Lover Unveiled, page 38
“Match,” Sahvage said out loud.
“What?” the human asked.
“Never mind. And you’re not taking any of her clothes off.”
On that happy little announcement, he glanced around Mae’s bedroom for no good reason. There was a bureau, a bed stand, and a queen-sized bed with a simple duvet and a couple of pillows. Short of some books and an alarm, there was no clutter whatsoever. Functional. Non-fussy.
Barren.
And that made him sad.
“Look, I’m happily mated, my guy,” Manello said. “So I know how you’re feeling right now. But how am I going to examine her properly if I can’t remove her tops?”
Before Sahvage had a proper thought, his dagger hand shot forward and grabbed the front of the doctor’s scrubs. Pulling the human right up close, he bared his fangs.
But instead of screeching, calling for help, or shoving back, the guy just rolled his eyes. “Jesus, you people need to fucking chill. Relax, dickhead. And spare me the ‘if you touch her, Ima kill you.’ I’ve heard it a million times, and not once has anything that’s six seven and clocking in at three hundred pounds had to put my face through a plate glass window.”
Sahvage’s eyebrows popped. “I didn’t think humans could read minds.”
“Wow, you went there with the glass? Really?” Dr. Manello punched Sahvage’s chest and got himself free. “Out. Now. If you care about this female at all, you’ll let me do my job. I’m not fucking around with your bonding anymore—”
“Oh, no, no—you got it all wrong.” Sahvage put his palms up. “I haven’t bonded with her.”
“So I’m smelling cologne you just decided to put on in the middle of a crisis?” The doctor tapped the side of his nose. “Niffer, niffer, dumbass. In case you’ve missed it.”
On that note, the human planted a fairly good-sized set of payback palms on Sahvage’s torso and gave things a big old push.
As Sahvage tap-danced out into the sitting area, the Brothers went with him and the bedroom door was shut.
Whereupon he just stood there. Like, well, a dumbass.
“You know,” Tohrment remarked as he parked it on the sofa in the sitting area, “I’m not sure what I’m most surprised about. The fact that your coffin was full of flour, the hi-how’re-ya out of the blue, the pull-a-female-through-a-steel-door . . . or this.”
“What’s this,” Sahvage muttered as he turned around.
“The bonding.”
“I haven’t bonded with her, for fuck’s sake.”
The fact that he had to physically restrain himself from stamping his boot was something that he resolutely refused to dwell on.
Meanwhile, over on an armchair, the Brother Butch cocked an eyebrow. And didn’t say a goddamn thing.
Which made it worse, of course.
As minutes stretched into three hundred years of waiting, Sahvage paced up and back. A couple of times.
Then he stopped. “So you know where the Book is?”
Butch looked at Tohrment. Who shook his head.
“We have a couple of people working on leads.” Tohrment crossed his arms over his daggers. “But make no mistake, we will find it.”
Sahvage thought about the summoning spell. And kept his goddamn mouth shut.
“When we get its location,” Tohrment continued, “we’re going to need you to help us get it. And before you try to bullshit us again that you’re nothing special, you just pulled a female out of some kind of alternate reality through a steel door. We need you, warlock. Without your powers, we’re not going to get to goal.”
Sahvage narrowed his eyes. “Answer me this: What are you going to do with the Book when you get it?”
“Put it in a very safe place.”
“You’re going to destroy it?”
“It’s going to be in a very safe place.”
Sahvage thought about the brunette. And what that bitch had done to Mae.
Then he cursed to himself as he remembered what his Mae wanted the Book for. But maybe everything that had just happened had changed her mind—not that he knew the details of abduction yet. He sure as shit was going to find out everything as soon as she was able to tell him about it, though.
Because now there were two things on his extermination list.
“I’m staying here with Mae,” Sahvage said. “You get a bead on the Book, the Reverend has my number.”
“So you will help us.”
Sahvage stared right into the navy blue eyes of the fighter who had once been his brother in all but blood—and lied through his fucking fangs.
“Absolutely I will.”
• • •
As Erika stepped off the Commodore building’s main elevator, a couple of floors above where she’d been called into that scene with the murdered and desecrated couple, she was glad that short-staffing issues had kicked in once again.
Striding down, she did not miss her sleep. Her empty apartment. Her planned couple of hours off. She was firing on all cylinders.
The uniform by the door nodded to her and opened the way in. As she passed through, she nodded back at him.
“They’re in with all the books,” he said.
The direction was great—except for the fact that it presumed she knew anything about the layout of the rooms inside. But considering all of the balls in the air at the moment? The mystery of the body’s location was the simplest one she had to solve. Besides, all she did was follow the conversation. Soft. With some weeping thrown in for tragic measure.
According to Special Agent Delorean, the wife found the husband after he’d gone to investigate a tripped alarm. And the corpse was . . . right up Erika’s alley.
After she went through a room full of hunks of rock, and then one that had some pretty gruesome-looking old instruments in it, she rounded a corner—and took a memory snapshot: Nothing but shelves and books in this space, but that was not what was going to stick with her.
Over in the far corner, a very dead body appeared to have been used as a projectile against a section of shelving, all kinds of broken pieces of wood and disrupted leather covers and cracked spines around the remains.
Which were in a very bad state.
Delorean broke away from the uniforms and came over. “This has to be your boy. There’s no . . . it’s just like the scene at the club and the other places, as if someone waved a goddamn wand and tore him in half.”
Erika went over and knelt down. Maybe it was the exhaustion . . . maybe it was the fact that her nerves were shot . . . but she was having trouble processing the victim’s injuries. It was as if he had been pulled apart at the legs, the torso raggedly torn in half from crotch to throat.
A sense that she was being watched made her jerk her head back over her shoulder. But there was no one there—
Erika frowned and straightened. Inside a Lucite presentation stand with a lid, like it was something special, a book was set apart from the others and it captured her attention for no good reason: Even though she couldn’t see its cover or its spine properly, and didn’t have any clue about how fancy or expensive it was, there was just something . . .
Well, captivating about it—
“You okay?” Delorean asked.
“Is the wife in the other room?” she asked as she shook herself back to attention.
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to go talk to her.” Erika put her hand up to the special agent. “Just give me a minute with her alone.”
Without waiting for a response, she followed the sounds of sniffling through a couple more rooms, and found herself emerging into some kind of sitting area that seemed big enough to be in a hotel. Over on a set of sofas, by a curving staircase, a woman with really good hair and a puffy face was wearing a bathrobe-and-nightgown set that was quite possibly worth more than a month or two of Erika’s rent.
As she approached, she didn’t have to ask the officer to get up and go. He took one look Erika’s way and murmured something to the victim’s wife before excusing himself.
“Hi, I’m Detective Saunders,” she said as she came over. “I’m with homicide.”
The wife patted her red nose with a Kleenex and looked up. “I just told him everything I know.”
“I’m sure it will be helpful. You okay if I sit down with you?”
“I don’t have anything else to tell. Herb went down when the alarm registered motion and he didn’t come back. I waited about twenty minutes and then . . . I left our bedroom and found him . . .”
Erika lowered herself onto a white velvet couch that was part of an overall neutral color scheme—so that the masterpieces on the walls would show, no doubt. Jeez, the place was like a modern art museum.
“Why would someone do that?” the wife said as she stared at the wad of tissue she was holding. “Why?”
When those bloodshot eyes shifted over, Erika’s heart stopped.
“I am so sorry.” Leaning forward, she put her hand on the woman’s shoulder. “I promise you, I’m going to find the person responsible. I will bring them to justice if it’s the last thing I do.”
Maybe it was the female-to-female thing, maybe it was the honest-to-God communion Erika felt with the pain the woman was feeling, but the wife’s eyes watered anew.
“Do you think this has anything to do with the watches?”
Erika blinked. “The watches?”
“That were stolen.” The wife sniffed and took another tissue from a white box. “We called the police as soon as my husband got home from Idaho and discovered they were missing. He went into the safe in our closet and saw they were gone. They were part of his collection. He always told me how much they were, but I don’t . . . I can’t remember now. But several hundred thousand dollars.”
Erika glanced around at the ceiling, taking note of the pods that were mounted in the corners of the gallery space. “You have a security system here, correct?”
“There was no footage from that night . . . something went wrong.”
“So you have cameras, too.” When the wife nodded, Erika frowned. “The alarm was engaged when you think the theft occurred?”
“I was here alone. I swear I put it on, but I maybe did something wrong. Maybe I turned the cameras off—oh, God, what did they do to him?” Those eyes lifted again. “There’s so much blood . . . and his body . . .”
As the wife started to get agitated, Erika shook her head. “Try not to think about that.”
What a bullshit thing to say. But what else was there?
“I can’t unsee it. Every time I blink, I see him on the floor—there’s so much blood. So much . . .”
As the wife’s words drifted, she stared off across the fine carpeting—and it was as Erika studied her profile that the sparkling at the woman’s throat registered.
Holy . . . fuck, she was wearing a diamond necklace—and not a diamond that was on a necklace, but a collar of diamonds that glittered with every ragged breath she took. So many diamonds.
A set of blunt and buffed fingertips felt over the stones, as if the wife had noticed Erika looking at the jewels. “My husband gave this to me for our anniversary last year.”
“It’s . . . incredibly beautiful,” Erika murmured.
“I feel beautiful when I wear it now.” The woman closed her eyes. “It keeps me warm at night when my husband doesn’t. Didn’t.”
Erika made a mental note, but wondered what kind of jealous lover had the strength to rip a grown man apart.
“No, I didn’t kill my husband.” The wife’s stare shot over. “I would never . . . he may have been with someone else, but I loved him and—”
“You’re not a suspect.” Erika noted all those totally clean fingernails. “And I don’t judge.”
There was a moment when the two of them just looked at each other. Then the wife took a deep breath and dropped her eyes to her tissue again.
“I feel disloyal,” she muttered, “even though he was the unfaithful one. Oh, God, Herb’s dead.”
As she started to cry again, Delorean appeared in the archway of the gallery, but Erika shook her head. When he nodded and backed off, she appreciated his discretion.
“I just want to be back in my dream.”
Erika refocused on the wife. “What dream?”
“The night the watches were stolen . . . I had this incredible dream. This man came to me, and he . . . well, he told me to wear this and feel beautiful.” The wife sighed. “But none of that was real, and I shouldn’t be thinking about that now, should I.”
“Sometimes the mind retreats,” Erika said softly, “to wherever it can. Sometimes those retreats are the only reason we get through things. So if you want to remember a dream like that on a night like this? You fucking do it.”
The wife turned and tilted her head. As her eyes focused, it was as if she were seeing Erika properly for the first time.
“Is the person who did that . . . going to come back?” she said hoarsely. “And why didn’t they come after me upstairs?”
“Are you aware of anyone who might have wanted to hurt your husband?”
“No. He was a stand-up man. In business, at least. Am I in danger here?”
“Do you have another place you could stay?”
“Not really.” The wife looked around. “But the bedroom suite is a panic room. I guess I could initiate the lockdown and stay here.”
“Whatever feels right to you. If you do stay, though, how about we do a sweep up there so you’re sure there’s no one hiding in any of the rooms?”
“I would really appreciate that.”
Erika looked at the diamonds. And thought . . . she knew what it was like to not feel beautiful. Except in her case, it wasn’t because some man wasn’t treating her right or disrespecting her with other females.
It was because there hadn’t been a man for a very, very long time.
“I’m going to give you my private cell phone,” she said. “I want you to call me anytime, about anything. Memory is a funny thing. It comes back at strange times. If you can think of something that can help us, I want you to call me.”
The wife nodded. “Okay. I will.”
“And keep wearing the necklace.” Erika got to her feet. “It really is perfect on you.”
With a groan, Mae woke up . . . and pushed herself a little higher on her pillows. As she winced, the male guard dog at her open door looked like he was ready to defend her against anything and everything, even if it was just the aches and pains she was suffering from.
The sight of Sahvage in the familiarity of her bedroom was a shock, but the fact that she was on her bed, in her home, at all?
She wasn’t sure she trusted this reality.
“Did the other males leave?” she asked in a rough voice.
“Yeah. About twenty minutes ago.” Sahvage cleared his throat. “Can I get you some Motrin or something? The doc said you were allowed a second dose if you’re still uncomfortable.”
The light from the sitting room made his huge figure seem menacing as a murderer. His scent, on the other hand, was a source of total comfort.
“I’ll be okay,” she said. “The doctor was really kind to me.”
“I’m glad you’re not hurt—I mean, not seriously hurt. Are you hungry?”
“I don’t know.” Mae laughed in a short rush and looked down at herself. She had some vague memory of changing into fresh clothes. Had she had a quick shower? Maybe. Everything was so hazy. “Can you imagine . . . that I don’t know if I’m hungry?”
She blinked and saw those racks of designer clothes. So she tried to rub the images from her mind by going knuckle on her eyes.
“I called Tallah,” he said.
Dropping her hands, she exhaled in relief. “Thank God. Did you talk to her? She doesn’t know how to get into her voice mail.”
“Yup, I spoke with her. I just told her we were staying here tonight. Nothing else.”
“Was she okay with it?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good.”
As Mae shivered, she pulled half of the duvet over her legs. “I can’t get warm.”
There was a pause. And then Sahvage said, “I can help with that.” When she glanced up at him, he put his hands out. “I’m not suggesting that we—”
With tears glossing her eyes, she extended her arms. She had no voice to reply to him.
As he straightened from his lean and came into the room, she couldn’t believe what she was doing—and it was the most natural thing in the world, too. She’d never had a male in this bed, in any bed, but there was no other answer except yes.
Before Sahvage joined her, he put his hands to the front of his hips, and as she flushed and had to swallow hard—he simply removed his gun holster and placed it close by.
The entire mattress tilted as he sat on its edge, and she moved over to make sure he had enough room. But as he stretched out, she suddenly wasn’t thinking about space. She was thinking about proximity.
His and hers.
Before she thought too much about anything, she curled into him, and his heavy arm pushed under her neck. When she hissed, he froze.
“No, it’s fine,” she murmured. “I just have a bump on my head.”
“From the car accident?”
As she settled in, she said with exhaustion, “I don’t know. It could have been. I don’t remember a lot.”
“How did it happen?” he asked right by her ear.
“The accident?” Mae thought back to the radio report she’d been listening to. “I got distracted and hit the brakes. I was rear-ended—oh, God, she killed that nice man. Who was going to call nine-one-one for me.”
As she moaned, he took one of her hands in his own. “Try not to think about it.”
“I was so scared,” she said as she went deeper into her memories. “In that place. She had a cage—I was in . . . a cage.”
“Mae . . .” Now he sounded like he was in pain.
She lifted her head and looked into his dark blue eyes. “How did you know where to find me?”
“One of the Brothers knew where the brunette was.”
“Did you call them for help?”
