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Her crying stopped in an instant, as she dropped her ploy. “Worth a try.”
She glared at him in the mirror. Her reflection every bit the vicious she-wolf she’d shown herself to be. And yet...
There was something almost...vulnerable beneath her gaze. Something real he was certain she wouldn’t want him to see. Something she worked hard to hide.
He tore his gaze away from her. A wave of guilt shot through him as he thought of how he’d roughed her up in the alley. He really was a worthless bastard. He’d sworn to himself that he would never be like his father, never hurt a woman, but in the end, he was no better than his asshole dad. Did it matter that she was a shifter? She was still a woman.
The angel and devil on his shoulders duked it out. He wasn’t sure which one was calling him a jackass. Maybe both.
Speeding around a final corner, he spotted the warehouse that was the cover for Headquarters local offices—an old abandoned Kodak building now surrounded by a gated fence with barbed wire. He drove up to the gate, pressed in the code to enter and parked the Chevelle inside the nearly empty lot, glad he had tinted windows.
Before he chanced doing something stupid, he twisted the rearview mirror away from him, so her reflection wouldn’t tear him apart.
“The guards will be out in a minute to escort you to an interview room.” He stepped out of the car. “She may be old and refurbished, but this car is alarmed. Open a door, shatter the glass, fuck with the wiring, and the noise will wake the dead. That’ll bring me and three other supernatural-hating sons of bitches running.” He dared to glance back at her as he raked over her nude form beneath the open coat. “Unless you want that kind of attention…”
She curled a lip at him, holding in a snarl.
Without another glance, he slammed the door and walked toward the warehouse, refusing to let her faze him.
Never in his whole goddamn life had he hurried faster to a division meeting.
Jace strode into the rusted,run-down warehouse, the scent of must and old wooden crates renting the air. He couldn’t catch a break tonight. That was for damn sure.
Once he’d descended the staircase to the basement entrance, a door that to the naked eye appeared to be an entrance to a boiler room, he keyed in. At quick glance, someone would be hard-pressed to find the security pad that opened the door to the hidden maze of halls and rooms which housed the Rochester division’s local branch of Headquarters, unless they moved a hell of a lot of wooden crates. Even if they located the keypad, they would still be faced with the code and the body scanner.
Once inside, after tossing his keys to the guard and giving a few barked orders to retrieve the waiting she-wolf from his vehicle and leave her on ice in an interview room, he was half-way through the maze of the white-walled cinderblock facility.
When he reached the meeting room, he threw open the door only to find three other hunters waiting for him. Damon sat at the far end of the table, his hands folded together on his lap as he shot daggers at Jace with his ice-blue eyes. The usual warm fuzzy welcome.
Save for its occupants, the large room contained no more than a single conference table, an old hot plate coffee machine with a peeling sticker emblazoned with the words Liquid Sanity which produced barely drinkable—yet thankfully still caffeinated—sludge and several old, flickering florescent lights.
Damon spoke first. “You’re la—”
“No.” Jace held up one finger, cutting Damon off. He took a long inhale, exhaled through his nose, then glanced down at his watch with a smug grin on his face. The minute hand ticked past. “Now I’m late.”
Damon’s face hardened into a frozen mask, but Jace knew the anger that lay beneath that cold, impassive stare. Jace felt rage—it was in his blood—but Damon took angst and made it into a lifestyle. Head of the division and the fiercest vampire slayer Jace had ever met, Damon Brock never smiled, and he sure as hell couldn’t take a joke.
“Sit down,” Damon ordered.
Jace flopped into one of the hard, metal chairs and propped his dirt-covered boots on the table. Shane, the brains of the group, sat to Damon’s left, obliviously pouring over a stack of paperwork while David sat to the right with his large hand covering his black goatee to stifle a laugh. David may have kept Jace in check and coming to meetings, but he wasn’t beyond goofing off a bit to grate on Damon’s nerves.
Jace nodded in his direction. “How’s it going, Big Daddy?”
“Not too bad, Sugar Plum.” A conspiratorial smirk crept across his David’s face, reaching all the way to his dark eyes. “What the hell happened to your arm?”
Jace was so used to the job, he’d damn near forgotten that the she-wolf had nearly torn his arm in two. He glanced down to where the plethora of bite marks had broken the skin. He’d duck into medical once this was over and get it stitched up and bandaged to cover his tracks.
“Don’t ask. Where’s Ash and Trent?” Jace gestured to the empty chairs at the table.
“Down in the city. They’re still assisting on that Brooklyn case,” Shane answered without glancing up from his papers.
David and Jace exchanged knowing smirks. Ash and Trent had already been down there a week and were due back today. In other words, their fellow hunters were likely taking their sweet old time to avoid coming back to this very meeting. Jace didn’t blame them. If Damon was a splinter in his ass, their region lead, Chet, was a Godzilla-sized thorn.
A grim look crossed Damon’s face as he caught Jace and David’s exchange. “Whatever you idiots are cooking up, can it before Chet gets here.”
So that’s what they were all sitting around waiting for: the arrival of the Big Kahuna of Assholes himself.
Jace struggled not to roll his eyes. Damon was always suspecting him and David of conspiring over something. “Can’t a man grin without being suspicious?”
