by Gaja J. Kos
I wound my fingers around her neck, then licked every drop of crimson before nicking my lower lip on her fang.
Another wave of pleasure rocked me, and my back hit the floor. Isa straddled my hips, her mouth coming down hard on mine in a storm of blood and kisses. She slipped a hand down my side, skimming my ribs, then slipped it beneath my T-shirt, my bra, until she cupped my breast. I arched into her touch and tilted my head to the side to expose my neck.
At her bite, the orgasm I’d been chasing slammed into me with mind-shattering force.
Isa didn’t drink deeply, but the small, graceful sips combined with her fingers working my nipple cast me into a vortex of pleasure that refused to subside. I wasn’t even sure how I got my body to cooperate, but between one moment and the next, my hand was in her pants, fingers delving into the silken heat of her arousal. Isa moved her hips, working in tandem with my strokes until she came, writhing and moaning—a sight that was so fucking beautiful I could hardly breathe.
When I liberated my hand from her pants, Isa swept down and kissed me.
Kissed me with a passion that had been bottled up for so long, nothing could contain its release.
When we parted at long last, a delicate flush stained her cheeks. The entire dungeon smelled of blood and sex, our ragged breaths ricocheting off the walls. An unguarded, bright laugh unlike anything I’d heard from her bubbled from Isa’s lips.
She smacked her palm over her mouth, but as I grinned, holding back nothing of just how fucking good I felt even in the shitstorm of circumstances we were braving, she, too, let that joy run free.
It was only once our laughter ebbed down organically and the last of post-orgasm haze dispelled that I returned to the shadows Isa needed to shed light on.
“Tell me why Kauer is gunning after you, Isa.”
She curled her legs beneath her and flicked a piece of trash across the ground. “I came too close.” Her lips formed a tight line, but after a long breath, she went on. “I might have been cut off from my ICRA resources while working undercover, but I still had my net of old contacts…as well as made a few new ones thanks to the circles I was forced to operate in. I wanted to find out who Kauer’s business connections were. With a net as large as his, there were bound to be some loose ends willing to speak under a bit of…persuasion.”
“You found them?” I scooted closer.
Isa shook her head. “Someone ratted me out before I could track down any solid leads.”
“How can you be so sure?”
A vampire as old as herself, not to mention an ICRA Senior Agent, made loads of enemies. Just because she was investigating Kauer didn’t mean it was him pulling the strings. After all, Isa wasn’t the only one interested in bringing the fucker down.
“The first murders happened immediately after I started digging.” She tucked her silken black hair behind her ears and leaned back on her palms. “I didn’t think much about it. Not until my liaison shared more intel during one of our meetings. I knew it was only a matter of time before I became ICRA’s prime suspect.”
“So you went into hiding.”
“I did. Not that it did me much good.”
I would have laughed at the dry expression on her face if shit wasn’t as serious as it was.
Isa’s long sigh uncurled through the sex-tinted air. “The murders carried on, targeting locations that coincided with my whereabouts even after I dropped off the radar.” She shifted her feet, the low heel on her boots scraping the worn floor. “Only the last few cities were random—and that, I believed, happened purely because I made sure to fall off the grid entirely.”
I frowned. “Who were you looking into?”
If she had only searched for loose ends, I suspected it would have been a lot easier for Kauer to have them murdered off instead of going through all this trouble to frame Isa. Cleaner, too.
But when I looked at her, the answer became obvious. A chill rushed down my spine.
It wasn’t who she’d been looking into initially.
“Shit, you don’t mean—”
But who she’d started looking into when her investigation became known.
“Kauer is working with someone damn high up the food chain,” Isa confirmed my fears. “Only a person with some serious power could keep everything hushed, keep a human man concealed to the point he might as well be a ghost.”
Fuck. I steeled myself, though it did little to hush the tremors skittering down my limbs.
“Isa…” I shook my head, unable to even comprehend the words coming from my mouth. “We’re talking supe leadership…”
A mirthless smile touched her lips. “Or ICRA.”
17
Isa’s words resonated through the dungeon. ICRA.
If it were someone high up the chain working with Kauer…
“But why?” I asked. “Why the fuck would anyone want to support a scumbag like him? What would they gain?”
Isa rose and strode over to the chain that had held me captive. She took a manacle in her hands and turned it over. “History is full of people who wanted to tailor reality to their tastes at all costs.”
She dropped the shackle, chain rattling as it swung against the wall.
“I don’t know what their end goal is. Supe supremacy?” The way her gaze scanned me brought back unpleasant memories of the facility where they’d imbued me with demonic traits. “Some good old-fashioned world domination?” A bitter laugh left her lips. “What matters right now is that we need to be careful. You need to be careful, Lotte.”
Universes of all the things she didn’t have to say lingered beneath her words. If it weren’t for her, I never would have fallen on ICRA’s radar. Wouldn’t have become a lab experiment, forever changed—
“Isa…” I stood and brushed the dust off my pants. “I won’t let you go through this alone. But if we do this, if I play this double game, I need to know—”
“The murders.”
A wave of relief washed over me that she’d spared me from voicing the damn thing. She inhaled deeply, then nodded—more to herself than me.
“I presume you saw my file.” She sat on a torn leather bench tucked against the chipped, right-hand wall. “There’s no excuse for what I’ve done. None. But there is more to the story.”
I strode across the room and sat beside her. A plume of dust puffed up as my ass hit the leather. “Tell me.”
From somewhere beyond the walls, echoes of a slurred, drunken song rode the night. Isa stared into the distance, her scent shifting through so many nuances it was hard to keep track of all the emotions. I tuned them out.
“I…had magic, Lotte. When I was human—or as human as a half breed can be. When my powers manifested in my teenage years and I found someone to tutor me…it wasn’t light magic that I learned, even if the spells and wards I created were mostly designed to protect the women in my village.”
My mind reeled from all the information. Isa had been a mixed-heritage magic wielder who had skirted the line between right and wrong. I’d always assumed she’d been born a vampire, but…
“You were made.”
Anger simmered across her face. “Forcefully.”
Shit. Though I’d met vampires who recovered from a forceful change—my own sister-in-law among them—the percentage of those who didn’t was far, far greater. I reached out and grasped Isa’s hand.
“My magic might have been dark, but I wasn’t a killer,” she went on. “But after that fuck of a vampire stole my life away, changed me into something I never wanted to be, I…turned.”
Her fingernails dug into my skin, but I didn’t break the contact. Not when it was so clear this part of her past was one she still hadn’t come to peace with. If I were in her position, I doubted I’d fare any better. I’d merely gained demonic traits while retaining my werewolf nature, and still I had a difficult time adjusting to the change. A damn difficult time accepting someone had thought it was in their right to fuck with me. Becoming a vampire and
having your past self wrenched away…
Isa’s voice sent chills down my arms as she said, “I became precisely the creature all cautionary tales warn about. If not worse.”
Her black hair brushed forward as she lowered her head. Without even knowing what I was doing, I reached out with my free hand and tucked it behind her ear.
Isa stilled—stilled so perfectly I wasn’t even sure how that was possible.
Then a tremor washed through her, and she met my gaze, eyes haunted.
No, more than that. It was hurt. Ages-old hurt turning them a devastating green.
“I slaughtered, Lotte. I slaughtered mindlessly and without discrimination. I raged against the world by bathing it in blood, pain, and death. It wasn’t until I reached my village and saw the faces of the people I’d once known that something…broke.” She swallowed, then wiped a rogue tear just as it began to spill down her cheek. “I couldn’t kill them.”
“They were your turning point.”
Isa nodded. “It took a long time for me to get to the point where I am now, but I hadn’t claimed an innocent life since then. I wouldn’t start now.”
My heart broke just hearing her say that. As if she were afraid there was still some kernel of doubt within me.
Or maybe she simply needed the words out when so many people believed she would so easily revert to the version of herself that had put a stain on her soul she’d never be able to wipe, regardless of how much she wanted to.
I liberated my hand from her grasp, but only to wind my arm around her waist and sit closer. Isa shivered against me.
I held her tighter. “The murders in your file belong to that dark time.” When she nodded, I ventured on. “What did the marks mean, Isa?”
The images from the antique book drifted through my mind, the differences between—
“They weren’t dark magic, were they?” I asked.
I’d only compared those symbols in the book to the ones on our latest victims. They didn’t match entirely. But I’d forgotten—I’d forgotten that the recent carvings weren’t the same as the ones on Isa’s old victims, either.
“I hadn’t even been aware I’d made them at the time.” Isa’s voice fractured a little. “Some part of me must have fought the killer that had taken over… Because those marks were symbols of protection. Of an apology. And a request for forgiveness that carried into the underworld.”
After lying through my teeth to ICRA earlier this morning, spending an hour out on the court with an old acquaintance was a reprieve I had no idea how desperately I’d needed—not until I felt the weight of everything melt under the total devotion tennis demanded. It didn’t even matter that it had been the shitstorm of events that had led me to seek out a match with Annika in the first place. The perfect cover to talk with her sister, who happened to be the owner of the club.
I hurried inside to speak with Meredith while Annika was still showering.
The werewolf lounged with one elbow propped against the high counter, watching reruns of a recent grand slam on the flatscreen TV that took up a good chunk of the apricot-painted wall. She smiled when she saw me enter and motioned to the empty stool beside her. I slid onto the polished wood.
“Can I get you anything to drink?” she asked.
“A coffee would be great. But”—I stopped her with a brief touch on the wrist when she moved—“I’d like to talk to you first.”
“Sure.” She sat back down and turned to face me fully.
The commentator broke into bubbling excitement on the TV right as I opened my mouth.
Meredith reached over the counter for the remote and promptly silenced him. “Sorry.”
“No worries.” I unscrewed my bottle and drank those final drops of water still left in it. “Listen, I wanted to ask—are you still running a safe house for supes?”
In a blink of an eye, Meredith’s entire demeanor changed. Gone was the club owner. The breezy, carefree werewolf who possessed the capacity to get along with everybody—precisely the quality that made her establishment so popular among tennis players looking for a place to unwind.
But right now, I was pretty damn thrilled to see this side of her.
“How fast do you need to move her?” Meredith asked.
No questions about who Isa was. The specifics of her situation.
Meredith offered a haven for supes who had it bad in their lives. Toxic parents. Abusive partners. She didn’t want a person’s story until they were willing to share it on their own terms.
“As soon as you can house her,” I said, then, after a quick decision, added, “It’s imperative that she stays out of sight, out of smell, out of everything, really.”
Twin frown lines marked the corners of Meredith’s mouth. “That bad, huh?”
“Yeah. Can you do it, Mer?”
I opened the secure gate leading into the underground tunnels and watched Isa emerge from the dark hole in the floor. Her sharp gaze swept across the rudimentary room with its tiny kitchenette in one corner, a bed tucked in another, and a loveseat and table with several books stacked atop situated on a neutral rug just slightly off-center. A tiny bathroom was tucked behind a door beside the entrance I’d taken from Meredith’s private locker room on the club’s premises.
The place wasn’t among Meredith’s most comfortable safe houses, as she’d explained, but it was definitely the most secure.
And it gave me the chance to come and go unnoticed.
ICRA knew I regularly turned to tennis to keep in shape and clear my mind. Me visiting Meredith’s club was a far more inconspicuous setup than checking into some building in Frankfurt’s center for no apparent reason. On the off chance my superiors were tracking me, they’d see nothing amiss.
“Meredith left some fresh clothes,” I said once Isa moved deeper into the room. I closed the gate to the tunnels, then joined her. “There’s some blood in the minifridge, too. I’ll drop by again tomorrow, but if you need anything, anything at all, you can contact Meredith by phone.”
Amusement touched Isa’s eyes as her gaze landed on the gray, old-school phone screwed onto the wall.
“It’s a direct line to Meredith’s phone in the office but reroutes to her secure mobile if she isn’t in,” I explained.
“Thank you, Lotte.” Isa reached out and grabbed my hand. “I mean it. Thank you.”
The air became charged, but neither of us moved. Regardless of what had happened in that basement, our history was far from a simple one, and this most definitely was not the time to tangle the threads of present time any more than they already were.
I rubbed my thumb against her skin. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
Since I’d tried—and failed—to replicate my particle form, there was no way I could return to the club sooner than that without raising suspicions.
When Isa nodded, I booked it out of there before the part of me that had always craved the vampire could win over my rationality.
After a thorough shower to wash off any traces of Isa’s scent that might have lingered on me, I blow-dried my hair, threw on a T-shirt and shorts, then hurried across Frankfurt’s center to ICRA HQ. Unlike in Munich and Berlin, the Agency’s base here was tucked in a remodeled building with old-school architecture galore. The essence of times past masked the modern upgrades, though my wonder ebbed as I entered the lobby. The damn thing was about as crammed as the midday streets.
I veered towards the long queue of people seeking admission when a vamp waved my way. He ushered me through a side entrance I suspected was reserved for higher-ranking agents and keyed me into the elevator once I told him I was meeting Senior Agent Thode.
Another vampire greeted me once I emerged on the fifth floor. His smooth voice slid over me like silk across naked skin, and I had to think hard to register that he’d just informed me to wait a few minutes for Thode to wrap up his meeting. Okay, not just a vamp, then. That had to have been some incubus juice flowing through his veins to affect me in such a manner.
Still, as I strode down the corridor and leaned against the wall beside three upscale armchairs, I couldn’t help but admit hiring someone like the vamp-incubus hybrid was a wise move.
Kind of hard for people to be cranky when their mind was in a daze.
Besides, as I pulled out my phone to kill the time, I realized whatever dose he’d given off wasn’t potent enough to impair someone’s judgment. Even now, only faint wisps of the previous bliss remained.
I seriously didn’t like anyone messing with my body or mind, but just this once, I decided to let it go.
Easing myself more comfortably against the wall, I scrolled through the messages that had piled up on my phone. There was the usual check-in from Alec to see how I was doing, followed by one from Elsa, who regretted that we had to skip our monthly girls’ night out. Much to my surprise, a quick note from Finn had also popped up—teasing whether the agents in Frankfurt were as awesome as the ones I’d met in Berlin. I chuckled and sent back that with the bar set as high as he’d done, it was unlikely anyone here could surpass it.
My jovial mood, however, dwindled down when I reached a cryptic text from Greta, wanting to talk about the case. I barely even saw the words as thought after thought slammed into my mind.
There was someone at ICRA I could trust. Someone who’d listen to Isa’s story.
I chewed on my lower lip.
But could I drag my sister into this?
It’d only been months since she became head of the Violent Crimes division. I had no doubts she’d take my side on this, but at what cost? I was just one agent. Not only did being a lone wolf make it easier to fly under the radar, but the consequences if ICRA found me out would be limited to me alone.
I let loose a steadying breath and typed back that everything was good, hiding between my words a warning that we shouldn’t even be speaking about this. Sure, curiosity about just what had prompted Greta’s message was killing me, especially since I got the feeling my sister must have heard something, but I was long past the point in this case where rumors could serve me in any helpful way.
