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“Jesus Christ.” He grabbed her wrist to hold her steady while he took a closer look. “You have the same mark as the dead men. I can see the scarab. Holy fuck, you tried to bury it under this other design, but it’s there.”
Fury and confusion sparked in him like a match struck against dry tinder. Mathias felt his gaze heat as the amber light of his anger ignited in the green of his irises. “Are you one of them, Nova?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Did you kill them?”
“God, no!” She moaned then, a terrified sound. The sound of an animal caught in a snare. “Mathias, please...”
He held fast to her wrist, refusing to let her evade him now. “There is video of you at the coroner’s office this morning, Nova. After I told you about the dead men with scarab tattoos, you went to the morgue to see them. You touched them, held their hands. Do you know who they were, or where they came from? Were you mourning any of them?”
“No,” she answered thickly. She struggled against his grasp, but he didn’t release her. Right now, he needed the answer to that last question more than any of the others. “It was nothing like that.”
“Then what was it like? Tell me, Nova. Talk to me. I’m not the only one who’s going to make you explain what you’ve done.”
When she looked up at him in question, in panic, he said, “The video was shown to JUSTIS officers today. They haven’t identified you yet. Since the employee who let you inside isn’t talking, I assume he’s a friend. All he’s done is delay law enforcement from finding you. But they will, and you’ll not only have to answer for the killing I’m certain happened here in the shop, but the other victims you seem to have some connection to as well.”
Her breath leaked out of her, taking some of her fight along with it. “I didn’t kill the man who came in here last night. I wanted to. But he was stronger than me. He clamped his hand around mine and he made...threats. Then he grabbed my hair with his other hand. He wouldn’t let go.” She exhaled a heavy sigh. “Ozzy only wanted to protect me. He did what anyone would do, what I couldn’t do at that moment. After he was dead, Oz and I dumped the body in the river. We tried to weight it down, but there was a storm overnight...”
Mathias listened to her in silence, watched her confess an account he hadn’t quite guessed on his own. And there was a detail that still troubled him. “You said the man made threats. What kind of threats, Nova?” When she didn’t answer after a moment, he freed her hand in order to brush his fingers along the taut line of her jaw. “You knew him, didn’t you.”
She nodded once. “From...before. I hadn’t seen him in ten years, but I would’ve recognized him anywhere. I tried to pretend I didn’t--that’s why I started to give him the tattoo he demanded. But then, after I started working on him, he recognized me too, even though I look very different now. I am very different now.”
“Was he the one who hurt you...before?”
“One of them,” she said. “His name was Orin Doyle.”
Mathias would dig into that name the first chance he got. He only wished he had the opportunity to deliver some pain to the bastard personally before Ozzy stabbed him. “And the others in the morgue?”
Nova shook her head. “I didn’t know them at all. They were associates of Doyle’s, but he betrayed them. He executed them in cold blood down on a dock at the river. There were others with them. They were speaking Russian, I think, making some sort of deal with Doyle’s men. But it all seemed to go wrong. At least one of them was shot too, killed, but not by Doyle.”
Mathias scowled, skeptical. “How can you know all of this?”
“Because that’s what I saw when I touched the bodies. I saw the last few minutes of their lives. I saw how they died. I saw who did it.”
At first, he wasn’t sure what she was saying, then realization dawned. “Your Breedmate gift is a dark one. It can’t be easy for you, having that kind of ability.”
She shrugged, but her voice was quiet, haunted. “I don’t think about it. I don’t use it. Not unless I have to.”
He nodded, solemn with understanding. For all the times he cursed his own grim ability, it was nothing compared to what Nova must experience when she called upon hers. And yet she bore her burden--all of them--with stalwart courage. An extraordinary woman, in so many ways.
As for what she’d revealed just now, Mathias had suspected some kind of massacre, but the news of Russians being part of whatever went down was valuable intel the Order and JUSTIS didn’t have. Still, it only raised more questions.
“Do you know what brought Doyle and those other men to London? You said it seemed like some kind of deal was taking place,” he said, trying to put the pieces together. “Do you know what that deal was about? Do you know why the killings happened?”
“No. That’s not something I could detect with my gift.” She met his gaze solemnly. “I don’t know any of those answers, I swear to you.”
“And the scarab, Nova?”
“What about it?”
“What does the mark mean? There’s no gang known to law enforcement that uses that symbol, so who does it belong to?”
She shook her head mutely, pivoting from him to pace a few steps away. “It’s not a gang. It’s a family symbol. My family.”
He walked up behind her. Gently rested his palms on her shoulders. “Tell me their name, Nova.”
“Now, you ask too much,” she murmured. “I ran away from them a long time ago, for good reason. I won’t speak the name and let that evil touch me again.”
