“Hold on.” He padded over to the door, slid the security chain on, and opened it a crack. Cade was propped up against the door frame, his face and one sardonically raised eyebrow visible through the gap.
“What would you do if I just kicked the door in?” he asked.
Marlow held the gun up. “Shoot you and deal with the paperwork later,” he said. “What do you want?”
For a second, something dark and hot flickered through Cade’s eyes, still bright amber even hours after sunrise. It made the breath catch in Marlow’s throat with sudden sticky awareness. Then Cade throttled it back.
“Nothing that I’m going to do in the street,” he said. His voice was still rough, low, and scratched around the edges, but it was more clipped now as the wolf faded and the asshole was back in the driving seat. “So let me in, before I tell your captain you’re not being helpful.”
Marlow closed the door on him. The glimpse of deep black offense he saw on Cade’s face for the second before the wood blocked it wasverysatisfying. For a second, Marlow considered leaving it at that, but fulfilling as it was to piss off the biggest pain in the Night Shift’s collective ass for years…
The captain had assigned him the case, like it or not. Marlow didn’t follow orders blindly, but he needed more reason than pissiness to ignore his boss.
Besides, his door was made of plywood and six layers of paint. If Cade wanted to kick it in, it probably wouldn’t take long.
Marlow still let the door stay closed a second longer than necessary before he unhooked the chain and opened it again. On the other side, Cade glared at him, those wolf-gold eyes narrowed.
“What?”
“I don’t like having doors slammed on me.”
Marlow wiped sleep out of the inner corner of his eye. “Yet I bet it happens a lot.” He stepped back and gestured for Cade to come in. “And yeah, it was childish. I’m not used to being woken up during the day.”
For a second, Cade just looked more pissed off. Then he visibly moved past that as he stepped over the threshold and looked around. His eyebrows twitched up as he took in the open-plan space with the huge, poorly installed French doors that let in the sun most of the day.
“This is… open,” he said.
“It was cheap.”
“I’m sure.”
Marlow didn’t bother to bristle at the faintly disdainful note in Cade’s voice. His house wasn’t to a wolf’s taste; that was why it was cheap. Too much light, too much space, no basement. It had actually been an artist’s studio when Marlow moved in, bought just for the view of Sunset Cliffs.
“It suits me,” he said. “But I’ll admit, nobody ever wants to crash here. What do you want?”
Cade turned to look at him and paused. His eyes tracked down Marlow’s body, from his head to his cartoon mouse boxers. His attention lingered on the scars that stippled over Marlow’s shoulder and spread over his ribs. Just two shots, but they’d made a mess. And Marlow didn’t have a wolf’s advantages.
After a moment, Cade looked back up. Marlow waited.
“I found whose house the entry card belonged to,” Cade said. It wasn’t what Marlow had expected, and he was off-balance for a second. Then he caught up, and he felt a pinch of guilt that he’d let the dead girl slip to the back of his mind. “Whoever it is shouldn’t have been there, but his business manager is willing to talk to you if you get there in the next hour.”
Marlow checked the time and swallowed a groan. He’d had three hours and twenty minutes sleep, and now the adrenaline from his abrupt wake-up call had faded, he could feel it. It would have to do; he’d functioned on less.
He scrubbed his free hand over his face and up into his hair, tangles caught around his fingers.
“Give me five minutes to get dressed,” Marlow said as he turned to head into the bedroom. “Then we’ll go.”
“One question,” Cade said before Marlow could close the door behind him. The clipped edge to his voice was close enough to a command that habit made Marlow turn on his heel. “You got the full show this morning, so how come I just get boxers?”
Marlow looked down at himself, past the scars to the wrinkled boxers he’d dragged on before he collapsed face-first into his pillows earlier. Six years ago, and Cade would have gotten his show—no boxersorscars. He shrugged and gestured with the gun still loosely gripped in one hand. “Same reason I sleep with this under my pillow, I guess,” he said. “If you want to put some coffee on, feel free.”
No coffee.
It turned out that Cade wasn’t domesticated. Marlow couldn’t pretend he was surprised, but when the secretary who’d shown them in invited them to sit down, he decided to stand. Right now, he could have dozed off in one of the station’s uncomfortable plastic chairs, never mind in what looked like an oversized, overstuffed cushion on legs.
Cade stayed on his feet too and paced restlessly around the room.
Marlow leaned on the filing cabinets—although the sleek black glass towers had little in common with the dented, sharp-edged steel ones at the station—and looked over the posters on the wall. The office was cutting-edge modernity, monochrome in black and gray, with the only splash of color, the bright red chair. Through the gray tint of Marlow’s glasses, everything looked as if it was faintly grubby. In contrast, the posters were explosions of color and block lettering: musicals, rom-coms, and a few kids' movies, based on the “Sheepret Agent” poster.
