at the demon staring stupidly at Maria, confident in his own invincibility. No human could kill a demon, or even seriously wound one. That was an incontrovertible truth. And unfortunately, Warrick hadn’t been able to stick around to see the shock and confusion of the demon as it had fallen to the ground. Of course, neither had he been around to watch the reaction of this Cedo character.
He knew from Jack that Cedo wasn’t someone to mess with. He also suspected he was almost certainly the second demon who’d been in the room along with the one Maria called Bonnie. Neither of them had picked up on Warrick’s arrival or his departure. And apparently, though Bonnie had been dropped by the bullet from Maria’s gun, Cedo had assumed that it wasn’t the shot that’d killed Bonnie so much as the cocktail of drugs running through his system. Drugs that had been created by demons, after all, and so could potentially be deadly to other demon kind.
Would Holkeri think the same thing?
Maybe. But first Holkeri would want to rule out the work of another demon, which was why Ganit and Furth had been tapped to attack Maria. Any demon worth her salt would’ve been able to take out those two idiots. That Maria had only barely fended them off validated her humanity. Warrick hoped that her failure to defend herself more ably would be enough to divert the suspicion from her.
Another possibility for Maria being able to kill Bonnie was that she was somehow blessed by God. That didn’t happen so often anymore, but it did happen, and she did wear a cross quite prominently. However, once again, Dopey One and Two had been able to take her down right in front of her big strong boyfriend. So the special-blessing theory was out.
That left option three, which was going to make Cedo cranky as well as Takio: that another demon had slipped in and done the deed. As complex as that scenario might seem, it happened often enough. Demons delighted in nothing more than using mortals as a bluff or a shield to help them t
ake each other out. The Syx might be the best at effecting glamour, but other demons also had access to that same ability. The older, cagier ones were damned good at using it.
Warrick tightened his jaw. Holkeri would be good at using it too, he suspected. He’d used it once before, after all, to strike at Warrick where he was the most vulnerable. Back before he’d gone by the name of Warrick at all.
“What are you thinking about?” Maria’s sleepy voice brought him back.
“Takio.” He grunted. Holkeri. This wouldn’t be the first time they’d crossed paths since the breaking of the world. But it would be the last, he resolved.
“What about him?”
Warrick looked over to catch her watching him, her eyes filled with fatigue but not with pain anymore, her face somehow more beautiful even as her skin turned yellow and dark, angry strips of red pooled beneath her eyes. She would ordinarily have an impressive black eye to show off to Cedo’s thugs and make Takio’s dogs preen, but Warrick wasn’t about to let that happen. He would wait until she drifted to sleep, and then—then he would heal her.
Even demons retained the barest whispers of abilities from the Beneficent Father. The beloved creations of such a powerful being could fall only so far…at least those, like Warrick, who still proved useful despite their condemnation.
Knowing Maria was waiting for an answer, Warrick shrugged. “He’s proud. He’ll want to send a message.”
Maria grimaced. “I kind of thought that was the point of attacking us in the park.”
“That’s a start, definitely. But rather than taking your beating like you were supposed to, you held your own. You fought back.”
“I fought back because I had you. My Red Spider buyer, Captain Big Shot. You fought like you were on fire, and once those idiots scrape themselves off the ground, they’ll be reporting what happened. We could both be targeted for that.”
He nodded. “Which is why I need to know your specific interest in Takio and this Noche gang.”
She straightened carefully, but he knew her well enough already to know her next words would be lies. “I don’t have any interest outside my assignment,” she said stiffly. “I was sent down here from Sylmar because I have local history, and I wouldn’t look too out of place in the old neighborhood.”
“That may explain why you were chosen, but it doesn’t explain why you wanted to be chosen.”
“I told you. It’s my job.”
“There’s more to it than that. You have to volunteer to go undercover, and the pay isn’t that much better when you factor in all the extra hours you’re actually working.”
“Maybe I—”
“Maria.” Warrick didn’t intend for his voice to sound so desperate, so pleading, but the combination did the trick. Maria stopped in the middle of her banal explanation and stared at him, really stared at him.
“Please,” Warrick said. “I don’t mean to pry. I truly don’t. I’m sure your reasons are every bit as valid as my own for taking Takio down. But I have to know them to understand them. If I don’t, something might happen while we’re inside the Citadel, something that doesn’t mean anything to you but is a direct outcome of whatever it is that brought you to Takio’s door. He’s—he’s been around the block long enough to be able to uncover anyone’s secrets. You better believe he’s going to be working to uncover yours if he can. Especially if that secret is linked to him.”
For a long minute, Maria stared at Warrick, then she looked away, her lips pressed together. And kept lying to him.
“I got nothing against Takio that a hundred other people from this neighborhood don’t,” she said. “He’s been in this community a long time, and he’s a bad guy. I shouldn’t have to need any other reason to want to take him down.”
Warrick exhaled. He’d been so close—so close to getting her to cave. Had she picked up on that, seen through his attempt? It didn’t matter. Because she was warded with the cross around her neck, a cross he couldn’t even touch without his fingers blistering, he was stuck. Until she gave the information to him voluntarily, he would have to wait.
Wait…and keep a constant guard.
Chapter Eight
“Pretty impressive fighting, Maria. I didn’t know you had it in you.”
Cedo sat at one of the empty booths in the roped-off VIP section of the strip club, where he usually held command performances so that he and his men could watch the women on stage. If it made whoever he was meeting with distracted or, even better, uncomfortable, so much the better.
“I didn’t either.” Maria shrugged, keeping her eyes on the lieutenant, not on the dancers. “It’s not something I hope to repeat anytime soon.”
It was the afternoon after the fight, and her face still felt like day-old raw meat. Maria had been called on what passed for a red carpet, but at least they were all sitting—including Warrick. She’d expected the courtesy for a buyer, but if Cedo had left her standing, she would have been seriously concerned. Still, there was no denying the way the lieutenant was eyeing her, his gaze straying to the vee of her T-shirt way more than it usually did, especially given that Warrick was sitting right there.
With a big show of accepting Warrick’s story that he was a buyer interested in checking out La Noche’s wares, Cedo hadn’t given Warrick more than a cursory quiz. Warrick’s responses had been to the point, unconcerned. Maria suspected there’d been an intense background check on Warrick before Cedo had summoned her to bring him back, but the lieutenant now seemed completely relaxed.
What was it with Warrick and his canned charisma?
The Fed wasn’t Maria’s problem, though. Cedo was. Cedo, who was still staring at her like she was some kind of jigsaw puzzle that was missing a few pieces.
She decided to go on the offensive. “Is there something I did wrong?” she asked, letting her panic show in her face enough to demonstrate her respect for the lieutenant, his position in the gang. “Should I, um…” She swallowed. “Should I have let them take me down in the park?”
“What? No.” Her relief was real as Cedo rejected that assessment out of hand. “No. La Noche appreciates strength. They sent, what, eight guys after the two of you? Eight,” he repeated, eyeing Warrick. For his part, Warrick lounged back in his chair like a cat with all the cream. He’d already given his accounting of the fight, and he’d been pretty accurate too. It’d made him come off like a badass, and it hadn’t surprised Cedo. Yet the lieutenant sharpened his focus to Maria, interested anew. And once again, his gaze shot briefly to her neckline before returning to meet hers.
“Eight men, and you handled them. Even you, who only picked up boxing when you started hanging with Jack. Broke the one guy’s arm and everything.” Cedo seemed to consider that. “You did good, though. You didn’t try to beat up the assholes, you tried to stay alive, defend yourself, and get them off you. Which is what you should do. What anyone in your position should do. Let them see you are defending, not striking, but that you won’t give up.”
Maria nodded, but it was as if Cedo wasn’t talking to her exactly, but repeating a mantra that had been drilled into him at some point, sort of a litany of self-defense. She glanced toward Warrick, but he was peering intently at Cedo too. Taking the opportunity that the moment of Cedo’s distraction provided, she lifted her hand to her chest, tugged up her collar. Her fingers strayed over Cara’s delicate necklace, and she stilled for a half second before continuing the brush of her fingers to push back her long hair.
Then she dropped her hand back to her lap, lacing her fingers together tightly. Was that Cedo’s problem? Cara’s necklace? Had he been ogling her breasts, or was his focus more on the tiny gold cross? They never talked about faith in the Guardia, ever. In private moments, she had with Jack once or twice, but Jack was at a crossroads in his life. Crossroads were excellent locations to have conversations about faith.
Still, surely her cross didn’t make the leader of the Guardia uncomfortable. She’d been wearing it constantly for five months,
and he’d never made a single comment about it. Why the sudden focus?
Her mental clamor was cut short as a man walked up to Cedo, then leaned down to murmur something in his ear. Cedo’s sudden smile was electric.
“Excellent,” he announced, lifting his tequila to Warrick. “Takio says you check out. He wants to see the two of you. Tomorrow.”
That made both Warrick and Maria sit up straighter. “The two of us?” she asked, unable to help her surge of excitement. “Why?”
Fortunately, Cedo took her eagerness for panic. “Apparently, you’ve impressed him, that’s all,” he said, then nodded to Warrick. “And of course, he’s more than happy to entertain a buyer for his brand-new…product. We’ll send a driver along to protect you as well, at least as far as the front gates.”
“Will he protect us as well as the guys you had on us yesterday protected us?” Warrick’s words were delivered in a dark rumble, though once again, Cedo didn’t seem to take offense. “Because they weren’t all that useful.”
“They weren’t supposed to be useful to you,” Cedo said, leaning back in his chair. “They were supposed to watch.”
“Well, that part, they had down.”
“And lucky for you, your account corroborates theirs,” he said. He pointed his finger like a gun at Warrick, and Maria felt the first stab of uneasiness. There were undercurrents here that she couldn’t quite tease out. Cedo didn’t seem mad at them, exactly, but he did seem keyed up. On edge.
“What is it that Takio’s, um, products do?” Maria asked, if only to break the tension. “Do you know?”
Cedo’s gaze flashed back to her. “Million-dollar question—multiple millions, as it happens, buddy, so I hope you’re prepared,” he said, including Warrick in his response. He smiled, and another jolt of panic skittered through Maria. The guy was definitely on edge. “Truth is, though, we’ve been trying to get the goods on this mix for the last month without success. We know Takio’s made some kind of breakthrough with the newest combination he’s been testing—testing because we’ve gotten him what he needs, I might add—but we don’t know the details. We’ve got a couple of ideas, but we also have to protect ourselves. We’re a family here.”
