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In the aftermath, there was nothing but silence and the smell of gun smoke.
She looked back at Lucan. “You’re going to Caldwell now and completing your job. And you know, if your girlfriend plays by my rules, I might let her live, if it’s beneficial for me.”
“Fuck you.”
“Her life is in your hands, wolf.”
Bide your time, he told himself. The female was right, he and Mayhem and Apex were not enough to hold control. Not right now. But with the right plan?
He needed time to think.
Grinding his molars, he muttered, “Yeah. Fine.”
“Bring Kane in here,” the female ordered out into the hall. “There’s a bed—okay, fine, let him do it, for fuck’s sake. He wants to play gurney, I don’t give a shit.”
There was a pause. Then she opened the door wider and held it in place with her strong body.
Apex didn’t look at her as he passed by with Kane in his arms. Good thing. The light in his eyes was capable of blowing a mortal right out of their boots.
And hey, at least Rio was nowhere to be found.
As Apex laid Kane out gently and sat on the bed beside him, two guards with shiners like they’d been hit with a set of two-by-fours took up res against the far walls.
Lucan shook his head as he tried to see whether Kane was still alive. “You better hope you didn’t kill him.”
The female shrugged as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “Whether he lives or dies doesn’t matter to me. ‘Adapt and overcome,’ that’s my motto.”
“So you’re a parasite.”
“No, I’m a predator.” She paused by the command table. “Well, well, well . . . look at this.”
The female picked up some papers and went through them. Then she drew them to her nose and sniffed.
“These were your female’s.” She smiled in that cold way of hers. “I can scent her on them. Such a little artist she is, but she wasn’t drawing you. Disappointed?”
As the pages were turned around, Lucan came forward and didn’t bother hiding his intensity.
The head of the guards’ satisfaction was like the bloodstains on the floor, something that penetrated the space around her: “Seems like she wanted to remember exactly what the layout of our facility is.”
Taking the papers from her, he frowned. They were, in fact, line drawings, floor by floor, of the sanatorium. Every room, staircase, hallway, and connector that Rio had been through. Down to the scale. And the head of the guards was right. The paper had Rio’s scent on it.
She had done these.
“But she’s not here anymore, is she,” the other female said. “Because you told her she better save herself—too bad humans can’t dematerialize, isn’t it.”
When he remained stonily silent—because that was what you did when you discovered someone was using you—the female filled the void with conversation.
“Why did you bring her here to the prison camp. And do not lie.”
“She needed to see the production.” He shrugged like he didn’t care. “It’s a big order. She said she wanted to make sure we could handle it.”
“Why be so secretive?”
“She’s a goddamn human.”
“The Executioner wasn’t going to jeopardize the funds flow. She was safe. Why hide her.”
“I don’t trust anyone inside these walls.”
“Not even your Kane?”
Lucan glanced over to the bed. Apex was curved over the other male, as if he were trying to breathe for the aristocrat by will alone. The fact that his own face was bruised and there was blood on his mouth didn’t seem to be something he even noticed.
“Kane is not mine,” Lucan corrected.
In retrospect, José had cursed himself.
That was what he decided as he finally left the homicide division’s bullpen and hung a louie to head down the empty corridor to the chief ’s suite. When he got to the outer door, he wasn’t surprised to see that the window to the waiting area was dark, but he had permission to go in so he tried the door handle.
Fortunately, things had been left unlocked and the motion-activated lights came on as soon as he put a foot inside. No doubt Stan had told Willie to leave things open because he’d been expecting the updated report on Leon Roberts sometime after she left for the day.
José certainly hadn’t thought it’d be this late before he’d finished his typing—he glanced at his watch and cursed. Nine frickin’ p.m. He’d had to call home twice. Once at six, when a tip on a cold case had come in, and then again at 7:30, to let his wife know he needed to stay and do write-ups.
There had been a great deal to add to the report, and not just in terms of the autopsy or ballistics. Lot of people were calling with leads on Roberts’s death. José had fielded them all afternoon long. He didn’t think anything was going to materialize from any of it, but you never knew. So he and Trey had returned thirty-three calls, all of which he’d logged manually into the system from notes he and the kid had scribbled.
