Inked Destiny (40 page)

“I’ve been asking around, trying to look up some of the people I used to hang out with. You know Vontae’s dead? He was killed in that shooting at the Curs hangout.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“You have time for a visit?

“Sure.”

“Check her for weapons and a wire?” Cricket asked.

“I’ll do it.” Roberto leaned the pool cue against the wall.

“Without an audience?” She made her voice husky and could have sworn she heard Cathal growl.

“Yeah, why not.” A jerk of his head sent Cricket down the hallway toward the room with the pool table in it. She strained to hear the clack of ball against ball but didn’t.

Roberto crowded closer. Like a lover until he grabbed her, slamming her against the wall, hand locked on her throat, gun jammed hard against her chest.

The space around her took on a deadly, waiting quality. The eyes on the palms of her hands blazed, a weapon she didn’t want to use if it meant the entirety of his memories would become hers, his life swallowed and made part of hers by a weapon she didn’t understand.

“Talk,” he said, putting weight behind the gun already digging into her. “Who else knows I’m here?”

Choices spun through her mind like a roulette wheel. An instant when the gun wasn’t pointed at her, when the accidental pull of a trigger wouldn’t kill her, was all her unseen companions needed.

She spat in Roberto’s face.

He reacted with violence, meaning to strike her with the gun but finding his arms held by men who seemed to appear out of nowhere. And then he sagged between Cathal and Heath, forced into sleep by Eamon, the gun dropping to the floor.

“Get it done, Etaín,” Eamon said, the heat in his voice and expression in his eyes making it clear she’d failed to follow his take-no-unnecessary-chances edict.

“The others?”

“Myk is capable of making someone lose consciousness. He and Liam have done what was required of them.”

“Might as well make this easier for the police,” Cathal said. “Let’s put this guy in the room with the others.”

He and Heath hauled Roberto down the hall, dropping him into a chair. Eamon allowed the air-cradled gun to fall onto the cushion.

“Moment of truth,” Etaín said, crouching, pressing her palms to bared skin. “Where is the gun you used to kill Vontae?”

His guilt touched her, the barest flicker of remorse, the hesitation caught in the nightmare.
Where is the gun you used to kill Vontae?

And she saw it, had felt it pressed below her breast. He hadn’t even bothered to get rid of it.

Ballistics could do what her gift couldn’t do for the police, provide evidence admissible in a court of law. “Where’s the other gun you used at the Cur’s hangout? Where are the silencers?”

The answers came easily, including who had accompanied him, though she posed those questions so only a sliver of memory would be lost, and felt satisfied the guilty and their the guns were all here.

“The sedan won’t remain hidden for much longer,” Eamon warned.

She acknowledged it with a nod, but delayed to ask a final question, because she couldn’t leave without knowing. “Why kill so many people? Why did you invade the Cur’s handout?”
Why?

She slid into his memory. Cyco was across the table from him, the two of them eating burgers. “The three Curs die,” Cyco said, “it sends a message that the rest of them don’t want to be moving stolen weed for the Norteños.”

Which three?
she asked, delving deeper for the targets, recognizing the men by sight though she didn’t know them. And never would. They’d all been at the bar.

Time flowed again. Roberto said, “I got a better idea, let me get a crew together. Let me take a shitload of Curs out.”

Cyco laughed and she understood why he’d gotten the street name. “Trying to be like me?”

“Fuck no. I’m my own man.” But his desires weren’t hidden from her. He wanted what Cyco had, the name, the respect. He wanted to be a legend, like his cousin.

“You hit their hangout, you better make sure you kill Anton Charles and his brother, otherwise shit will go down.”

“It’ll be a clean sweep. Me and my crew might even top what you did in Mexico.”

“Going to take twenty-six bodies then.”

“When we get done at the bar, you’ll see them bringing out at least that many.”

It sickened her, made her burn with the need for justice. Vengeance. Sometimes there was little separating the two.

“Etaín,” Eamon said, a warning they needed to leave.

She used her gift like a knife, this time entering Roberto’s memories and excising the stretch of them from her arrival until the instant he fell to Eamon’s spell. She shivered doing it, remembered Farrell’s terror of her, the blanched fear she’d seen on other Elven faces at Aesirs.

When she stood, Eamon indicated Cricket with the flash of his hand. “Remove anything that will identify you.”

It bothered her that she felt no guilt doing it. But only because for an instant, she imagined herself back in the captain’s office, heard his condemnation, his accusation, calling the use of her gift an assault.

Mental rape. It could be.

The ends justified the means here, though she rubbed damp
palms against her jeans. Felt the fluttering of her heart until Eamon’s hand at her back, joined by Cathal’s, served as a reminder she wasn’t alone in this, that she had two anchors to keep her from becoming a monster.

The inked bond was unique to the
seidic,
Eamon had told her. Maybe this was the reason for it.

*   *   *

L
iam moved to where the man named Cyco lay in a half sprawl on the armrest of the couch. A case was open on the cushion next to him, revealing the weapon that might have killed any of their kind other than Heath. And Heath’s survival had been made possible by the chance warning of a magical artifact.

Time to test Eamon’s intended, to see if she was a Lady he would ultimately give his oath to. The choice was his in a way that didn’t exist for most who called Eamon
Lord.

Liam placed his hand on the human’s chest, eyes meeting and holding the
seidic’
s.

Stop
.

And the heart obeyed without protest, the exhalation of one final breath marking death.

“You’re Lady now,” he said in challenge. “Only by your command will I reverse what’s done.”

*   *   *

T
here will be challenges to come. Never doubt it.

Had Eamon known Liam’s intent? Guessed what he might do?

She glanced at Eamon and found his expression unreadable, though he said, “This is the price that comes of being involved in human affairs. You’ll face it repeatedly if you continue as you have in the past.”

“Meaning you’re not going to stop me?”

“Oh, I’ll try.”

Violence led to more violence.

And yet sometimes it ended it.

This was where the captain’s justice failed. Jailing men like Cyco didn’t eliminate their influence. Wouldn’t end the pain and suffering they were responsible for or stop them from creating more of it.

Her eyes met Cathal’s in a wordless reliving of the past, the moment she’d stayed his hand because she’d known what killing the Harlequin Rapist would do to him. “Maybe I’m too much like your father and uncle.”

He stroked her cheek. “Make your choice. It won’t diminish what I feel for you.”

“Let the police find him dead then.”

“Liam will remain here as a safeguard,” Eamon said, and the assassin moved forward, lifting his arm and pulling his shirtsleeve back to reveal a thin braid of gold. Her hair. And she understood how Liam could find her.

“Tricky,” Cathal said, admiration in his voice.

A spoken word accompanied by the touch of Eamon’s fingertip and the tether between her and the assassin burned in a flash of fire. “Let’s go, Etaín.”

She made the call to Detective Ordoñes in the alley after surrendering the bike to Myk, Cathal and Eamon at her side as if they couldn’t bear the separation.

“You’re sure?” Ordoñes asked.

“Positive.”

He thanked her and she pocketed the phone. Getting into the car, she said, “If we’re going to do much of this, we need some different vehicles. The sedan practically screams Feds!”

“Not happening,” Cathal growled.

She laughed at that. “Never say never.”

His lips curved as he pressed them to her neck. “I’m still a slow learner when it comes to you.”

“You’ve got hundreds of years now to master the subject,” Eamon said, a trickle of amusement in his voice.

Joy was a flower opening up in her chest. “Master the subject? In your dreams.”

“Surely a Lord is allowed them.” Eamon’s mouth brushed her ear. “Home, Myk.”

Home
. It rang in her soul and heart like the chimes she’d heard before entering Aesirs that first time. Her hands curled around masculine thighs, desire returning, need both tidal wave and raging fire, what she had with Cathal and Eamon, pure magic.

Epilogue

N
iall Dunne felt only a coldness of purpose as the man who’d tried to have his son killed sat down across from him. What was done was done. Rage had no purpose here.

Frederico Perera waved away the menu and ignored the glass of water set in front of him, though he had the look of a man whose fear had left his mouth dry and his bowels loose. And why not? Pressure had been brought to bear and he understood power, and how little of it he held, that he could be forced back to San Francisco before the earth had settled over his son’s grave.

Let him fear.

“There are men who would threaten to have done to your daughters what was done to my niece and her friend,” Niall said. “I am not that type of man. Nor is my brother. We abhor rapists. This ends now, in a truce. Or your wife becomes a widow and your children fatherless.”

Bile rose in Frederico’s throat, a festering rage with nowhere to go. No safe target except one. “And the boy who still lives?”

“Would it make your loss more bearable to imagine him in prison? Are you asking that he be spared the death awaiting him behind bars?”

“No.”

“Then there is nothing more to discuss. Are we in agreement about a truce?”

“Yes.”

Frederico pulled the phone from his pocket. He dialed the number he had been given by the American who’d driven him here, and was not truly surprised to have it answered by Eduardo Faioli.

“You wish something of me?”

“That matter we spoke of earlier. It is no longer something I wish to pursue.”

“It has brought trouble into both of our lives.”

His bowels became watery. “My apologies. It was not my intent.”

He did not dare remind the man he spoke to that he himself had dismissed the Irish as no threat. He did not voice his suspicion, that Eduardo Faioli had already called a halt to further attempts on Cathal Dunne’s life.

The silence stretched, a menacing threat that had sweat gathering under his arms. Eduardo Faioli wouldn’t hesitate to target wives and daughters and parents should he desire to send a message of his displeasure.

Finally, Eduardo said, “I will stop my efforts on your behalf though they have not led to success. But I have expended political capital. Because of it, your debt to me remains.”

“I understand.”

He hung up, hand shaking as he returned the phone to his pocket. “It is done,” he said, standing, leaving Aesirs, a place he couldn’t have otherwise entered.

His bitterness grew in the presence of the dark-suited American who drove him back to the embassy. It was made sharper as he went to his small office to wait until he would leave for the airport and a long commercial flight home rather than the military jet that had brought him here.

He remembered the touch of his lips to his dead son’s cold skin, the promise of vengeance he must forsake unless he was willing to get his own hands dirty. Looking down at them, he considered how easy it would become to kill at least one of the Dunnes if they believed the threat was over. He wondered if the sacrifice of his life might be better for Margarita and their daughters, might free them of the threat from Eduardo Faioli.

Or perhaps he could arrange for an assassin, someone who could make it look like an accident or suicide. His pulse quickened, fantasy born in grief but cut short with the sudden awareness that he was not alone.

He turned to find a stranger where it should be impossible for one to be unannounced and unescorted, a dark-skinned man with long braids, his appearance too similar to those who’d been serving at Aesirs to be a coincidence.

If he courted death, it was here in this stranger’s eyes. In a voice that calmly said, “The man who holds my oath has some interest in the Dunnes. Remain a threat and there is no place you can go I cannot find you, nor will I wait for you to act first.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jory Strong has been writing since childhood and has never outgrown being a daydreamer. When she’s not hunched over her computer, lost in the muse and conjuring up new heroes and heroines, she can usually be found reading, riding horses, or walking dogs.