Underground Warrior (5 page)

And then, instead of kissing her the way they’d been kissing since this started, he gave her an odd, closed-mouth smooch on her cheek. Then he drew back.

He waited, scowling. And breathing hard. His eyes were still dilated. He clearly still wanted this. So why…?

Confused, Sibyl reached for him—but he spread a hand against her naked chest, just under her throat, and held her at arm’s length. Trace Beaudry had pretty long, thick arms. When she tried to reach for him again, he didn’t give an inch.

“How many guys have you been with?” he demanded.

She shook her head.

“C’mon, Smartypants. How many have you
done?
”

“None!” There. She’d said it.

But Trace let loose a few crude terms of his own, in a completely different context, and slumped back against his end of the seat. When Sibyl tried to follow, he said,
“No!”

So she stayed where she was. She buttoned her shirt and felt humiliated.

“What, you thought I didn’t need to know? Or maybe I’d get stupid?” He was still scowling when she peeked back up from her buttons. “It’s not like I have money anymore.”

She still couldn’t think, so she didn’t say anything. She felt like crying from the rejection and the confusion and the dissatisfied ache. He was looking at her like the freak she was now. She wanted to explain that she hadn’t known it would upset him. She wanted to tell him that to get sex before she turned eighteen, she would have had to go with girls or guards—like clarifying
that
would recommend her. She wanted to cite studies about approximate age at first intercourse, and how being among about 10 percent of Americans who’d waited, while a minority, didn’t exactly make her as unusual as Bigfoot sightings or unicorns, either.

And damn it, once she started thinking in statistics, the moment—and that blessed, blissful silence—was pretty much gone.

Most of all, she wanted to be back in his arms, no matter what he was doing to her while there. She’d felt…she’d felt….

But feelings weren’t Sibyl’s forte.

Trace scrubbed a splayed hand down his face, then looked at her over it. “Don’t give me those big Bambi eyes. I’m the one you just…who’s still….”

But whatever he’d meant to say, he deleted. He didn’t look quite as angry.

Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry
. “Faline,” whispered Sibyl finally.

“What?” She didn’t think he meant to snap the way he did.

She took a deep, shaking breath. “Bambi was a boy-deer. Faline was the girl-deer.”

She hadn’t meant it as a joke, but his bark of laughter still eased her distress. He wasn’t too angry to laugh, anyway. “Fine. Don’t give me those big,
Faline
eyes.” He searched her face. “So this really wasn’t some kind of plot to get my father’s money?”

She shook her head against visions of rags-to-riches lottery winners. “Your father has money?”

“Ex-father. It’s a long…crap. Look, I’m sorry if I overreacted.” Now he reached across the space between them to catch some of her hair between his fingers, to tuck it behind her ear. She let him, savored his touch.

“You mean you really wanted me for your first time? Just…
me?
”

As opposed to…? Warily, Sibyl nodded. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“’Cause I’m just some illegitimate good ol’ boy who grew up in a trailer park on the wrong side of the tracks.” He said it like that was supposed to scare her off. “I don’t even have a job right now.”

And I’m an ex-con. And I’m so broken, I never even looked at a man until you. And the guy who owns this apartment doesn’t know I’m house-sitting, which kind of makes us trespassers.
Did Trace really think
he
wasn’t good enough for
her?
Sibyl shrugged, even attempted a smile and a joke. “At least you aren’t Comitatus.”

His expression…stilled. A momentary pause in his breathing. A flicker of guilt in his eyes. Nothing more. “Yeah,” he said, but he sounded uncomfortable saying it—and then she knew. Because, whether she wanted to be or not, she was very,
very
smart.

Smart enough to rearrange seemingly unconnected tidbits of data into a new, unmistakable pattern.

When she’d met Trace, he was with three Comitatus descendents.

His father—ex-father?—was apparently wealthy.

If illegitimate, he might not bear his birth father’s name.

“You are Comitatus,” she accused in a whisper. This time she
wanted
him to laugh at her. She wanted him to deny it, maybe more than she’d ever wanted anything except for the nightmare of her father’s death, of her wrongful imprisonment, to never have happened. But he didn’t deny it. He opened, then closed his mouth. He swallowed, tried again, but only managed, “How…?”

By then, new and worse patterns had revealed themselves.

He’d brought her a sword from the LaSalle house. How had he happened to end up gutting the LaSalle house?

He had a cleft chin. By genomic imprinting, that could only be inherited from one’s father. She’d seen a chin like that before. And the pale eyes in his dark face, the same color as….

The court finds Isabel Daine guilty…

Sibyl stood. “Excuse me.”

“Wait.”

But she kept walking toward the bathroom, unwilling to show weakness, unable to show anything. She concentrated on taking one step after another, the ache in her throat tightening, tightening. “Are you okay?”

Sibyl made herself look over her shoulder toward where Trace now stood, looking concerned. She made herself smile to show teeth. “I’m fine,” she lied. As a child, she’d never lied. Jail—and the Comitatus—had turned her into this.

Then she locked the bathroom door behind her. She turned on the overhead fan. She turned on the water.

Then she fell to her knees and vomited, violently but almost silently, into the toilet.

She’d almost slept with the bastard son of Judge René LaSalle.

Chapter 3

B
eckett Covington, intern for attorney Dillon Charles, liked to multitask. MP3 player, check. Texting with one hand, check. Because if all he had to do was stare at his laptop screen, skimming the assigned thumbnail images and hitting the page-down key every few seconds, he’d lose it from boredom. He’d known this job would include scut work, but damn. Eyeballing almost five hundred shots of manual laborers, taken at the site of an old house nobody had lived in for decades?

Still, Dillon Charles wasn’t just Beckett’s boss, but his superior within the rankings of the great and powerful Comitatus. Just like the Judge was Charles’s superior. So it had been for centuries, and so it was this afternoon. Although a few centuries ago, squires probably got more interesting tasks than—

Wait.
Now, when his phone beeped, Beckett texted “BRB” and put it down.

He paged back up on the laptop, maximized an image and leaned closer. One of the construction crew working on LaSalle’s bungalow looked damned familiar. Could that possibly be…? Doing
construction?
God, the Judge would be mortified.

Beckett printed the picture, then began reviewing the others with renewed interest. This time he was searching for a particular height, a particular color of shirt…a particular scandal. He printed more pertinent shots. He even ditched the iPod. Maybe interning didn’t suck so badly, at that.

Up-and-coming attorney Dillon Charles was about to go on the warpath.

And Beckett hoped he got to see it.

Sibyl huddled on the travertine tile, her face in her hands and her elbows on the toilet seat. How could she have been so blind?

“You don’t know for sure,” she whispered to herself, then argued back with an almost voiceless, “So ask.”

But she didn’t want to. “Because you already know the answer.”

Stop talking to yourself.
The habit had begun in self-preservation, back in juvie. Even predators who went after small, underaged girls generally gave crazy people a wide berth. By the time of Sibyl’s parole, it was harder to stop than she would have thought, especially under stress.

She jumped when Trace hammered on the bathroom door and called, “It’s not like it matters.” He sounded especially loud and real, in contrast to her whispers. “Even if I did once join some stupid society—not, you know, that I’m saying I did—I quit. Would have quit. If I belonged. Crap!”

The way he fumbled around the oath of secrecy he’d surely taken only exacerbated her shame. She’d missed this? That the Comitatus had ever trusted him with privileged information….

Privileged information. Like, maybe, who killed her father?

Sibyl stood—unsteadily, but she stood.

“Look, you’re kind of scaring me here,” Trace called. “You want me to leave, I’ll leave, but let me know you’re okay. Okay?”

The Comitatus had entrusted Trace with privileged information. He’d since quit them. He referred to LaSalle as his
ex
-father. And he liked her. At least, he’d kissed her as if he liked her, hadn’t he? From what little she knew of kissing?

He hammered on the door again, rattling it in its frame. “Sibyl? Just say something!” More hammering. If they weren’t careful, the neighbors would call the police, soundproofing or not. The police would call the apartment’s real owner, on his extended business trip. The real owner would ask, what house-sitter?

“I’m okay,” she called, and flushed the toilet. He stopped pummeling the door. Quickly, she lit a scented candle, then began rinsing her mouth. What if…? She felt guilty to consider it, but she shouldn’t! She’d been searching for a chink in René LaSalle’s armor for years. Now, just outside that door, stood proof of the Judge’s fallibility. And he cared about her. Sort of. Maybe.

What if this was an opportunity?

Sibyl wondered how far she would go to bring the Comitatus down. Could she kiss Trace again, knowing his lips were LaSalle lips? Could she welcome his hands against her bare skin again, open her legs for him? Surely not! But she didn’t have to go that far, did she? She could blame virginal timidity.

Straightening, drying her hands, she stared at herself one more time in the mirror. Her hair had come down, but it made a better shield that way. Her color looked off, but otherwise, her expression was a mask.

“For Daddy,” she and her reflection whispered to each other.

Then she heard the apartment door close.

By the time she’d leaned into the hallway, Trace had gone. He’d taken his sword and his secrets with him. And she couldn’t tell if she was relieved or not.

“Holy guacamole, Trace—it’s gorgeous!”

“When were you going to tell us about this?”

Just as Trace had figured, his fellow outcasts—Mitch Talbott and Smith Donnell, in that order—appreciated the sword a lot more than Sibyl had. Their eyes caressed it where it lay on the dining room table.

“I’m telling you now,” Trace snapped, at Smith’s criticism. “Sibyl says it’s…” He concentrated. “Eighth– to eleventh–century. Because of Vikings and using one hand and a bunch of other stuff I wouldn’t have thought about.”

“You took it to Conspiracy Girl before you brought it to us?” The brown-haired Texan, Smith, had built his own security business with help from Trace, Mitch and another friend from college. He’d lost the business after their exile, of course. But sometimes he still acted like everyone’s boss.

Trace folded his arms, lifted his chin and narrowed his eyes down at the others. “Yeah. I took it to her before I brought it to you.”

Trace expected more questions. He sure as hell had some! Instead, the guys just went back to the sword. Blond Mitch, who kind of resembled a surfer dude, crouched by the ornate table to get an eye-level view. Smith leaned over it, hands spread as if to guesstimate its length against his own Comitatus blade. “Don’t y’all want to know how she’s doing?”

Smith said nothing, but Mitch shrugged. “Nah. We see her once or twice a week.”

Really? “I thought she hated you two. ’Cause you’re Comitatus.” Or maybe she only hated him for that.

Smith barely looked up. “Oh, she hates us all right.”

“Her hatred makes me sad inside,” agreed Mitch—but with his usual grin. “I have no idea why someone who hates secret societies would become such an expert on them…unless it’s like an epidemiologist. Epidemics aren’t fun either. She likes Greta, though. And Dido.” Their landlady’s cocker spaniel ran in a happy circle at the sound of her name. She still hadn’t recovered from the excitement of Trace’s return. “Sometimes she comes by on the days Greta’s teaching piano at Arden’s rec center. They put a leash on the dog and Sibyl walks both of them.”

“You know that I can hear you,” chided Greta from the large pantry. “It’s my eyes that are going, not my ears.”

“Just checking.” Mitch laughed, widening his eyes in feigned guilt.

Trace had somehow expected more to change, after he’d left. “So you two are still staying here? Nobody’s bothered the place?”

“Nah. Smith’s been staying in Highland Park with his giiirl frieeend, now that her brother’s back in school. But they come here to slum with us pretty much daily, ’cause of the rec center. And as long as Greta’s willing to have me, I’m just happy to stay someplace that doesn’t smell like feet. Especially since Smith’s deal with the local Schmomitatus still stands.”

That was Mitch’s playful way around their vow of secrecy—speak instead about a hypothetical society called the Schmomitatus. It’s not like they felt too much need to stay stealthy around Greta. Her own father had rebelled against the society decades ago, a fact she learned herself when he’d developed late onset dementia and began talking. The fact that she was “of the blood” had, at Smith’s insistence, won asylum for her old Victorian home on the bad side of town and everything in a five-block radius. That included the light-rail stop and Arden’s recreation center for teenaged girls.

“I’m the one who’s happy to have you.” Greta reappeared from the pantry with several cans of sauerkraut. She looked old and German and deceptively frail. “You’ll stay here, too, Trace.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “So Sibyl—she’s doing okay, then?”