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His considerable strength, if the huge dent in the plaster was anything to go by.
“Okay, you really don’t like owls,” I muttered.
He didn’t find me funny. “You have no fuckin’ clue what that is, do you?” he seethed.
Something started to click. Something that took longer because of the only two sips of coffee and the rather jarring change in Keltan’s demeanor. “No, but I’m guessing it’s not good,” I surmised.
His face was a blanket of fury. “No,” he clipped. “It’s not fucking good.”
Then he turned on his heel and stalked over to his countertop, snatching his phone off the charger, pressing a button on it and putting it to his ear. He didn’t take his eyes off me as he waited.
“Heath, I need you at the offices. Now. Call Duke. We’ll meet you there in twenty.” He paused. “Yeah, we got problems. Fuckin’ big ones.” He didn’t wait for a response, just hung up.
He silently padded over to the wall and, amidst the crumbling plaster, snatched up the figurine. He closed his fist around it and was still for a split second, closing his eyes. He was the unnatural kind of still, the scary kind that had me wondering what chaos that small figure represented.
Then he turned back around, striding towards me but stopping a good space away.
I lost purchase on his eyes as he regarded the mess on his table.
“Get your shit together,” he ordered roughly. “And then don’t fuckin’ move.”
I put my hand on my hip. “Keltan, I don’t really know what’s going on, and I don’t know what this owl means. Obviously shouty, broody things. But I’ve got a meeting to go to. I can’t go to your offices and have whatever kind of badass powwow you’re planning. I’ve got a job.”
“Yeah? Well so do I,” Keltan hissed. “My main fucking one. Remember that one? Keeping you alive.” The words were little more than a hiss. He held up the little piece of silver that hadn’t seemed so threatening until about two minutes before. “And this means my job is about to get a fuck of a lot harder. We don’t have time to explain right now.”
I crossed my arms. “Make time,” I ordered.
His eye twitched.
“I’m not having you drag me around and shout things and go from sexy to furious in the blink of an owl without an explanation,” I told him. “And considering you alluded to my being alive or not was connected to that particular bird—” I nodded to his hand. “—then I think I deserve an explanation.”
He regarded me, my folded arms. Sighed.
His eye twitched once more and his jaw was stone, but he began to talk.
“The owl is considered in a lot of different cultures, including South American, to be the bird of death,” he said, the words harsh and sharp with his accent and fury.
I tilted my head. “Okay. Not exactly an explanation.”
I actually heard him grind his teeth. “In the right, or wrong, circles the owl and the delivery of one is known to be the delivery of a death sentence,” he continued. “A promise of it, in fact.”
I swallowed. “And what circles would they be?”
“Ones that a Columbian drug lord by the name of Rafael Martínez lords himself over,” Keltan said in a flat voice.
I bit my lip. “I’m not liking where this is going,” I muttered.
He glowered at me. “Yeah, you fucking shouldn’t,” he clipped. “Considering you’ve found the break in the story you’ve been looking so hard for.”
He held up the owl, such a little thing, something I’d looked at and mocked before. It suddenly seemed so much bigger.
“Your scoop just landed in your lap. And the threat of your fuckin’ death just landed in mine,” he all but snarled.
His words somehow final, a premonition of what was to come.
It turned out Keltan had been contracted by a client—who would remain anonymous, thanks to that pesky thing called client confidentiality—to investigate Rafael and his entire operation. The client had a lot of money and a personal stake in this, from what I could glean from the furious man, which wasn’t much.
The meeting at his offices, with Heath and an attractive and better-humored hottie named Duke—the Duke, I was guessing—wasn’t fun. Especially with Roger texting me demanding to know “where the fuck I was” every five minutes.
It was meant to be a debriefing for all staff. Just because I had been given a relatively long leash to investigate this story didn’t mean I still wasn’t chained to the place.
“You can’t do this story anymore,” Keltan informed me after glaring at me for checking my phone for the third time.
“Why?”
His knuckles clenched and I watched him visibly take a breath to calm himself.
The air thickened, tasting bitter, like it had ever since Keltan had glimpsed the figurine.
“Because,” he ground out, “you have a Columbian drug lord sending you direct death threats, which means he not only knows you’re the sole witness to a murder he most likely ordered, and therefore a loose end, but you’re investigating the fuckin’ thing. As soon as he gets wind of that—”
