Текст книги "Marked by Midnight"
Автор книги: Lara Adrian
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 1 (всего у книги 6 страниц)
MARKED
BY
MIDNIGHT
A Midnight Breed Novella
by
LARA ADRIAN
~ ~ ~
Join Lara’s email newsletter to hear about upcoming releases and to be eligible for subscribers-only giveaways and exclusive content.
Sign up now at:
http://bit.ly/LaraAdrianNews
~ ~ ~
MARKED BY MIDNIGHT
Midnight Breed Series: Book 11.5
Determined to solve a string of brutal slayings in London, vampire warrior Mathias Rowan is forced to seek the help of Nova, a fiery tattoo artist who ignites an unexpected, yet undeniable, passion in the grim Order enforcer.
Nova’s shadowy connections and dark talents may be Mathias’s best hope of unmasking a treacherous enemy... but falling for a woman with her dangerous past will risk both their hearts and their lives.
~ ~ ~
Contents
Cover Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Sign up for Lara Adrian's newsletter
A note from Lara Adrian
Excerpt for CRAVE THE NIGHT
Midnight Breed Series Book List
Other Lara Adrian Titles
About the Author
Copyright
CHAPTER 1
The night sky over London hung thick and ominous, heavy with black clouds still lingering from the evening’s torrential rainstorm. The downpour had lasted for hours, driving most of the city’s residents inside for shelter.
It was an advantage that Mathias Rowan and the three other Order warriors accompanying him on patrol tonight had made full use of, knowing the vampire lair they’d located in Southwark the week before was all but certain to be occupied amid the storm.
While Mathias never found it an easy thing to kill his own kind, the nest of blood-addicted Rogues squatting in the derelict brick building had to be terminated. The collection of human bones tossed in a pile in the back room of the foul-smelling lair had been more than ample justification for the Rogues’ executions.
Rory Callahan, the warrior behind the passenger seat Mathias occupied in the Order’s black Range Rover, let out a howl. “Damn, those were some sick, Bloodlusting fucks.”
Still green and mostly stupid about life, Callahan leaned forward, grinning, the tips of his fangs still visible behind his lip, evidence of the battle rage that had gripped them all during the raid. The youngest of the squad, he hadn’t seen enough death or violence yet to understand how closely every Breed male tread to the madness they’d encountered tonight.
From beside Callahan in the backseat, Deacon, the third member of the team exhaled a low, solemn curse. “They’d been killing for a while. Good thing we ashed them before they got tired of draining homeless people and moved uptown where folks were apt to notice the thinning of their herd.”
Mathias grunted in grim agreement.
Only Liam Thane, the Breed warrior behind the wheel of the speeding vehicle, hadn’t said a word since they’d done their business and left the lair.
Mathias had known the male for more than two decades–back when they’d both been part of a different, and since dissolved, policing organization for the Breed. Mathias had served as director in Boston then, and Thane had worked mostly covert ops around Europe and the United Kingdom.
While no one would ever call the hulking, black-haired vampire jovial, tonight Thane seemed more pensive than usual. Mathias glanced at him from the passenger seat. Thane’s long hair was gathered in a tail at his nape, accentuating the severe cut of his cheekbones and stern jaw. He stared straight ahead, unblinking, focused on the rain-slicked road that followed the bank of the Thames.
“I knew one of them,” he murmured, his gaze unblinking, never leaving the road. “He was a good man once...my cousin, Jacob.”
The vehicle went silent at Thane’s admission, nothing but the hum of the Rover’s engine and the night wind buffeting the windows as it blew up off the river.
Mathias didn’t offer apologies or sympathy. Thane wouldn’t look for it any more than Mathias himself would. They were warriors. They had a job to do and they did it, no matter how unpleasant.
No matter how personal.
Even under ordinary circumstances, the Order’s justice was swift and final when it came to dealing with the diseased killers among their race. After all, it had only been twenty years since the Breed was outed to mankind around the world in a massive Rogue attack. To say that human/Breed relations had been tenuous in the time that followed was putting it mildly.
And now, just days ago in Washington, D.C., the Order had been dealt more cause for concern. A bombing meant to disrupt a world peace summit–using a weapon powered by Breed-killing ultraviolet light–had been thwarted by the Order’s founder, Lucan Thorne, with mere seconds to spare.
The attack, and the war it was meant to incite between the vampire and human populations, had been diffused, its chief architect killed, but the threat remained very real.
The Order had powerful, hidden enemies. They’d eliminated one in D.C., but they’d come away from the battle realizing there was an untold number still operating in the shadows, plotting destruction and waiting for their chance to strike again.
Compared to that, London was fortunate that aside from a Rogue problem that had just been neutralized, the only war taking place in the city was a recent spate of gang violence that had fed half a dozen bodies into the murky water of the Thames last week.
As the Rover rolled through Southwark’s Bankside area, Mathias noticed a cluster of law enforcement vehicles down at the river’s edge. “Christ,” he muttered. “Looks like JUSTIS is fishing another floater out of the drink.”
“You want to head down there and have a look?” Thane asked.
At his nod, the big warrior turned off the road and drove toward the small gathering of human and Breed officers who served the Joint Urban Security Taskforce Initiative Squad.
They parked at the periphery of the action and walked over to the crime scene. Triangulated headlight beams pierced the darkness from the shoreline, shining out over the water where a small power boat was approaching. A pair of officers in diving gear sat at the stern, a large, unmoving object draped in a pale tarp at their feet.
Even from several yards away, Mathias’s keen Breed senses allowed him to see–and smell–the dead human they had retrieved from the water.
“I’d have thought the Order’s got better things to do than slum it down in Southwark.”
Mathias turned his head in the direction of the booming, baritone British voice of the JUSTIS officer in charge.
Gavin Sloane was Breed, a towering, wide-shouldered male with sandy blond hair and piercing blue eyes. He came over to greet Mathias and his team with a nod and a ready grin. “If we weren’t friends from way back, I might have to remind you that we got here first, so it’s our party.”
While the relationship between the Order and JUSTIS around the globe was guarded at best, Sloane seemed to understand, as Mathias did, the value of having allies across territory lines. They’d shared case intel from time to time over the past decade or so, and had developed a respect for each other that went beyond their jobs.
Last year, when Sloane finally conceded to settle down and take a mate, he invited Mathias to the reception that followed at the family Darkhaven. Mathias didn’t know who’d been more unnerved by the presence of an Order member at the celebration–Sloane’s highborn Breedmate, Katherine, or his JUSTIS officer brethren.
Sloane’s broad smile didn’t falter as he clapped Mathias’s shoulder in greeting and glanced at the array of titanium blades and semiautomatic firearms holstered on the warriors’ weapon belts from the night’s raid. “Anything JUSTIS needs to be concerned about?”
“Not anymore,” Mathias said. He gestured to the floater being unloaded onto the riverbank. “Anything the Order needs to be concerned about?”
Sloane shook his head. “Just another dead scarab.”
The remark referred to the tattoo each of the recent gang war victims had in common. This death brought the body count to seven. Although it wasn’t unusual to find a corpse in the 213-mile river that spat them out at an impressive average of one a week, the Thames was suddenly choking on members of an unknown, but apparently lethal, new gang.
Mathias and his squad followed Sloane over to the recovery in process. Three JUSTIS officers hoisted the tarp-wrapped body onto the concrete riverbank. As the corpse settled on the ground, the plastic fell away, revealing a large human male.
“No ID on the body,” Sloane said. “We’ll run his prints, but it if this case follows the other six we’re processing, this guy isn’t likely to pop a criminal record either. Aside from the common tattoo on all of the victims, we don’t have much to go on.”
The dead man was dressed in dark, sodden clothing, his harsh, ugly face blanched white in death, contrasting sharply against the russet color of his full beard and shaggy red hair. On his biceps, under the short sleeves of his blood-stained T-shirt, an array of tattoos ran the length of both his beefy arms. The scarab rode the back of his right hand, the same mark and placement as on the six other murdered men.
Sloane dismissed his fellow JUSTIS officers with a curt wave as Mathias stepped closer to the corpse, studying its damage. Multiple wounds peppered the thick neck and barrel chest–deep punctures, many of them concentrated in tight clusters.
He frowned. “The other victims were pulled out of the river with bullets in their heads. This guy was stabbed with something. Repeatedly, and with a hell of a lot of force. Or passion.”
“Dead is dead,” Callahan murmured from beside Mathias and the rest of the team. “Maybe his killing was meant to send a stronger message than the others.”
Sloane shrugged. “It’s possible.”
“The last body surfaced two days ago,” Mathias recalled. Despite the obvious connection to the others, something didn’t feel right about this victim. He looked out at the black water of the Thames, still churning from the earlier storm. The current was pulling hard in the scant moonlight, which barely penetrated the heavy cloud cover overhead. “Which way is the tide running?”
“Out,” Deacon replied.
Away from London, then, toward the North Sea.
Thane’s pensive glance said he was following Mathias’s line of thinking too. “A couple more turns and the tide would have carried this corpse out to open water. He hasn’t been in the river as long as the others had been.”
“Based on the condition of the body,” Sloane interjected, “we don’t expect this poor bastard’s been dead for even twenty-four hours.” He met Mathias’s gaze with one of concern. “You sensing anything out of the ordinary down here?”
His friend wasn’t talking about investigator hunches or forensic evidence. Sloane was familiar with Mathias’s extrasensory ability.
Every Breed vampire and every half-human Breedmate female was born with a unique ESP or telekinetic gift, some of them more useful than others. Some of those gifts were very dark, more of a curse.
Mathias’s fell somewhere in the middle, though given his choice of occupation, the ability to pick up the psychic traces of violence left behind at a scene where harm was done to someone gave him an edge over most other law enforcement officials.
Still, he wasn’t sure what to make of tonight’s floater. “I don’t feel anything unusual here, but that only means the killing didn’t occur nearby.”
“But you’d know if it did,” Sloane prompted.
Mathias nodded. “Violence leaves a psychic mark on a place, the same way a physical blow leaves a bruise. The trick is finding it before it fades.”
One of Sloane’s men called to him from across the way. He raised a hand in acknowledgment, but kept his gaze trained on Mathias. Shaking his head, he blew out a chuckle. “I tell ya, Rowan, life just isn’t fair. My best parlor trick is the ability to tie a decent sailor’s knot without using my hands. A gift like yours, I’d have gotten promoted to JUSTIS Commissioner by now. Instead, I’m stuck bagging and tagging the city’s dregs on the shit side of town.”
Another vehicle rolled on to the scene, and Sloane’s fellow officer shouted for him again. “About time the medical examiner showed up,” he muttered. “I gotta go handle this. As for you and your team, I know I don’t need to tell you that the Order’s presence down here is going to make some people uncomfortable and twitchy.”
Anxious looks were coming from the unit of human and Breed officers and the newly arrived coroner. Mathias grunted. “I thought uncomfortable and twitchy was standard operating procedure for you JUSTIS folks.”
Sloane smirked. “You turn anything up, let me know, yeah?”
“Sure,” Mathias agreed. “God knows, you need all the help you can get.”
With a low laugh and a one-fingered salute, Sloane pivoted and shuffled off to join his colleagues.
“You see all the ink on this guy?” Deacon said when the warriors were alone with the body. “He’s sporting some seriously hardcore tattoos.”
Mathias glanced down at the elaborate artwork, cold words and cryptic symbols. The meanings of a few were easy enough to comprehend–grim indicators of kill counts and carnage, glorified, bloody depictions of violence and death.
He took out his comm unit and snapped a few quick photos of the dead man and his collection of body art.
Peering closer, Mathias noticed something interesting about one of his tattoos.
“Look at the Celtic cross on his left forearm. The six-pointed star behind it is fresh.”
“And only half-finished,” Thane added, staring down at the reddened skin and black ink.
Even incomplete, the star was intricate, rendered by a highly skilled hand and an artist’s eye for detail.
“Hope the dumb fuck didn’t pay in full for half a job,” Callahan joked lamely.
None of the warriors laughed along with him. Thane and Deacon were looking at Mathias with the same glint of possibility.
“Something’s not right about this whole situation,” Mathias said, thinking out loud. “Six dead members of a gang no one’s ever heard of, now a seventh body turns up days later. Why?”
Callahan shrugged. “Gangs kill each other all the time. If you ask me, we should let them carry on and thank them for saving us the trouble.”
The kid had a point, albeit a wrong-headed one. And dangerous besides. If a gang had ideas about bringing their war into Mathias’s city, under the Order’s watch, they would need to think again.
And something was nagging him about the slayings, even before this last body was pulled out of the Thames. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on yet. He needed more information. Seemed to him, the best place to begin that quest was the place where tonight’s floater might have spent some of his final hours.
“Wherever he had this work started was likely one of the last places anyone saw him alive,” Mathias said. “I want to find that tattoo shop. As in, tonight.”
Deacon cast a skeptical look in his direction. “London is full of tattoo shops. We’ll be looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.”
“We can eliminate the tourist traps and celebrity-hound studios right off the bat,” Thane said. “This guy would go to the real deal. Somewhere discreet, off the beaten path. Somewhere no one would raise an eyebrow if a thug like him walked in.”
Mathias agreed. “Callahan, take the Rover back to base. Thane and Deacon, we’ll cover the most ground if we split up, each of us taking the city a section at a time.”
He swiveled his head upriver, against the current that would have carried the body out to sea before long. Southwark’s least prosperous section of town loomed all around them, darkened buildings set against an even darker night sky.
He supposed it was as good a place to start as any.
CHAPTER 2
The buzzing drone of the tattoo machine vibrated through Nova’s gloved fingertips as she inked the delicate line of a spider’s web onto the left pectoral of her final client of the night.
The design was a favorite of many who came to Ozzy’s studio in Southwark, men and women who’d known little else but struggles and hard times, even a long stint in prison, like the middle aged man seated in Nova’s chair now.
Folks who frequented the hole-in-the-wall shop weren’t going to win any humanitarian awards or keys to the city, but most of them were good people at heart.
Fancy clothes and big, sparkling mansions didn’t make someone good. Nova had known that at a very young age. It had taken longer to recognize that there were plenty of good people walking around with ink all over their skin and miles of hard road in their weary eyes.
Ozzy had helped on that score.
Nova glanced over at him, puffing out her breath to blow aside the wisp of her asymmetrically cut, black-and-blue-dyed hair that had fallen into her face as she worked. The wiry, grayed and grizzled, tattooed old man who owned the shop was hunched over his latest creation, his bony, age-spotted hand as steady as a rock.
Oz had been focused on the piece for more than three hours now, the seventy-two-year-old artist working as meticulously–as reverently–as Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel. Ozzy’s canvas tonight was the masterfully designed, tattooed sleeve of an ex-con who’d lost his only grandson to cancer the weekend before last.
By hand, Oz had painstakingly reproduced the toddler’s smiling face, turning the child’s likeness into the tender image of a winged pixie, cavorting blissfully in the forbidding, Gothic forest that had already existed on the man’s arm.
As Ozzy wiped away the running ink and blood from the final details, the shop’s young apprentice took the opportunity to stop cleaning equipment and come over to have a look. Nine-year-old Eddie’s freckled face lit up as he took in the finished design.
“Fuckin’ righteous, Oz!” the street-wise kid exclaimed. Ozzy had taken in the former juvenile delinquent last year, much the same way he had Nova a decade ago. Eddie grinned through snaggled teeth and a scabbed lip healing over from a recent brawl at school. “Man, I cannot wait until you let me have my own chair and iron.”
“And I can’t wait until you clean up the storage room and swab down the toilet,” Oz said, not missing a beat. “Watch the fucking cursing, while you’re at it.”
Ozzy was more father than boss, a role the old man had somehow slipped right into, even though he had no children or family of his own.
Like any sullen son, Eddie grumbled over the reminder of his chores. As he shuffled to the back of the shop to do as he was told, Nova paused her own work, glancing over to admire her mentor’s most touching tribute.
“Beautiful work,” she said, giving the old man a warm smile of approval.
Ozzy grinned with pride–a rarity–then went right back to finish cleaning and dressing the fresh ink.
Nova turned her attention back to her client, just as a dark-haired, muscular man in black fatigues walked up to the smoked glass window of the studio’s entrance door.
No, not simply a man, she realized in that same instant.
A Breed male.
A vampire.
Even worse, one of the members of the Order.
He came inside, large and menacing, even without saying a word. Nova didn’t startle, but the human client in her chair flinched as soon as his gaze lit on the big, heavily armed warrior.
Given the backgrounds of the majority of Ozzy’s regulars, even if they’d been keeping their noses clean, none of them would be eager to cross paths with the Order’s cadre of lethal peacekeepers. Nova didn’t exactly welcome the intrusion either.
Before she could tell the Breed male he was obviously lost, Ozzy leveled a narrow look on the warrior from across the small studio. “Appointment only. No walk-ins. Got nothing for you, friend.”
The vampire cocked his head, unfazed, in the direction of the surly greeting. Thick, wavy brown hair set off striking, pale green eyes in a face too handsome and aristocratic for his rough profession. That unnerving gaze skated over Nova, then past her, settling on Oz. “I have a few questions for you and the other artists who work here.”
The accent wasn’t English like hers, but American. Boston, if she had to guess. His voice was cultured and deep–as firm as the muscles she could see rippling under his fitted black combat shirt and thigh-hugging pants as he strode farther into the studio, refusing to take the hint that he wasn’t welcome.
Nova’s inner hackles rose in warning. She sent a glance toward Ozzy, whose challenging stare had flattened into a glare now.
“Question-asking requires an appointment too,” he told the warrior. “Right now, we’re booked up until sometime after hell goes glacial.”
While Ozzy confronted the warrior, his client made a casual, if hasty, exit out the back door of the shop. The guy in Nova’s chair seemed to want nothing more than to flee too, and likely would have if she hadn’t already gone back to work on him.
Ozzy stood up, crossed his tattooed arms over his chest. “Unless you’re here for ink, you got the wrong place, friend. Even then, you got the wrong place.”
The warrior grunted, dark amusement in the sound. “Not very helpful.”
“Helpful ain’t my line of business,” Ozzy growled.
“What about you?”
It took Nova a moment to realize he was talking to her. She lifted her head and was blasted by his shrewd green gaze. Those eyes bore into her, as piercing as any needle.
She watched him take in her two-toned hair and the dozens of piercings that studded the rims and lobes of her ears. She didn’t blink as his gaze moved down, over her tattooed shoulders and full-color sleeves that continued down onto her gloved hands, her extensive body art accentuated by the black leather vest she wore to work that night. It zipped up the center, showcasing even more tattoos that rode the faint swells of her breasts.
She couldn’t care less what he thought of her or all of her ink and metal. She wasn’t intimidated by his stare or his certain disapproval.
“What about me?” she tossed back at him irascibly, as his prolonged visual appraisal continued.
Finally, his eyes returned to hers. “I’m looking for an artist who did some specific work on someone recently. Maybe you know something about it that could help me.”
He held his expression neutral, carefully so, but the dark power in his stare was unmistakable. This man, this Breed warrior, didn’t have to resort to bellowing or brute force to get what he wanted.
No, he was all the more dangerous for the way his calm demeanor coaxed her interest, her trust.
And just because he was attractive and cool-headed didn’t mean there wasn’t a monster lurking behind his knight-in-shining-armor good looks.
She’d gone up against worse than him and emerged unscathed.
Well, mostly unscathed.
“Nova’s busy with a client, as you can see,” Ozzy interjected. “She don’t have time for your questions either.”
Intrigue sparked in the Breed male’s eyes. He was intelligent, to be sure, but at the moment, Nova read a note of suspicion in his keen gaze. “If the Order were to shut this shop down tonight, you’ll both have nothing but time on your hands.”
Ozzy snarled under his breath, but let the warrior continue. Without waiting for permission, the vampire took his comm unit out of the pocket of his black fatigues and flashed a photo on the device’s display. “This look familiar to anyone?”
It was a close-up of a tattoo, an incomplete piece. The Celtic cross portion of it was older, a finished work, but the star behind the cross was only an outline with partial coloring applied.
“Not sure? Here’s a different shot.”
The warrior clicked to another photo, this one taken slightly farther away. A wide enough angle to show the full length of a man’s bare arm from below the short sleeve of a sodden, dark T-shirt to the tips of his thick fingers. Against the colorful ink and black lines of his many tattoos, the man’s skin was unnaturally ashen and waxy.
Cadaver-white.
Nova’s pulse kicked up a notch.
“This body was fished out of the Thames about an hour ago,” the warrior confirmed. “No ID on him. JUSTIS is checking for criminal records to see if they can identify him that way, but it’s doubtful they’re going to find anything. All we know for certain right now is that whoever put that star on him was likely to be one of the last people to see this guy alive. If not thelast.”
Nova set down her tattoo machine and blotted the ink on her client’s pec. “Let’s break for a bit,” she murmured to him. “Go on in back. I’ll come get you in a few minutes.”
“Nova.”Ozzy’s voice vibrated with warning.
“It’s okay,” she assured her overprotective boss and mentor. “I can handle this.”
The Breed male was determined to have some answers, and as well-meaning as Ozzy was, his lack of cooperation was liable to get them all arrested. Or worse.
After her client had shuffled to the break room and it was only Oz and her left to contend with their unwanted visitor out front, Nova walked over to the counter where the warrior stood. “The star is my work.”
He didn’t seem the least surprised to hear it, didn’t even blink at the admission.
Up close, his face was even more captivating than she thought. Sharp cheekbones, strong, proud jaw line. Green eyes the color of palest sage. “Tell me what you know about the dead man, Nova.”
Her name on his lips sent a shiver of awareness through her that she had to fight hard to ignore. She shrugged. “I can’t tell you much, other than he was a real asshole. Came in here late last night, drunk, belligerent.” An errant lock of her chin-length hair slipped from behind her ear and into her face, but she ignored it, her hands down at her sides, encased in ink-stained gloves. “As we told you, we don’t take walk-ins. That goes double for intoxicated walk-ins. But this guy was insistent. No matter what we said, he wouldn’t leave.”
“Seems to be a pattern lately,” Ozzy muttered, still glaring at the warrior.
“Like I said,” Nova went on, “the guy came in late, just about the time we were closing for the night. He refused to leave without getting some fresh ink–something about commemorating friends who’d recently passed.”
Now the warrior seemed surprised. One of his brows quirked in reaction. “He had a lot of tattoos, from what I saw. I’m no expert, but seems to me he had some hardcore art on him. Death scenes. Kill counts. Some kind of affiliation mark...”
Across the studio, Ozzy cleared his throat.
“I wasn’t looking at him that closely,” Nova said. “I wouldn’t know what other ink the guy had on his body. Even if I saw it, I’d make a point not to notice. That’s what we do in this line of work, especially with the kind of clients that come through that door.”
The warrior gave her a slight nod. “Why didn’t you finish the tattoo?”
“I didn’t have the chance. I didn’t like working on him. When I told him as much, he got upset. Really upset. He stormed out in a rage, and he didn’t come back.”
“Son of a bitch left without paying too,” Ozzy grumbled.
Those penetrating green eyes hadn’t strayed from her for an instant. They studied her, made her skin feel too warm, too tight under his stare.
“Besides demanding a tattoo to memorialize his dead friends, then storming off before you could finish the work, did the victim say anything else to you, Nova?”
He did it again, spoke her name in that smooth, deep velvet voice that made her forget for a second that he was not only one of the Breed, but the Order as well. A dangerous combination that she couldn’t afford to get too close to, for a hundred different reasons.
“Look, I don’t know what more I can tell you,” she said, impatient to be done with the conversation and get back to her work. Back to her life. “I didn’t spend much time talking to the guy, or looking at him. I didn’t want to. I just wanted to do whatever it took to get rid of him.”
“Kind of like you’re doing with me?” the vampire drawled knowingly.
Nova stared at him, refusing to take his bait. Ozzy didn’t give her the chance anyway.
He walked over to join her at the counter. “I got a business to run here, and Nova’s got a customer waiting on her out back. Like I told you, we don’t take walk-ins and we don’t have time for questions. Least of all, questions about our clientele. If the Order wants to conduct some kind of investigation, I’ll thank you to do it on your own turf, on your own time.”
It took the warrior a moment before he acknowledged with a tight nod. “Fair enough.”
He reached for a pen that lay on the counter, and jotted something down on an errant scrap of paper. He pushed the note toward Nova. “In case you change your mind and want to talk more. You can reach me anytime.”
She kept her arms at her sides, her eyes steady on the shrewd gaze that seemed more suspicious than he was letting on.
Finally, the warrior turned and walked out of the shop.
Nova stood unmoving as he stepped out the door and into the night. Then she waited some more, until she was certain he was gone and wouldn’t be coming back.
Only then did she reach out to retrieve the scrap that held his bold, efficient handwriting.
He’d written down a phone number and his name.
Mathias Rowan.
Nova stared at the note for a long moment.
Then she crushed the paper in her gloved fist, and dropped it into the trash bin under the counter. She had no intention of ever calling the number.
If she were lucky, she’d never run into the warrior again.
She glanced over at Ozzy, her voice quiet as she spoke. “Do you think he believed me?”
