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“Because I need a fresh start,” I said instead. The truth was not going to leave my mouth today.
“Bad guys don’t care about fresh starts, De Ver,” Chief said. “And I’ve got some pretty bad shit happening around the City the past couple weeks.” His eyes fell on the documents in front of him, as if that was the end of that topic.
What if he was right? What if Ididn’thave to change everything now that I had all I’d ever wanted since I hopped on that plane to get here? Dominic wasn’t around anymore. There were rumors that he was being sent off to missions out of the country, but nothing the Chief confirmed personally.
What mattered was that hewasn’there—I was. I could still have my job. I could still do what I came here to do without having to run into him or without having him ruin things for me. He obviously wasn’t telling the Chief to put me off missions anymore, and even if he was, the Chief wouldn’t care now. He wouldn’t—I’d already proved myself, and heneededme.
I sighed. “Okay, Chief,” I said with a small smile. If feeling good about being needed was a bad thing, so be it. I’d suck it up and deal with it. “Okay. Tell me what you got.”
“A drug,” the Chief said, putting the documents down on the desk. “They’re calling itCrackdown. We have no clue what it’s made of as of now, but at least six people that we know of have died from it in the past five days.”
My stomach fell. “Six?” That was a big number in such a short time frame.
“Mhmm. It’s basically a very powerful suppressant. You’ve got the reports of everything found in the victim’s bodies in here. Take whoever you need to work on this, but make it fast. We need to know what this thing is and how it works yesterday.” He gave me the stapled documents.
“Okay,” I said, feeling a tiny bit overwhelmed. I’d never done drugs before. I’d chased a few creatures, had led operating crews three times already, and one of the five cases I’d been given lately had been nothing but a rumor—someone had claimed that a group of incubi were holding ten women captive in the basement of their house to feed from them. Turned out, the woman who called the ODP anonymously about it was just pissed because she was in love with one of the three incubi and he was refusing her, so she wanted to make him pay for it.
But anyway, none of it had had anything to do with drugs. They had all been pretty standard cases, and I’d never needed help from other agents before. Not that I minded—working with Hunter, Patricia and Eva would be a breeze, too.
Still, I felt very uneasy.
“Everything else you need is in the archives. The bodies are downstairs in the morgue if you want a closer look,” the Chief said in a rush. “Now go. Get outta here. I have work to do.” Without waiting for me to even move, he leaned back in his swivel chair, put his shiny black shoes over the desk, and took his phone out of his pocket.
“Thanks, Chief,” I mumbled and went for the door.
“I’ll need a full report in two days about whatever you find. Work fast, De Ver,” he called.
“Sure, Chief. Sure.”No pressure.
My eyes were stuck on the document, trying to read the whole thing at once, so I didn’t realize something was wrong until I was in front of the first row of desks.
But the silence got to me. Our office was big, with a lot of people in it at any given time, and it was very unusual to bequiet, especially so close to lunch. That’s why I raised my head to see what was happening, if maybe the Chief had kept me in his office longer than I thought, and everyone was already on their breaks.
They weren’t.
Instead, they were all looking at the double doors to the office…at the person who had just walked through them and was coming my way.
Dominic Dane.
My body froze as if someone had pressed pause on me. Even my eyes didn’t blink, afraid they might miss a single movement of his body.
My God, I hadn’t seen him in forty-two days—not that I was counting. But where had he been? Why had he disappeared?
It doesn’t matter, a voice in my head whispered as he strode between the desks and came closer and closer. Everyone at the office was looking at him, and I couldn’t have cared less.
He was here. He came back for me.
And he looked…different, too. He’d lost weight—the hollows of his cheeks were more pronounced. If the blue bags under his eyes were anything to go by, he hadn’t slept much lately, either. And his hair had grown longer than I’d ever seen it before. It did things to my stomach because I kept imagining running my fingers through it.
But the look in his eyes was the same—murderous, distant, ice-cold.
How was it that he looked even hotter than before? There were purple bruises on the sides of his neck, which I only caught when he was about five feet away from me. That meant he was probably coming from whatever mission he’d been on until now. He was wounded, had lost weight, hadn’t slept, and he hadn’t even had time for a haircut. It all should havetakenfrom him, instead of adding to his appeal.
Damn you, Dominic Dane,I thought, but I also smiled. Couldn’t stop it if I tried.
He was here. And he was…
Notlooking at me.
