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For the longest time, he just stood there, measuring her. Looking right through her. God help her if he ever saw the truth.
“When you’re ready, I want you to tell me what happened here, Nova. All of it. As for the rest...” His deep voice trailed off, and he gave a weary shake of his head. “You know how to reach me.”
She stepped away from the open door. “Good-bye, Mathias.”
He walked out.
As soon as he had, she closed the door behind him and threw the bolt.
Then she sagged back against the battered black steel and released the shaky breath that had been burning in her lungs.
CHAPTER 5
At barely five a.m. the next morning, Nova stood outside the green doors of the Southwark coroner’s office employee entrance in a baggy gray sweatshirt and jeans, her hair concealed under a knit cap. She rapped twice, her breath steaming as she waited in the pre-dawn chill.
The door creaked open, revealing a reed-thin man in a white lab coat. His graying, dishwater blond hair was caught up in an elasticized plastic cap, baring his neck and the edges of the extensive tattoos that weren’t quite concealed by the collar of his coat.
“Thanks for doing this, Stan.”
“No worries,” her long-time client said. “I’m the only one on shift right now, so come on in.”
She’d called him last night, immediately after Mathias Rowan left the shop. Stan hadn’t asked any questions about why she was interested in the recent arrivals at the area morgue. That she wanted to come down and have a look had been explanation enough for one of Ozzy’s regulars.
Even better, Stan wasn’t going to require her to present ID and sign in, the way she’d have to if her visit had been anything but covert.
“This way,” he said, leading her inside to a cold room of white tile and stainless steel. The place reeked of antiseptic and death. “All of the John Does are in those coolers on the far wall, Nova. Take as much time as you need.”
She gave him a nod, then waited until she was alone in the room.
She walked over to one of the latched cabinet compartments and opened it. The drawer clicked as she pulled it out, the only sound in the place, now that it was just her and the dead.
The body on the refrigerated stainless steel slab emerged feet-first, a toe tag proclaiming him Unidentified Caucasian Male. Nova tugged the drawer out the rest of the way, and in moments she was looking over the face of the thug from the other night at Ozzy’s.
Orin Doyle.
The name tasted like acid to her senses, the memory of his ugly sneer and terrifying threats chilling her even more than the cold air in the morgue.
She wasn’t interested in him now. He wasn’t the reason she hadn’t been able to sleep last night. He wasn’t the reason she had come to the coroner’s office on an investigative mission of her own.
She had to know more about the others.
Why were men with scarab tattoos suddenly turning up in London?
Had they known she was there?
Doyle had stumbled upon her by accident, but what if there were others in the city now too? Others who might come looking for her, if they weren’t already...
Nova had a thousand questions, but there was only one she could resolve here.
It was someplace to start, at least. If she were lucky, she might learn if her secret was safe, or if she needed to run again.
She could hardly bear the thought of leaving Ozzy after all he’d done for her. The old man had been her only family for almost half her life now. And Eddie, the kid brother she never had.
Her heart hurt to remember another brother, one she knew a long time ago. Older than her by a lifetime, it seemed, Aedan had been the sole kindness in a beautiful, glittering house full of hideous, private brutality and unspeakable abuse.
A Breed male born to the monster who’d adopted Nova when she was a young child, Aedan never knew what she’d been going through. She’d been forced to smile and act her part, keep all of her toxic secrets bottled up inside. And then Aedan left their Darkhaven home, never to return, and from then on she’d been truly alone.
Ozzy and Eddie were the family she made for herself in the time since, and after last night, she’d dragged Oz into the violence and ugliness of her past too.
