AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I could make a happy life for myself here full-time, couldn’t I? I could be Auntie Secret, teaching all the little nuggets hand-to-hand combat.
Hell, I could have one of my own.
I froze at the thought and stuffed it deep, deep down into the dark recesses of my mind, where I hoped it would stay buried for a good long time.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want kids. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to have those kids with Desmond. It was more that I had been pregnant once a very long time ago, and the outcome of that had been so heartbreaking for me I still wasn’t ready to face it, even a decade later.
I sipped my own coffee and it was, indeed, disgusting.
“Did you get out of bed for this?” I asked.
“No, I get seniority now. Day shift, baby. Means that Owen and I can balance the schedule with the kids pretty well. He takes the day, I take the night. We barely see each other anymore, but we still manage to have some really hot sex in the doorway when we’re swapping.” She winked at me.
“Careful, that’s how more babies get made.”
“Ay.” She shook her head vigorously. “No more.”
“That’s what you said after Eliza.”
“I’m here to tell you there’s a giant damn difference between one baby and two.”
I wasn’t about to start picking away at her, suggesting that she didn’t really mean she wanted to stop having kids. The truth was I’d never pegged Cedes for the kind of person to have kids at all, let alone two of them. But she loved her babies, and if she was happy and done with two, those were two of the luckiest kids in the world.
We wove our way through the old metal desks, and I marveled at how few of the faces I recognized anymore. With Tyler off in L.A. with me, Cedes was the only other cop I’d spent any extended amount of time with. I guess a lot can change in any workplace when you’re not really paying attention.
Taking a seat at her desk, she slid the folder across to me without preamble. I gratefully put aside my coffee, which tasted like licking the inside of a canister of engine oil, and started to flip through the document.
“I’m still not used to you being on our team now,” she said idly.
I glanced up. “What do you mean? I was always one of the good guys.”
“I know, I know. But I mean, you’re all legal and shit. You have a badge.”
“Cedes, I even have one of those fancy windbreakers that say FBI on the back.”
“Damn, girl, you’re in the big leagues.”
“Yeah, except I really whiffed it on this one.” I tapped the folder.
“Okay, two things. One, I have never been prouder of you in my life than I am right now that you just made a baseball reference and used it correctly.”
“You try being married to a hard-core Yankees fan for five years. It’s all bound to rub off after a while.” I shrugged.
Cedes put a hand on her chest. “As a hard-core Yankees fan myself, I can assure you, that is entirely our goal. And to point two, you can’t beat yourself up over a mistake like this. I’m here to tell you it won’t be the last. We try our best, Secret, but we’re never going to be a hundred percent right all the time. It’s impossible.”
“We’re only human,” I sighed.
“Hey now, don’t say that like it’s a bad thing.”
I gave her a soft smile and flipped through the pages of the report. Even looking at it now, everything in my blood told me this wasn’t a typical vampire killing. Of course, now I knew Davos was a methodical killer, a trait I typically saw more in human murderers. Vampires did it for food, for protection. It was quite rare for a vampire to kill for the sheer pleasure of the act.
I laid out the crime scene photos, trying to see what I’d missed and to figure out if any of it was going to lead me to Sig.
“Did you really come back early just because of this?” she asked. “I could have couriered the file back to you.”
I shook my head. “There’s more, but I’m not sure I’m at liberty to share the details.”
“FBI stuff?”
