And what of his mission? Overriding all those concerns was the risk of losing his focus once he took a sip of her nectar. His sole purpose was to protect those who could not do so for themselves. Lounging betwixt Ari’s thighs was a selfishness he did not dare entertain. His wife’s memory deserved more.
“Bale.” Amaryllis laid her palm against his cheek. “If I were still your queen, I would command you to open up your heart and believe in the power of love again.”
He bit back a smile. Only a royal would believe they had the power to order another how to feel. “But you will do so anyway.”
“No. I am going to pray for you, Balellanos. I am going to make a plea to every god of every faith in existence that you will find your heart again, because you are worthy.”
His vision blurred as a band wrapped around his chest and up over his throat to squeeze the breath from him. He wanted to shout at her to not waste her energy, to deny her words, but he didn’t have the strength.
When everyone had wanted him dead, Amaryllis was the only person who believed he had merit. She fought for him when no one, not even himself, thought him worthy to live. Her faith in him was both a gift and a curse, and why he swore fealty to her although she no longer wore the crown.
“Will that be all, your highness?” he asked in a voice as smooth as coarse sandpaper.
Her slight smile made his stomach clench as she uttered the words that struck fear into the hearts of every Llanos warrior.
“For now.”
Chapter Five
Captain Marco DeWinter stomped down the aisle between the cubicles that made up the organized crime and vice divisions of the city’s police department. The dramatic slamming of a door would have made his exit so much more satisfying, but since the only person with an enclosed office on this level was his POS commander, the pounding of his steel-toed boots on the paper-thin carpet had to do.
God, he wished he had a cigarette. Not that he smoked. Actually never touched the cancer sticks, but the idea of feeling his lungs catch on fire then letting it all out on a long, slow exhale sounded like an excellent distraction. Well, a good fuck would do that too, but he couldn’t develop an ill-timed hard-on by fantasizing about cigarettes.
“What’s the word, humming bird?” his lieutenant Cassidy Coulter asked as he held open the door to the elevator.
“Just a minute.” Marco bit his tongue during the short ride down to the parking level and the hundred and thirty steps across the pavement to the police-issued Jeep Cherokee where he slid onto the passenger seat. “Drive,” he ordered as soon as Cassidy stuck the key into the ignition.
The moment the vehicle left the garage and turned onto the paved road, Marco let loose with a bellow, “Motherfucker,” which then led into a litany of curses that questioned the legitimacy of every one of Commander Asante’s relations going back several generations before launching into a detailed description of what exactly Asante could do with his directive and ending with a hurled insult at the Lord and Savior because, hell, why not include the Big Guy too?
“Went well I see,” Cassidy said and pulled into the nearest parking lot.
Marco wiped his hand over his mouth and focused on controlling the pounding of his heart and the ability to speak without shouting. “The Smithwick case has been dropped.”
“Fuck,” Cassidy spat and slapped the steering wheel with the flat of his hand, then again for good measure. “Why the fuck for? We’re so close to nailing that bastard.”
“Until evidence presents itself that can directly implicate the suspect, we are forbidden to pursue the matter further, quote Commander Asswipe.”
“Right, like evidence is just going to fall into our laps. He’s on the take, he’s gotta be, we just haven’t linked him to Smithwick yet. There is no good reason to stop now.”
Marco wanted to agree, but his gut said there were other reasons why his team was pulled away from apprehending one of the biggest crime lords in the state. Asante was too lazy to be on the payroll of a crime boss. He’d have to actually work to make sure he held up his end of the bargain.
“I didn’t say I’m stopping.” Marco reached into his jacket pocket for the pack of gum he kept on hand and pulled out a stick. “What I do on my free time is nobody’s business but my own.”
“No.” Cassidy shook his head. “No, no, no. You go rogue, you get busted, you get fired. Then I’m stuck with one of Asswipe’s cronies as a captain and life sucks. Is it bullshit the case was dropped? Yes, but do not do something stupid, you hear me?”
Marco chomped on his gum.
“Captain. Do you hear me?”
“Yup.” Didn’t mean he was listening.
Cassidy sighed and leaned back in his seat. “Where to now?”
“We’ve been assigned to a new case. Head to Nguyen and Son’s Jeweler.”
“Theft? We’ve been assigned a case of B&E where the perps have already been captured? Double bullshit.”
“Nope. We’ve been assigned to a case of vigilante justice. The Hood made an appearance.”
“Triple bullshit.”
“Just drive, Coulter.”
Marco snapped his gum and focused on reining in his anger on being pulled from a case he invested three years of his life on. If he spent another second thinking about the manpower, the extra-long nights and the resources that had gone into working out the intricate thread of Smithwick’s network, that was now all for naught, he’d go apeshit.
Taking down an organization as large as Smithwick’s was not an easy task, and the commander should have understood that. No matter how much evidence he had presented to the commander as to why to keep the case open, the dickwad had done nothing but shake his head and repeat that department resources were too low to continue to track down a ghost.
The most galling thing of all was that he almost had him too. A fact which made Marco want to punch the wall with his head.
Almost a year had passed since the night he had had the drop on Smithwick. A year since the capture of the piece of shit had been so close, Marco had heard the snap of handcuffs clicking around the man’s wrists.
The crime lord had gotten sloppy and kidnapped the girlfriend of one of his enemies. A good guy who had asked Marco for help in her rescue. For a second he had the little bald-headed criminal in his sights, then all hell had broken loose and the bastard got away.
The memory of Smithwick running to the fire exit as gunfire erupted all around them woke Marco up many a night. In his dreams he played out over three hundred different scenarios where he succeeded and Smithwick had been captured, only to wake up on the break room’s couch and head back to his cubicle to renew the search.
All that time, and now his team had been pulled off the case and assigned to track a different ghost. A goddamn vigilante.
Cassidy pulled to a stop behind a police cruiser in front of Nguyen and Son’s Jewelry. At this time of morning the only other people out were the street sweepers and delivery trucks making their daily runs.
The front door chimed as they entered and both men paused inside the entry to scan their surroundings. Not a thing looked out of place that he noticed at first glance. The glass door was in one piece and all the display cases were intact. A medic was in the corner administering first aid to a gentleman with blood splattered on his collar and one hell of a bruise coloring his face. The young woman seated beside them rocked in her chair, her arms wound around her body like a straitjacket.
Two officers from theft were gathering the last of their supplies and nodded at Marco with sly grins on their faces. They knew what he was there for and probably couldn’t wait to give him a hard time.
“Where’s Sanchez?” he asked.
“In the back. Surveillance room is on the left.” The grin spread wider. “Do you want me to pick you up a shield? That’s some sword your boy carries. You may need a full suit of armor when you go after him.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“What about some
chainmail, or a horse? A noble steed for a noble stud?”
“Funny.” He turned his back on the officer and headed for the woman. “Hello, are you Ms. Nguyen?”
She nodded.
“I’m Captain Marco DeWinter, this is Lieutenant Coulter. I know you’ve had a really long night and we don’t want to take up too much of your time, but we have a few more questions for you.”
“No, no, no.” The older man jumped from his seat and waved his arms. “You talk to me.”
“And you are Mr. Nguyen, correct?”
“Yes. I her father. Anything you say, say to me.”
Marco restrained his eye roll and reiterated the information he had already been given by Asante. “Correct me if I’m wrong, sir. I was told that after your nephew and his friend surprised you last night by entering the shop with a stolen key, you were knocked unconscious by one of the suspects. Is that right?”
“Yes, yes.” His answer was accompanied by lots of nodding.
“And is it also correct that you did not regain consciousness until after the paramedics arrived?”
“Yes.”
“Great. I’m going to talk to your daughter now since she is the only eyewitness present at the moment. Now, Ms. Nguyen, can you please tell me what happened after your father was knocked out?”
The girl looked toward her frowning father and remained silent. Apparently Daddy had her on a tight leash.
“I can go look at the surveillance footage, but I’d like to hear your version first.”
Her eyes widened before she looked down at the floor. Her cheeks pinked as she stuttered out the words. “Tinh’s friend, Danny, he pushed me at the safe and yelled at me to open it.”
“And did you?”
She shook her head. “I’ve only opened it once before. I couldn’t remember how.”
“Then what happened?”
“Danny said he’d hurt me if I didn’t open it quick. And then Tinh said he heard a noise and went into the hall. When he came back, he said it was nothing.”
“And was it nothing?”
She peeked up at him and shook her head.
“What was it?”
“I do not know, but soon a man was in the doorway.”
“What did he look like?”
“Big.”
“And?” he prompted when she fell silent.
“Really big.”
“I need a little more than that. Skin color, body size? What was he wearing?”
“Black. He had on a hooded sweatshirt, black coat, black pants. Everything was black.”
“Gotcha. Did you see his face? What color was his skin?”
“Not very well. Only this part.” She drew a circle around her mouth and chin. “And his skin was white. Very pale.”
“Did he carry a weapon?”
“Yes, a sword.”
“And what did it look like?”
“It was very big.”
Coulter snorted with laughter and continued to scribble notes on a small pad of paper.
“Got it.” Marco sighed. This girl was going to make a spectacular witness. “Did he say anything? Was his voice deep, high? Did he have an accent?”
“His voice sounded like his throat hurt. Deep and scratchy. Very nice. Very manly.” A sparkle winked in her eye before she realized what she said and looked back at the floor. “He said for them to go and leave me alone. Danny told Tinh to kill him and they yelled at each other. Then the man moved…” Her brow furrowed.
“What happened next? How did he move?”
“Fast. So fast. He broke Tinh’s arm and slammed Danny into the wall. Boom. Quick like. Then he told me to sound the alarm and get rope.”
“And did you?”
“Yes. Well, I got jeweler’s twine. We didn’t have rope.”
“And then he tied them up?”
She sneaked a glance at her father and leaned forward to whisper, “I did.”
Marco raised a brow. Whatever happened after she retrieved the twine, she obviously didn’t want her father to know about. This could be interesting. “What else did he do?”
“Nothing. He left right after.”
“Thank you, Ms. Nguyen. I’ll call your father if I have any other questions. Fine by you, Mr. Nguyen?” He raised his voice so the eavesdropping man could hear.
“Yes. Fine. Fine.”
“Right. Let’s go check out this video,” he said to Coulter and headed down the hall.
Marco remembered the first sighting of this mysterious crusader during the prior winter when a gang had been set upon by a man wielding a sword of all things. Three members had been slaughtered before another maniac with his own sword showed up and the two had gone all Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon before a peanut gallery of shocked witnesses. Eye-witness accounts of what happened that night were pretty fantastical. Too bad the traffic cameras in that part of town had been shut down due to budget cuts. Physical evidence would have been nice to support the stories that had flown around the station.
Since that night all had been quiet but for the odd rumors popping up every few months about a guy wearing a hooded sweatshirt and carrying a sword being spotted around town and dispensing his own brand of justice. His victims had been found bound, gagged or with limbs missing. Sometimes all of the above. Whoever it was, he was good at hiding his trail, never leaving a speck of DNA and keeping his face obscured. He was a ghost no one could prove existed.
Until now.
Marco paused at the entrance to the scene of the crime and issued a low whistle when he saw the three-foot-wide hole in the drywall. “Damn. No wonder he’s in the hospital. I heard one had a broken arm and the other a pulverized wrist and broken back. Now I can see why.”
“Impressive, huh?” Officer Sanchez asked from the dark closet of a room across the hall. “Wait until you see the footage.”
In the small floor space that was available he had set up a tiny portable table to hold the laptop he had plugged into the server that fed the security system. Not willing to swim in the stench that seemed like half a bottle of Polo, Marco watched from the doorjamb.
Sanchez motioned them to gather around the computer then typed in the commands to begin the video. “I heard you and your team were the lucky SOBs who get to apprehend this caped crusader.”
Marco snorted. “Nope. Our guy doesn’t wear a cape.”
“Ha ha.” Sanchez flipped him off. “I also heard the Smithwick case had been closed.”
Good news traveled fast. “Hiatus. We are on a hiatus.”
“Sure. Sure.” He smirked. “Okay. Let me fast forward a little here to the good stuff. This part here is where Tinh Nguyen and his boy Danny enter the shop and find Mr. Nguyen and his daughter in the office. Judging by the expressions, it looked as if the boys thought the place was empty.”
Sanchez slowed the video down at the moment Danny Phong hit Mr. Nguyen in the head with the butt of his gun. Mr. Nguyen went down hard, crashing into the corner of the desk as he fell. The video didn’t carry any sound, but Marco could imagine the screams coming from the daughter as her mouth opened and her body shook.
Phong slapped her across the face twice and pushed her toward the safe. The girl’s hand slipped off the dial several times as she turned to say something to Phong over her shoulder. While this was going on, Tinh maintained an eye on the hallway, the hand holding the gun swung wildly with his agitated movements. The kid had no idea how to hold a weapon.
“That’s cold letting your family be knocked around like that,” Coulter muttered.
Marco grunted. Coulter had only been on his team a few years. He had yet to build up his intolerance to the cruelties of humanity. Marco wasn’t sure if that was a blessing or a curse.
“Ah. Here we go,” Marco said as all the players on the screen froze as one. Phong motioned to Tinh, who then moved out of camera range. “Do we have any footage of the hallway or back door?”
“We have the alley but not the hallway,” Sanchez answered.
He nodded and bent lower to focus on the screen.
Both he and Coulter exhaled at once as their vigilante came into view. The guy was huge. Compared to the others in the room he looked as if he’d just stepped off the beanstalk. While Tinh and Phong blustered about like chickens the hooded man was statue-still, almost as if he were a freeze frame to their fast forward. One second he had been in the doorway and in the next frame Tinh was on the floor and the stranger had Phong up against the broken wall as if he were hanging a piece of artwork.
Marco straightened. “What happened? Why did the video skip?”
Sanchez smiled. “It didn’t.”
He raised a brow. “Are you telling me this guy moved ten feet across the room in one second?”
“The video says it all. Look, I’ll even rewind and slow the frames down.”
As each frame ticked by, yes indeed, The Hood had two men incapacitated in less than ten clicks of the mouse. Marco would have thought the feat impossible except he had seen someone move with that kind of speed once before.
Well, I’ll be damned.
Life just got a hell of a lot more interesting.
“Hey,” Coulter whispered. “Doesn’t that remind—”
“Shh,” he hushed. “Burn me a copy, Sanchez, and include any other footage with him on it from the other cameras.” He nodded and gestured for Coulter to follow. “Let’s head to the hospital.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Coulter asked as he slid into the driver’s seat.
“Probably. Let’s concentrate on finding the man first.” He unwrapped another piece of gum and chewed in silence as he organized his thoughts.
Going to talk to Phong and Nguyen was a mere formality in his opinion. He doubted they’d have anything else to add to the investigation. Even if they had seen the man’s face, he knew whoever was under the hood was not easily traceable. The only way they were gonna find this vigilante was to capture him in the act. Marco’s options were either have his team launch a sting operation or track down the guy to where he lived and wait for him to make a move.
Fortunately Marco had an idea of where to start, and the hospital wasn’t it. But if he didn’t interview the two victims it would look odd on the police report. No need to give Commander Asswipe a reason to poke his nose into the case.
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