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“Yeah, I thought you’d come up with a great idea to make him back off, bu
t then he hung in there through all the bondage-negotiation talk.”
A dark blue truck started to pull out ahead of us. Edward put on his turn signal and vultured while cars started getting trapped behind him. The person driving the truck didn’t seem to know how to back up without hitting the cars behind them. Big trucks were tricky. It was one of the reasons I didn’t own one; that and I was too short to get into them without climbing. I didn’t need to drive a daily reminder that I was shorter-than-average height for a woman.
“What if Olaf agrees to something that you’d do if it wasn’t him?” Edward asked.
I stared at the side of his face, because it was all I could see. He tried to just look at the truck in front of us, but it was taking so long, he finally had to look at me. His face was empty and unreadable behind the sunglasses.
“You cannot be serious,” I said.
“Petra, or Pierette, is right about one thing, Anita: Your beast doesn’t react to someone unless you’re attracted to them.”
“And?” I said. The one word was as cold and empty as his expression.
“Your beast likes Olaf a lot.”
“The last person my lioness liked this much ended up trying to kill Nathaniel. If Noel hadn’t pushed him out of the way and taken the bullet, I’d have lost Nathaniel.”
“I’m sorry you had to kill Haven to protect everyone, Anita. I know it cost you.”
“Then how can you ask me to even consider another werelion that’s even more dangerous? I will not risk the people I love or the people that I’ve given my protection to because we’re too gutless to tell Olaf the truth.”
The truck finally managed to exit without crashing into the cars in back of it. It took the truck even more time to finally get turned so it could start forward enough that Edward could begin to slide into the parking spot. The truck backed up again. Edward had to slam on his brakes and prove the seat belts worked, or the truck would have hit us. The truck began to try to go forward. Some people shouldn’t be allowed to drive big trucks.
“And what is the truth, Anita?”
“I can’t be his serial killer girlfriend.”
“He doesn’t want a girlfriend. He wants to try sex without killing the woman.”
“Say we manage it. Say we find a set of bondage rules that keeps me safe enough to fuck him. Then what? If it satisfies him, then I’m stuck as his lover forever? If it doesn’t satisfy him, then he still wants to fuck me, but now he wants to do it his way, which means he’ll torture and kill me during the process? There is no win here, Edward.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Probably?”
The truck finally left, and we were able to park at last. Edward reached for his door handle. “I’ll just be sorry when we have to kill him, and I’ll be sorrier if he kills us first.”
With that, he got out of the SUV, and I was left hurrying to catch up. We were in the crowd on the porch of waiting customers by the time I caught up, so I couldn’t say any of the things I wanted to say. But then, neither could he.
76
WE ENDED UP in the manager’s office, Pamela’s office. She’d brought in extra chairs so she could sit beside Hazel instead of at her desk. Hazel’s shoulders hunched forward, her arms holding her stomach as if someone had hit her there and doubled her over, but it wasn’t a physical blow that had hit her. Pamela sat beside her, one hand making small circles on the other woman’s back, the way you’d soothe a baby to sleep. Hazel didn’t react to the touch, but she didn’t tell Pamela to stop either. Either it made her feel better or she wasn’t even aware the other woman was touching her. Carmichael hadn’t been dead two hours yet, so it wasn’t so much grief yet as pure shock. The hard-core grieving—where you missed them forever and had to accept that it was forever and nothing you could do would change it, or bring them back, or let you feel their warm hand in yours ever again on this side of the grave—that was still to come.
I sat facing the women in one of the other chairs clustered in front of the desk. Edward and Olaf were standing farther down the wall as far away as the room allowed. They’d be able to hear, but we were trying not to spook her. Livingston had drawn a chair to one side of all of us girls, so he was leaning back against the wall. Hazel knew him, trusted him through Pamela, so he was more a big comforting presence to them both, I think.
Hazel’s voice was low, thick with crying already, though the tears stopped as she talked as if talking steadied her, gave her something else to do besides cry. “They killed him. I know they did.”
“Who’s they?” I asked.
She looked up at me. Her eyes held some of that harsh distrust I remembered from the restaurant. “Rico and Jocelyn.”
I gave her the long blink, the one I’d learned over the years when I couldn’t afford to show shock or act like I didn’t know what the hell was going on. “Tell me what you know,” I said, keeping my voice even and neutral.
“Mike showed up to work high a couple of times, and Mr. Marchand put him on notice that if it happened again, he’d have to let him go. I begged Mike to not screw it up, but it was like he couldn’t help himself. If there was something good in his life, he had to fuck with it, you know?” She looked up at me as if willing me to understand that the man she loved hadn’t been bad, just flawed.
I gave her my best sympathetic face, nodding. “I know people like that, too,” I said.
