“What did you find out?” Thane asked.
“That our dead scarab had, indeed, been in the shop. He came in the night before, and Nova was the one who did the tattoo.”
“But she didn’t finish it,” Callahan said.
“No. The guy was drunk, belligerent. There were words exchanged, then threats. Things turned ugly, and Ozzy killed him to protect Nova. They dumped the body in the river.”
“Jesus Christ,” Sloane muttered.
Mathias went on, holding his old friend’s rightfully indignant look. Sloane wasn’t going to like anything else he would hear now either. “I realized there were things she wasn’t telling me. I suspected some kind of connection between her and the man who came into the shop...and I was right. She knew him. She didn’t know the others in the morgue, but she was scared enough to go there and find out what she could about them.”
Now, Sloane’s hissed curse was even more profane. “You lied to me earlier today, Rowan. You acted like you had no goddamned idea who woman in the morgue video was. Yet all along you knew.”
“I knew,” he admitted soberly. “I’m telling you now, lying to my friends--to my teammates--goes against everything I am. But when it comes to this woman, when it comes to Nova...”
“You care for her,” Thane said.
Mathias nodded. He glanced to Sloane. “When you told me she had been at the morgue to see the other dead men, I didn’t know how deeply she might be involved in any of this. I didn’t know if she had been part of the other killings too. I didn’t know if she’d been lying to me about what she knew. I only knew I had to give her the chance to tell me first. So, as soon as the sun set, I came here to talk with her.”
“You’ve been here all night?” Callahan piped up. “You were here while the killing took place?”
“I was upstairs, in Nova’s apartment with her.” He didn’t have to elaborate on what he was doing up there. The looks he was getting from all four men said they understood plainly enough. “I didn’t know about the attack until after it was over. The boy, Eddie, was in the shop when the killer arrived. Eddie hid back there, in the storage room. He ran upstairs to Nova’s afterward, in a state of shock.”
“He didn’t see who did it?” Deacon asked.
“No, but Nova did.” At the round of confused glances that fixed on him, Mathias explained. “She’s a Breedmate. Her gift lets her see the final moments of someone’s life when she touches them. When she touched Ozzy, she saw a Breed male in a hooded jacket. She saw this male slash open her friend’s throat.”
Mathias now looked to Sloane. “That’s what Nova was doing at the morgue this morning, when she touched the dead men with the scarab tattoos. She saw that there was some kind of meeting taking place between those men and a group of Russians. The thug who confronted her here in Ozzy’s shop the other night was there too. She saw him execute his own men.”
Sloane stared at him, raked a hand over his head. “For fuck’s sake, Rowan. When were you going to divulge all of this intel? Things between our two organizations are touchy enough without the commander of the Order’s operation in London willfully interfering in an open JUSTIS investigation. Withholding information, diverting resources, fucking a person of interest--”
Mathias growled at that last charge, even though he was guilty of everything Sloane pointed out. “I want this thing sewn up as much as anyone else--more than anyone, I’d say. But Nova is my responsibility. I don’t want anyone questioning her, or pointing one damned finger at her without coming to me first--”
Sloane studied him through narrowed blue eyes. “Have you drunk from this female? Have you blood-bonded to her?” When Mathias shook his head in denial, Sloane scoffed. “No, but you want to.”
He wasn’t going to refute that. He couldn’t.
While he’d lived a very long life taking his sustenance from willing human females--women who provided sex and nourishment and little more--he’d had no appetite for basic Homo sapiensblood anymore.
Not since he’d first laid eyes on an ink-covered, metal-studded, thoroughly unconventional beauty named Nova.
If he drank from her, a Breedmate, one sip would mean forever.
A concept Mathias was more than willing to explore with her. If she’d have him, and if he managed to find her before the danger on her heels came any closer than it already had.
“It doesn’t matter what I want right now,” he told Sloane and his team from the Order. “I just need to make sure Nova and the boy are safe, and that starts by finding the murdering bastard who was here in this shop earlier tonight.”
With his warriors dispatched to split up and hit the surrounding area streets on foot, and the JUSTIS unit augmenting the search by vehicle, Mathias then turned to Sloane. “The killer didn’t come here looking for Nova by accident. He must’ve had access to the video from the morgue. I know you don’t have a lot of reason to do me any favors right now--”
“No, I don’t,” the JUSTIS officer grumbled. “But lucky for you, I don’t hold a grudge. You want a list of all the eyes that saw that video?”
“And anyone who handled the reports of the dead scarabs,” Mathias added, quirking a brow when Sloane shot him an arch look. “I appreciate it.”
The Breed male grunted. “I’ll go make a few calls. I’ll alert the coroner’s office to the situation too.”
Mathias cuffed his old friend on the shoulder and murmured his thanks as Sloane stepped outside. Alone in Ozzy’s shop, the blood coagulated under the sheet-covered body, and far less potent to his Breed senses, Mathias took a moment to consider everything that had happened that night.
His concern for Nova’s safety, and the need to know that he hadn’t lost her completely, had his emotions combating his warrior instincts most of the time following Ozzy’s murder. And now that he was resolved, a plan being put into place, he realized that something was gnawing at the edges of his mind.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing something crucial.
The pieces weren’t quite fitting together for him, and he kept coming back to the fact that something just didn’t feel right.
Sloane walked back inside, slipping his comm unit back into his pocket. “Since you’re begging favors from JUSTIS tonight, you want me to put an alert out on your female? Ordinarily, a missing persons call doesn’t go out until twenty-four hours pass, but I see nothing wrong in bending the rules for a friend.”
“No, but thanks,” he replied, those prickly instincts still nagging him.
As much as he appreciated Sloane’s offer of support, he preferred to keep all eyes focused on finding the killer. And there was a part of him that wouldn’t trust anyone where Nova was concerned.
He thought back to what she’d told him about the things she saw when she touched the dead scarabs in the morgue. “Nova said there was someone else on the dock that night,” he murmured, thinking out loud. “Someone who shot and killed one of the Russians, maybe more than one.”
Sloane grunted. “That’s odd. The only thing we pulled out of the river so far are dead scarabs. Not a single Russian among them.”
“She seemed pretty certain that’s what she saw,” Mathias said. “Which means we’ve got another killer out there.”
“Maybe that’s the guy we need to be looking for tonight,” Sloane suggested. “Was she able to ID anything useful about the guy who shot the Russians?”
“She didn’t say.”
“But she was sure it wasn’t Doyle?”
Every tendon in Mathias’s body went as tight as a bowstring. His veins started to pound. “Yes, she was sure...”
He glanced at Sloane, who had now gone equally still, staring back at him.
“I never told you his name,” Mathias said.
At first, he thought Sloane was going to deny it. But then the big Breed male cocked his head slightly, a wry smile lifting one corner of his mouth. “No. I guess you didn’t.”