Loose Ends (32 page)

She stiffened in his arms, swearing under her breath, and tried to push away from him.

“Hey, hey, don’t go anywhere, not yet,” he whispered, pulling her back.

He kept his hold on her gentle but firm, and after a moment, she relented. She wrapped her arms around herself, keeping her distance, but stayed within the protective shelter of his lap.

“You got a rough start,” he said. “There’s no shame in that, and as soon as you saw another way, you took it. That’s the best any of us can do.” And she’d done it in spades. No one looking at her would ever see the grimy kid she used to be. He’d been looking at her all night and hadn’t seen anything but—

Trouble
.

Hell. He let out a sigh and relaxed more deeply into the corner, feeling the shakes slowly fading away. The white pill worked fast, and he was starting to feel pretty good, like he was going to make it through the next few hours.

She felt good, too, all soft curves, silky dress, and even silkier hair, long and loose and sliding down his T-shirt, catching on his arm. He wanted her, but he sure didn’t see that going anywhere.

Outside, he heard a pair of car doors slam shut, and then the flashing lights faded from the windows. The cops were leaving. It was time to move.

“Come on,” he said, gathering her close and standing
up. He let her feet slide to the floor, and as soon as he knew she was stable, he released her and headed into the bathroom. “Can you make us some coffee, maybe see if there’s something in the fridge to eat?”

There would be. The kitchen in this house was always stocked, the woman who lived here always generous in a thousand ways that had kept him coming back year after year.

This place … this place …
He stopped and looked around. He’d come here for a reason. He just wasn’t sure what it was, or who the woman was who owned it.

Nothing was as clear to him as the Wild Thing. Every time he looked at her, another image from the past slid across his mind. Some of them not so great, like one night when he’d caught her on the street, literally, he’d had his hands on her, holding her, and she’d been a mess, coughing, her nose running, wearing a jacket two sizes too big, and yet under her straggly hair and dirty face, he’d seen a kindred spirit, a survivor, a fighter.

She’d been up to no good. He knew that but nothing more about what she’d been doing that night.

From out of nowhere, another memory flashed across the corner of his mind, of a powerful hand, a man’s hand, and a strong wrist, and the tattoo that snaked up both of them and disappeared under the cuff of a pale gray shirt. A sudden pain had him lifting his hand to his heart, and for a split second, it was hard to breathe. Then the moment passed, but not the memory.

Yeah, he knew people here. He’d had a life in this city, one at least as rich and rough as hers, and maybe it was still there for him, if he wanted it.

“Sure,” she said, turning toward the kitchen, going to make the coffee.

He watched her leave, fighting a sense of futility. Even if he wanted his old life back, he didn’t want it as much
as he wanted Lancaster, and that truth still begged the question he was facing tonight.

How much did he want her?

Too much
.

Fuck
. He stepped into the bathroom and stripped off his makeshift bandage and his T-shirt in order to give his knife wound a good look-see. He’d gotten off easy this time. Despite King’s ultimate warrior skill set, he’d gotten only one good strike in, right in Con’s side meat, missing all his vitals and his ribs.

Without giving it a thought, he opened the door to the linen closet and found exactly what he was looking for, a plastic tub full of first aid supplies, including a suture kit. In the other room, he could hear Jane opening cupboard doors, and he went to work.

About halfway through his fourth stitch, he realized he wasn’t alone.

He glanced up and found her standing stock-still in the doorway, staring at him.

“Why don’t you wait for me in the kitchen,” he said. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

“S-sure.” She choked out the word, but she didn’t move, not one inch.

Hell
. He didn’t blame her for staring. He knew what he looked like, and he was a mess. More mess than she would want to deal with, and he didn’t blame her.

“Was it King who cut you?” she asked.

“Yes, and if you’re going to faint, you’re on your own until I’m done,” he warned her, finishing off the stitch and reaching for the povidone-iodine.

She didn’t budge.

“Who did
that
to you?”

He had a lot of scars, but he knew which one she meant, the epic track running down the center of his chest.

“Maybe a guy named Dr. Souk, maybe not,” he said,
disinfecting the stitches. “I try not to spend a lot of time wondering about the things I don’t remember. In this case”—he shrugged—“I think it’s best that particular memory is gone.”

He pressed a thick gauze bandage over the sutures and started wrapping more gauze around his waist to hold the bandage in place.

“How’s the coffee coming?” he asked, glancing up.

She was really looking him over now, cataloging every wound he’d ever suffered, every cut of the knife.

Good.

She needed to see it all.

Some of the butchery he remembered, being strapped to a gurney, going under with Souk’s face looming over him, and waking to a new set of bloody bandages—and, without fail, a new level of strength and power and speed that in the end wasn’t worth the price to be paid.

He was glad someone, somewhere, had blown that bastard’s brains out.

“The coffee?” she said. “It’s, uh, coming along fine.” Moving another step into the bathroom, she reached into the tub for the first aid tape.

He ran out of gauze, held the end, and waited while she tore off a piece of tape and smoothed it into place. Her fingers were cool to the touch, sweetly feminine, gentle—and enough to make him want all the trouble she could deliver.

“Thanks,” he said, deliberately moving away. “We should—” He stopped in the same instant that her gaze flew up to meet his. The stark look on her face told him she’d heard it, too, the creaking sound of someone stepping up onto the front porch.

He wanted in.

Beneath the oddly rotten stench of this end of the block, Monk could smell the woman from the alley, the one in the golden dress with the bangles on her wrist. He’d followed her trail up the hill, and it had led him to exactly where he’d known she would be: 1822 Secaro Street, Alazne Morello’s house, an address and a name he’d found in J. T. Chronopolous’s files. The golden woman’s scent seeped through the walls of the house, and he wanted her.

The other strong scent, the one reeking of testosterone, had enraged him every step of the way. It would be good to have Conroy Farrel dead.

But first the woman.

Monk walked through the gardens surrounding the small house at the end of the block and stepped up onto the front porch. The rotten smell immediately became even more disgustingly intense, like overripe fruit left in the hot sun for far too long.

He spied the smoldering brazier, the apparent cause of the reeking stench infusing the whole street, and reached for the door, intending to make quick work of his prey—but the smoke thickened and caused him to pause.

Odd
.

Unexpected
.

Maddening
.

In less than a second, he ran through the series of thoughts, all of them inadequate until he reached the last one:
maddening
. He understood maddening. He felt it often, the bone-deep anger that pushed him beyond his ability to reason.

But this wasn’t reasonable.

This place … this place …
he looked to either end of the porch, still trying to ignore the smoking brazier. There was something about this place, something impenetrable, something disturbing, something besides the smoke threatening to gag him.

He brought his arm up and buried his nose in the crook of his elbow, reaching for the door with his other hand.

Sickening
.

More than sickening, the smoke burned his nostrils and made his eyes water. The smell of it made his skin crawl and curled around inside his stomach, tightening it into knots.

He kicked the brazier off the porch, but even in the wet loam of the gardens, the coals smoldered, and now the smell was at his back as well as lingering around the door in wisps of the nauseating, gut-churning smoke.

He coughed and gagged, and backed down off the porch, stumbling away from the assault on his senses.

The woman who lived here, the one from J. T. Chronopolous’s past, was a
bruja
, a self-proclaimed witch. Alazne Morello called herself a sorceress. Monk had dismissed the claim out of hand, but he sensed a woman’s presence in this place, a fierce, disturbing presence.

There was power beyond the merely human in the world, and he had it in spades, hard-won and paid for in blood and pain. This Latina in Denver did not have that kind of power. No one did, except the men who had
come out of Souk’s and Patterson’s laboratories. Men who had paid a price no woman could have borne.

And yet he barely made it to the sidewalk before the churning, cramping agony in his gut had him retching out the contents of his stomach.

The pain was brutal, like a beast clawing at him from the inside, something he thought he’d left behind in Bangkok.
The bitch
, to have done this to him. He would come back for her someday and make her pay.

Rising from his crouched position, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and started back toward the house. But the smell hit him again, cloying and rich, and so thick he could barely breathe.

He tried another route to get inside, skirting the property from a distance and coming around from the back. But the smoke, the insidious smoke curled around the whole damn place. He didn’t know how. He’d dumped the brazier, but the smell and the smoke were everywhere, wisps of it winding through the gardens and hanging from the eaves of the house.

He tried approaching the back door off a small stone patio but was turned back once more by the nauseous cramping induced by the smoke. Standing at the edge of the garden, he used the tail of his shirt to wipe the sweat from his face, mindless of the viscera and blood splattered on it.

There was another way.

He turned his face into the wind, felt it rising from the west and bringing rain in its wake. Soon it would be upon them, and the smoke and smell would dissipate. He would have them then, Farrel for slaughter and the woman … perhaps the woman for something else, something he hadn’t experienced since before Bangkok. She was Farrel’s, reason enough to want to take her like a man, but even more, this woman, unlike the ones he’d killed, teased his lust to life.

He would capture her and use her, and when he was done, not even a beast like Farrel would want what was left.

Turning away from the house, he broke into a run, heading downwind to higher ground where he would watch the house and wait.

Con reached over Jane’s shoulder and hit the bathroom light switch, plunging them into darkness.

Whoever the hell was out there, he wasn’t going to give them any kind of advantage. Far from it, he was going to break them in half.

Holding tight to Jane’s arm, he escorted her back out into the hallway, the most protected place in the house.

“Stay here,” he said, and got all of half a step before she grabbed him.

“
No,
” she said, pulling him back into the corner. “You’re staying here with me.”

No, he wasn’t.

“This won’t take long.” And it wouldn’t. He’d caught a scent, the same rancid sweat and oddly metallic smell from the darkened alleys behind Mama Guadaloupe’s, and whoever that sonuvabitch was, he’d made his last mistake. “I’m only going outside for a minute.” If it even took that much time to bust this guy.

“The
hell
you are,” she whispered harshly. “So help me God, you’re not going
anywhere.
”

“Jane—” he began, only to get cut off by a clattering sound coming from the porch.

She swore and shifted her hold to his waist, grabbing onto his jeans.

Dammit
. He needed to get out there.

“I need—”

“You’re
not
leaving me here alone.” Her hand curled around his waistband.

“I’m going to be right outside the front door.” She
wouldn’t be alone. He reached down and took hold of her hand, intending to pry her loose, but she just held on tighter.

“
No,
” she insisted, whispering fast. “It never works that way. The guy always leaves, and then something terrible happens to the woman. You’re not leaving me in this house, where … where
anything
could get in here and … and … you’re
not
leaving.” She moved in closer, making it all that much harder to get away.

But honest to God, he could have put up more of a fight.

She was scared, really scared, which was all the more reason for him to get out there and take care of business. He heard the guy move off the steps, and then there was silence for a moment, before he picked up the sound of someone walking around the outside edge of the garden.

The bastard was trying to flank them.

He could slip out the bedroom window and come up behind the guy, or be waiting for him when he came in the back door, but either option entailed somehow extricating himself from her grip.

“Where’s your purse?” he asked. “I’ll get your gun for you.”

“It’s in the kitchen. I’ll go with you.”

“No.” He didn’t want her exposed through the windows.

“Yes, I’ll—”

“
Shhhh
 …” he said, touching his finger to her lips. Something had changed outside.

He turned his head toward the back door and listened, waiting, but there was nothing, not a sound, and the rancid, chemical smell of sweat and metal was quickly fading.

If he didn’t move fast, he was going to lose the bastard. He turned to tell her as much and then realized with a dawning sense of inevitability that it didn’t matter.
If he chased the guy down the street, then he really would be abandoning her—and he’d already done enough damage in that quarter for one night.