Cold Hard Secret (Secret McQueen) (16 page)

“I think it’s important for you to take this seriously,” Keaty went on, having given me more than enough time for personal introspection. “You know this won’t go overlooked.”

“There’s no evidence to link me to the crime, and like you said, the article doesn’t mention what happened to the body. Chances are good the authorities will cover it up to avoid the embarrassment of losing a corpse like that.” I made a mental note to call Tyler once I left. He was still working with Mercedes under the guise of being a police officer, but now I knew his real job.

Tyler had been recruited by the FBI to work for a special black-ops division that investigated paranormal entities in the US. Sort of like the
X-Files
only they were taken very seriously by their peers, and the stuff they worked on was real.

I was willing to bet Special Agent Nowakowski and his partner Agent Emilio LaRoy had international affiliations. They could probably call someone up at Interpol who would be able to sweep the whole mess under the rug. Sometimes it was nice to be a government asset.

“I’ll take care of it,” I assured him.

As to the matter of my secret identity becoming public knowledge? That was something I still didn’t know how to deal with.

Juan Carlos was going to have a heyday. No one had tried harder or pushed as much to find out what I was. He hated me.
Hated
me. Once he found out I had werewolf blood tainting my already questionable mortality, he would lose his mind. In Juan Carlos’s opinion, the only thing worse than a human was a werewolf. So what would be worse than a half-human vampire? A half-werewolf vampire, naturally.

Sig had kept me protected from Juan Carlos this long, but could he keep me safe now?

“You seem very sure of yourself.”

“I did what I had to do. I’ll make sure things don’t spin out of control.” Only a few years ago I wouldn’t have been able to make such assurances. When I’d been a mere bounty hunter for the Council, I had feared their retribution at every turn. Now that I was on the Tribunal itself, I was damn near untouchable.

I was going to put my power to use for as long as I still had it.

“So, you killed Alexandre Peyton.” He crossed his legs at the knee and slipped his glasses back on.

I withdrew the leather cord tucked under my shirt and showed him the tooth I’d removed. Since I hadn’t been able to keep the first one I’d divested Peyton of, I wasn’t sure what would happen to this one if it were to see daylight. Luckily, keeping it on me meant I would probably never have to find out.

“Dead dead.”

“How does it feel?”

It was a fair question, but one I hadn’t really paused to consider for myself. Peyton’s death had opened up a whole Pandora’s box of problems I was now juggling. Unlike killing The Doctor, I hadn’t been able to meditate on how the death impacted me.

Killing The Doctor had been
essential
. I’d made a military general swear to me I’d be allowed to do it, and to their credit they’d followed through. If he hadn’t died by my hands, I never would have slept again. As it was I barely slept. Without seeing the life fade from him with my own eyes, though, I wouldn’t have been able to go on living.

Peyton was different. He was easier and harder all at once. Killing him didn’t cleanse my soul or give me freedom. It felt like the period at the end of a very long sentence, something that just finally
was
. It was as necessary as the death of The Doctor, perhaps more so in some ways. Yet when I thought about it now, I felt…

“Nothing. It feels like nothing.”

Maybe in a week, or whenever I was able to sit down and process everything, I might feel relieved, or triumphant. Maybe I’d feel sad. Or sick over how I’d done it. But for the time being, where there ought to be a sensation of finality, there was a void instead.

Keaty didn’t seem worried, though. Rather, the smile forming on his face told me he was the exact opposite of concerned. “At last.”

“At last?”

“You have been led through life by a leash of your emotions, Secret. You
feel
too much, and it makes you weak. I have spent years trying to train you to rid yourself of pointless thoughts and feelings and to simply
be
. And now, at last, I think you might be there.”

Ah, yes. To be Keaty’s perfect assassin. The mindless killing machine he had spent most of my teenage years teaching me to be. In an ideal world, I would be a cross between Sherlock Holmes and a Terminator. Deductive not reactive. And driven at all times by my directive.

I think Keaty’s main problem with me was that I wasn’t human, but I behaved too much like one. He didn’t know what to do with me, so he’d tried to beat the humanity out of me one lesson at a time.

There were days I think he succeeded more than he could ever know, but sometimes a shard of personhood peeked through.

Who the hell was I?

I had straddled the line between my vampire self and my werewolf self, and for the longest time neither side wanted me, which made it easy to stay the course and do a fair impression of humanness. Now I was being pulled in both directions at the same time, and something had to give.

And that something was my personhood.

I’d literally given up my humanity earlier in the year, hadn’t I? I’d had a chance to live as a human, and I’d traded it in to be a monster again.

What did that say about me?

Maybe Keaty was right. Maybe I finally was the mindless killer he wanted me to be. And if that was the case, I had to be her a little longer. I wasn’t done with death yet.

“I learned from the best.” I wasn’t sure if I meant it as a compliment or not.

I doubted it mattered.

Chapter Twenty-One

There were only so many detours I could take before I had to go home. Though I didn’t have to worry about feeding my cat, Rio, since she’d been staying with Mercedes and Owen while I was in France, I did still need to go back to my apartment eventually.

I’d checked my phone every five minutes since leaving Rain Hotel, and as if he could feel my anxiety from across the city, Dominick texted me to say,
I’ll let you know if anything changes. Go home.

How did that skinny jerk know I was avoiding my apartment?

What Paris and New York had in common that I most appreciated was how their layouts promoted pedestrian exploration. I liked cities I could walk in, mostly because driving in traffic made me want to punch people in the throat.

Walking also gave me an excuse to avoid Hell’s Kitchen for an extra forty minutes while I wandered the streets, breathing in the evening air. It wasn’t until I’d gotten back here and set foot on the sidewalks of the city that I realized there had been a time I might have never seen this city again. I had almost died in Paris, and if I had, what would my last memories of New York have been?

Grief and bitterness, avoidance and pain.

If I was going after my mother, I needed to make peace with my city and the people who lived in it. Specifically the people in my life who I had been failing of late.

I kicked up my pace, walking past the corner Starbucks that would take me into Calliope’s hidden realm and continuing down the next two blocks until I was standing outside my yellow apartment complex. My living room light glowed warm, but I couldn’t see who was home thanks to the curtains.

Since Desmond was in wolf form downtown, my houseguest potentials were severely limited. In fact, given that only a handful of people knew I was back in the city, the possibilities were narrowed right down to one.

I didn’t bother looking for my keys again. If it was who I suspected it was, the doors would be unlocked. The undead tended to be less than concerned over their personal safety, at least as far as break-and-enter situations went.

As predicted, neither door gave me any resistance, but when I walked into the living room, it was empty. My apartment wasn’t very big, so there weren’t a lot of places he could be.

“Holden?” I dropped my Coach weekend bag on the floor, weary of having dragged it all over the city. My purse thumped next to it. I kept my boots on and unsnapped the closure on my holster in case someone other than Holden was waiting in the dark recesses of my apartment.

I peeked my head into the kitchen first but found only my microwave and small bistro table to greet me. Neither had much to say.

The shower wasn’t running, so I didn’t bother with the bathroom and instead moved into my bedroom. He wasn’t hiding. My side-table lamp was on, and Holden was sitting in the big armchair next to the door. He’d stretched out his long legs and rested his feet on the end of my bed. A copy of
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
was lying facedown against his stomach. It was one of those books I’d bought on a whim but had never gotten around to reading.

I didn’t have a lot of spare time for books, unfortunately.

“Running up my electric bill for kicks?” I asked.

He glanced up. “You can afford it. Speaking of, I have to wonder why you still insist on living here when you have the Tribunal bankroll behind you. I know you weren’t keen on taking charity from the wolf king, but the Council money is yours to spend.”

“No, it’s not.” I sat on the end of the bed and pulled his feet into my lap. I liked seeing he had obeyed my house rules when I wasn’t home, and had taken his shoes off. I gave his toes a squeeze through his cashmere socks.

Leave it to Holden to be snobby enough to own cashmere socks.

“You work for them. Most people who do a job are willing to accept the paycheck that goes along with it.”

“I accept the money, but I don’t feel right spending it wildly. After my first Bergdorf’s spree, I stopped finding it fun. Plus, I like this apartment.”

Holden sneered, doing nothing to hide his disdain for the place. “You’re rich, yet you choose to live in squalor beneath the streets.”

“God, you make it sound like I’m living in an abandoned subway tunnel with all the mole people. This is a nice apartment, and if I ever fall out of favor with the Council, it’s the apartment I can
afford
. Why would I give that up?”

“Secret, you’re the Tribunal. If you fall out with the Council, you’ll be dead.”

I chewed the inside of my cheek and stopped squeezing his feet. “Unless there were extenuating circumstances.”

“Such as?”

“Like if they found out what I really was.”

His chocolate-brown eyes narrowed in concern. “Why would you bring something like that up?” He knew me well. At least enough to know I wouldn’t casually mention something like my heritage unless I had a good reason.

“Peyton knew. And he told a bunch of his lackeys in Paris. It’s going to come back to our Tribunal. And…”

“He knew? Past tense?”

I gave a tight nod, and he pulled his feet from my lap, leaning closer so he could take my hands in his.

“I killed him,” I said.

“Finally. I wish I could have seen it.”

I liked how he didn’t ask me what I was feeling or how I was dealing with it now that that chapter of my life was over. Withdrawing the tooth necklace from under my shirt, I showed him my spoils of war.

“Good girl.” He kissed my forehead, holding my face close to his for a long breath, then placing a second soft peck on my lips. He didn’t try to initiate anything else, and I was grateful, since the one kiss had already made me coil up with anxiety.

Whether he sensed my unease or he had learned to accept my emotional distance by now, he sat back in the chair, giving me some much-needed personal space.

I hadn’t felt the crashing waves of fear and uncertainty in their former extremes since leaving Paris. There’d been no flashbacks or panic attacks since the moment I’d divorced Peyton’s head from his body. Part of me had probably thought that was the end of it. I was cured.

But it wasn’t so easy, was it? Clawing my way back to a place of safety and sanity would take more than one headless vampire.

I stared at Holden, taking in every last bit of him I could, feasting on the visual buffet of his beauty. During our stay with The Doctor he’d been starved to the point where his skin clung to bone and his hair had begun to fall out. Now that he was back to his former modelesque glory, I only wanted to picture him like this and drive out all other memories. His dark, glossy hair, this side of too long, brushed the collar of his dress shirt.

He looked like he’d just stepped out of the pages of
GQ
, which stood to reason. I don’t think I’d ever seen Holden as anything other than totally pulled together.

Even when we’d been on the brink of death, he’d worn Burberry.

“I thought I’d be happier,” I confessed, though he hadn’t asked.

“About killing Peyton?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you think he was the vessel containing your peace of mind? And by cutting him open he would release it and you’d be yourself again?” When he said it like that, it sounded totally absurd, but of course I’d thought that.

“I guess I figured I’d feel like the whole thing was over finally and that would make me feel better. But it’s not over yet.”

“Who decides when it’s over?”