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“Me? I don’t want athingfrom Ms. Guin, actually.”
“Bullshit. Your guy Leo—”
“Perhaps,” Gavan hisses quietly, “you should findLeowhenhe’staking a fucking steam bath and ask him then. Or perhaps Pascha Andreev, who has so mysteriously vanished.” His mouth twists into a thin smile. “Though I’m extremely curious to find out what it is that’s stopping you from askingherdirectly.”
“Careful,” I growl.
Gavan pulls his towel away just enough to show me the knife in a sheath strapped to his bare, inked thigh.
“Believe me, I’m always careful, Hades.” He flips the towel back down. “And I’m also out of fucking patience and answers.”
I’m only half sure I believe what he just said regarding Elsa. I can also read him well enough to see I’m not going to get anything else from him. But that was only half the point.
The other half was to let him know in no uncertain terms that if he wants anything with Elsa, or even wants to speak to her again, it’s going to be throughme.
I start to walk out of the steam room.
“Hades.”
I glance back to see Gavan watching me intently.
“This stunt you pulled today is amusing all ofonce. I can appreciate your balls. But don’t mistake amusement for an invitation. We’re not friends, Hades. Nor are we business partners. And we never will be.”
“Does that make us enemies, then?”
He smirks. “If this happens again, I can promise you, you’ll find out quickly enough.”
* * *
“Top of the morning,god of Hell.”
Cillian nods, stepping aside and ushering me into his office. He’s still working out of his late half-brother’s office at the Kildare family brownstone on the Upper East Side, though his penthouse apartment is back in Brooklyn—not that far from my place, actually.
But no one meets him there. I got to check out the ridiculously cool penthouse built into the top of an old clocktower overlooking the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges all of once, and that was before he met Una. Since then, to my knowledge, no one’s been invited over.
I guess drinking each other’s blood and fucking on pentagrams or whatever the hell those two get up to demands privacy.
So, yeah, today it’s the brownstone where I’m meeting him. The psychotic, green-eyed Irishman looks me over curiously as we sit on two couches facing each other.
“To what do I owe the unexpected visit?”
I shrug. “Meh. I was in the neighborhood.”
Cillian doesn’t say anything. He just levels that typical slightly-unhinged look of his at me. Which, even if we’re friends now, still has the ability to completely freak me the fuck out sometimes.
I exhale through closed lips.
“Actually, I need a guy.”
“You’ll need to be more specific.”
“A guy who can look into people.”
Cillian’s brow arches. “All right. Friend or foe?”
“Friend. But it’s complicated.”
“And…blonde?”
