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?”
CHAPTER 3
She lied to him.
Mathias had known it even before he left the tattoo shop a couple of hours ago.
Hell, he’d known it almost as soon as the petite, pierced, walking, talking work of art had opened her tough little mouth.
Mathias’s Breed senses had lit up about a block from Ozzy’s studio, and the imprint of violence had only grown stronger the closer he got to the door.
Something bad had occurred inside that shop last night.
Something more volatile than a simple confrontation between Nova and the angry drunk later pulled out of the Thames by Gavin Sloane’s unit.
Whether it was the man’s actual murder or an event leading up to it, Mathias couldn’t be sure. His ability didn’t translate into such neat black-and-white terms. But after talking with Nova and her surly old boss at the tattoo shop, Mathias was certain the pair were hiding something.
He meant to have the truth.
To get it, he needed to talk to Nova again--preferably without the old man there to hover over her like a snarling guard dog. It was obvious the pair’s relationship went deeper than colleagues or friends, and based on the shop owner’s age alone, Mathias doubted a fiery twenty-something like Nova would be sharing the man’s bed.
No, it was a protective, familial kind of bond between them, not physical. Why that should stir even a small sense of satisfaction in him, he didn’t want to consider.
And there was more to the young woman than met the eye too.
A lot more, Mathias was certain.
She was young, but a hard one to rattle, hard to figure out. The myriad tattoos and piercings were more intriguing to him than off-putting, giving her an unusual beauty he found hard to ignore.
There was something about her--those layers of secrets in her eyes and on her skin--that made the investigator in him curious enough to know more, even if his tastes typically ran toward more conventional-looking females. The kind who were attractive enough to be on his arm or in his bed, but easy enough to forget once his work called him back to the only true passion he’d known.
As for Nova, first and foremost, she was a person of interest in his quest to learn more about the dead man.
If he found her to be a person of interest in any other sense, he wasn’t about to let that stand in the way of his duty.
The narrow, dark side alley where Mathias stood now shadowed him from view, but also gave him a clear visual path to Ozzy’s shop on the other side of the main street. He’d been watching the place all this time, waiting for the opportunity to find Nova alone.
The client she’d been working on when Mathias was in the shop had exited twenty minutes earlier. The last appointment of the night would have arrived five minutes ago, except the burly dock worker had experienced a sudden change of heart mere steps away from the door and fled without bothering to cancel.
Even though humans had more or less gotten used to the idea that they shared the planet with vampires, it was still amazing what the sight of sharp fangs and glowing amber eyes could do to even the most hardass members of their population.
Mathias smirked as he pushed away from the brick wall he’d been leaning against and stepped out onto the main street.
He should call his friend in JUSTIS to clue him in on what he’d encountered earlier that night.
At the very least, he should have alerted his fellow warriors to the situation.
Instead, he approached the tattoo shop with silent purpose, prepared to do whatever it took to make Nova talk to him, confide in him about what really happened between her and the man later found stabbed and floating in the river.
Mathias needed to earn her trust if he could.
Or pull the truth out of her some other way, if her trust proved elusive.
He walked in, glad to find her alone in the shop. She had her back to him as she replenished a handful of bottles and bandages at her station. No sign of Ozzy. His station was neatly closed up, his stool pushed under his work table.
“Be right with you,” Nova called over her colorful shoulder.
“Take your time. I’ll wait.”
She startled at the sound of his voice, but in the short moment it took for her to whirl around, she hit him with a forbidding frown. “What do you want now?”
A dozen answers sprang into his mind uninvited, none of which he was willing to speak. “I had a few more questions for you about the altercation that happened in here last night.”
Her frown deepened. “I didn’t say anything about an altercation.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. I didn’t.” Her English accent was cool with challenge, even if her gaze was cautious as he strode through the studio, over to her station. Mathias hadn’t noticed what color her light eyes were earlier; now he stared into baby blue irises ringed with indigo. She folded her arms over her breasts. “If that’s all you came to ask me, then I’m sorry you went to the trouble to come back.”
He met her flat look with an easy smile. “No trouble at all.” He took a seat on the client’s chair in front of her.
“You can’t sit there. You can’t stay.”
“Why not?”
Her chin hiked up a notch. “Because I’m working here. Because this is Ozzy’s shop, not the Order’s interrogation room.”
“We don’t have an interrogation room, actually. It’s rare we have to resort to that. Folks tend to confess long before we feel the need to haul them in for a formal interrogation.”
He was joking--pretty much. But she didn’t so much as smile. No, she was taking this all very seriously.
Deathly serious.
Mathias glanced around the empty shop. “Anyway, I don’t see Ozzy now. It appears it’s just you and me, Nova.”
“He’s here,” she said. “He’s upstairs in his apartment. And in case you didn’t hear him the first time, we don’t appreciate anyone coming in here asking questions about our work or our clients.”
“I heard him. I just wonder if Ozzy’s got something to hide.”
“He doesn’t,” she replied tightly.
“Do you?”
“No.”
Mathias had to give her credit. The lie slipped off her tongue without a hint of hesitation. No doubt about it, this was a woman who’d learned to keep her cards close. But had she learned it from a cold absence of conscience, or raw survival instinct?
Against all better judgment, Mathias wanted to know the answer to that--almost as much as he wanted to know why his nerve endings were tingling with the psychic aftershocks of violence.
The reading he was picking up seemed to be at its strongest right where he was sitting now.
In Nova’s client chair.
She stared at him as he ran his hands over the worn black vinyl arms. Her blue eyes revealed nothing, her stance so schooled and careful, he almost began to doubt his ability to sniff out the scene of a crime.
But no, the imprint was there.
Sharp, sudden, unmistakable.
“We need to talk, Nova.”
She didn’t so much as flinch. “I thought we already had.”
He grunted, unsure if he should be amused or infuriated by the female’s apparent disregard for her own self-preservation. He hadn’t tried to hide what he was. She had to know that provoking one of his kind was a bad idea.