He offered me my dagger, hilt first. “Do you want this back?”
He’d made me drop the dagger. I never dropped my weapons unless it was on purpose.
I swiped the weapon from his fingers and chased him to the door, keeping a blade between us. Curran opened the door and paused in the doorway. “Seventy-two hours, Kate. That’s all Jim gets. He knows it and he knows I’m looking for him. Now you know it, too.”
“Got it,” I snarled.
“You sure you don’t want to kiss me good-bye, baby?”
“How about a good-bye kick to the throat?”
I slammed the door closed, leaned against it, and slid down to the floor to review the situation. The Beast Lord. Lion of Atlanta. Sir My Way or the Highway. A frustrating, infuriating, dangerous bastard who scared me into blind panic until all the brakes on my mouth malfunctioned.
He kissed me. No, he admitted to breaking into my apartment to watch me sleep, he pinned me down on the floor, and then he kissed me. I should have broken his nose. Instead I kissed him back. And I wanted more.
I tried to put it into perspective. I had told him I’d never sleep with him. He told me I would. For him it was a game and he was simply trying to win. Someone once explained to me that if you lined up all of Curran’s former lovers, you could have a parade. He was sizing me up for another notch on his bedpost. If I gave in, I’d be a footnote in his procession of girlfriends: Kate Daniels, Investigator for the Order, whom his Furry Majesty had banged briefly until he got bored and moved on to bigger and better things, leaving her street cred in tatters.
An open relationship with Curran meant professional suicide. The agents of the Order were impartial by definition. Nobody would deal with me after I slept with the head of the shapeshifters. More important than that, when Curran lost interest in what I had to offer, he’d take my heart, smash it with a hammer into bloody mush, hand me the ruin, and walk away untroubled.
I understood all this and still I wanted him. He drew me like a damn magnet. I wanted him more than I’d ever wanted anybody before in my life. For those few moments, he’d made me feel safe, wanted, needed, desirable, but it was an illusion. I had to get a grip.
The more I thought about it, the more pissed off I got. He thought he had me bagged. His Majesty was long overdue for a rude awakening.
I growled and went to dress.
BY SEVEN I REACHED THE OFFICE. THE ORDER OCCUPIED a plain box of a building, crude, brick, sturdy, and warded so heavily when the magic was up that an entire division of the Military Supernatural Defense Unit could batter it for days. There had to be another facility in the city, a state-of-the-art headquarters, but I didn’t rank high enough to know its location.
I climbed to the second floor, opened the door, and stepped into the hallway. Long and gray, it stretched into the distance like a narrow, drab tunnel at the end of which loomed a black door. A heraldic lion of polished steel reared in the center of the door, identifying it as the office of the knight-protector, the head of the chapter and my immediate supervisor.
“Good morning, dear,” Maxine’s voice said in my head.
“Good morning, Maxine,” I said. Technically I could have just thought it, if I’d concentrated hard enough for Maxine to pick it up, but talking worked better for me. I could grasp an undead mind with mine and crush it like lice, but telepathically I was a complete dud. I ducked into my office, expecting a two-foot-tall stack of paperwork. My desk was clean. Pristine. Stack-less.
“Maxine? What happened to my files?”
“The knight-protector decided to clear your schedule.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“The Order appreciates your services. Particularly when it comes to your late-night work.”
The light dawned. Ted was giving me unofficial approval to screw with the Midnight Games. There would be no investigation. Ted already knew as much about the Games as could be humanly known. He simply lacked the means or an excuse to do anything about them. Now I presented him with a golden opportunity. He was throwing me at the Games like a stick into a wheel. I was capable and completely expendable. Any public problems I caused would be excused by my half-assed status. I wasn’t a knight. I wasn’t properly trained. The Order would disavow any knowledge of my activities, paint me as an overeager incompetent, and toss me out on my behind.
Andrea manifested in my doorway, walked in, and closed the door. “Raphael called. Apparently an order just went down the chain of command. Any member of the Pack who attacks you is going to have a long, unpleasant meeting with Curran.”
I raised my pen in a mock salute. “Yippee. I had no idea I was a fragile flower in need of His Majesty’s protection.”
“Have you been attacked?”
“Yep. I was good and didn’t kill anybody.”
Andrea sat down in my client chair. “What’s going on?”
I got up and activated the ward. Dim orange glyphs ignited in the floor, intertwining in twisted patterns. A wall of orange surged up to seal the door. It was the spell my guardian had used to secure the room. People told knight-diviners secret things, the kinds of things a confessor or psychiatrist might hear. Greg’s defensive ward was soundproof, sight-proof and magic-proof. Not even Maxine’s telepathy could penetrate it. It had taken me a month of painstakingly retracing the glyphs on the floor to figure out how he had done it.
I unlocked my top drawer, pulled out the file, and put it on the desk. “Do the hand.”
Andrea raised her hand. “I will not disclose the information I am about to receive, unless authorized by the person who surrenders this information to my discretion. I will not use this information for personal gain even under duress, coercion, or to save myself or others from imminent physical harm. I do so swear by my honor as a knight of the Order.”
It was a hell of an oath. More people flunked out of the Academy on oath breaking than any other test of will. When you’ve been beaten, drowned, whipped, and then branded with a hot iron, most people will say anything just to make the torture stop. There was a narrow band of pale skin on my back, the reminder of where a hot iron had kissed me. It proved I’d passed. I knew Andrea had an identical scar. We both would remember the secrets we had to keep for our test oaths to the end of our days and never reveal them. Not even through a stray thought.
I handed her the file. She read through the pages and looked at me. I filled in the holes, including Curran’s visit.
Andrea blinked a couple of times. “Shit. Fuck shit.”
“ ‘ Shit fuck’ would also have been accepted.”
“The head of Pack’s security has gone rogue, Derek is near death, and you’re mated to the Beast Lord.”
“Jim hasn’t gone rogue; he’s just not following orders at the moment.”
“That’s what going rogue is!”
Okay, I had to give her that one. “And for the record, I’m not mated to Curran.”
Andrea shook her head. “What planet are you from? He’s slipping into your apartment to tuck your blanket in at night. That’s the protective urge at work. He thinks you’re mated.”
“He can think whatever he wants. That doesn’t make it true.”
Andrea’s eyes widened. “I just realized: he’s treating you like a shapeshifter alpha. You’re playing by the rules of not-quite-human courtship here. Has he asked you to make him a dinner yet? Dinner is a big deal.”
“No, he hasn’t.” Hell would freeze over before I cooked for Curran. “Look, I’m not a shapeshifter and he’s dated humans before.”
“That’s just it.” Andrea tapped her nails on the table. “A direct come-on like that is a challenge. That’s how an alpha male would approach an alpha female. They are all about power struggles and the hunt, and they don’t do subtle well. I realize this sounds twisted, but it’s a backhanded compliment on his part.”