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Desmond bought me a diamond necklace.
The clip still made the rounds on YouTube, and someone had made a gif of my over-the-top eye roll. That got a lot of play on Twitter even to this day.
“This guy was real dyed-in-the-wool vampire serial killer, then?”
“Was,” Holden said grimly. “Still is, if the High Line murders are any indication. It’s the first time we’ve seen him make a move like this on American soil, and certainly the first time he’s done it since the reveal. Your team thought it was a human killer, and I can’t blame them. He certainly made it look like a human copycat. But one of our wardens is from Tbilisi. She recognized the signature right away. Always two girls. Always dumped in public.”
I fanned myself with the card and thought about this. The warrant was absolutely called for. Davos Kent needed to die. But what did that have to do with Sig? And why would Sig have Shane hold off on the kill almost immediately after it had been issued?
I needed to get my hands on the file we’d sent to the NYPD to get the details of the murders again, and I wanted to talk to Shane about how Sig had behaved the last time he saw him.
I was here to find a missing vampire Tribunal leader.
Might as well take down a murderer while I was at it, for old time’s sake.
Chapter Fifteen
The longer I was in the city, the further down the list my own husband dropped in order of importance for visits.
First I’d had to stop to see the Tribunal. Now I had to slot in a visit to see my BFF, Detective Mercedes Castilla of the NYPD. I wanted to see Shane and Siobhan as well, but considering it was already dawn, I could probably push that a few hours.
I sent Desmond a text to let him know I would be at the apartment soon but needed to see Cedes first. The indicator told me he read the message, but the lack of little dot dot dots told me he wasn’t planning to reply.
Either he didn’t really care what I was doing at six in the morning, or he knew I wasn’t going to like the reply he gave. Sometimes silence speaks volumes, and I was willing to bet Desmond and I would have a bit of a discussion about those volumes as soon as we had both slept.
Sometimes I put my job ahead of our marriage, and not only because I refused to leave California. The funny thing was, it was the same shit I used to get so mad at Lucas for. Lucas had valued his pack above everything else in his life, and couldn’t understand why those around him were upset when he blew them off or betrayed them in the name of doing what was right for the pack.
Realizing now I was becoming the very thing I’d loathed the most about someone else made me feel a weirdly profound sense of empathy for Lucas. It also made me pick up my phone again and type, I love you, I’m sorry I’m late, I will bring you Dean and Deluca’s bagels.
Dot dot dot.
Mini bagels from Absolute, or divorce.
I cracked up. At least he didn’t ask for Utopia. That shit was in Queens, and I was not about to go borough hopping to bribe him for his love.
He couldn’t be too mad at me if he was placing a breakfast order. That was its own kind of relief.
What I had learned from my time with Lucas was that an honest apology could go a long way when you inadvertently hurt the person you love. I was bound and determined not to make the same mistakes with Desmond that Lucas had made with me. With both of us, really.
No one said this would be easy, but I had to be willing to meet him halfway if we were going to make it work.
So mini bagels and apology texts it was.
I made my way to the front steps of the seventy-sixth precinct building and jogged in through the doors that were almost as familiar as those in my old apartment. I’d spent a lot of time in and out of this little police station in my prime, and bless it, the damn thing never changed.
Mercedes knew I was coming—I’d given her a heads-up to make sure she was actually at the office—so when I arrived, she was already waiting at the top of the stairs, two cups of coffee in her hands.
She thrust one at me, then sipped her own gratefully.
“It’s disgusting, but honest to God there’s nothing I missed more when I was pregnant. With Javy I thought I might claw out Owen’s eyes when he told me I couldn’t drink it anymore.”
Like Shane and Siobhan, Mercedes and her bar-owner husband Owen had jumped headfirst into the world of responsible adulthood, one that apparently involved having babies. Cedes and Owen now had two, the first a little girl named Eliza, the newest a baby boy named Javier.
I hadn’t missed any of these milestones, which was the benefit of being back and forth from Los Angeles so often. I’d been with Mercedes when Javy was born, holding her hand because Owen’s flight was stranded at O’Hare on his way home from a bar convention in Las Vegas.
I had been a witness at Shane and Siobhan’s small wedding ceremony.
I had to admit, there was still a lot of life and love here for me, even though I resisted coming back to it permanently.
