“A lady jumped off the building a minute ago, and youdon’twant to know what we saw in the stairwell. If I see one dead person in our room, I’m sleeping on the fucking roof.”
Police sirens wailed a few blocks over, a familiar sound on this side of town.
Christian scooped up the room key and stared at it. “There’s something I came up here to talk to you about, but I’m afraid you’re not going to like it.”
The wind whipped my hair in my face, and I brushed it away. “I went to a party where people got their heads cut off, walked through an energy wall from hell, and discovered I’m now living in a shadow realm between the living and the dead. I’m pretty sure you can’t top that. Not unless you’re planning on sleeping in Lenore’s room tonight. That’s a hard no.”
“Actually, this is about her. There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you about Lenore.” He scratched the back of his head. “She’s the one who buried you.”
I slowly turned my head and dissected his expression. “What fuckery is this?”
He put his hand on mine. “She scrubbed your memory of the whole affair. But Lenore is the one who buried you, to be sure.”
“How do you know?”
“I found one of her hairs on you. And I tasted a drop of blood that wasn’t yours.”
“You’ve known this whole time?” I swung my legs back over to get off the ledge and stood up. “You fanghole! Why the hell did you keep that from me? You should have told me.”
“For what reason? So you could commit career suicide and slaughter a higher authority member in a fit of rage? You were in a fragile state.”
When the shock wore off, I thought about the course of events. “Why? Why would she bury me?”
He chuckled softly. “Why wouldn’t she? I asked myself that same question for a decade as I stared into the darkness of my own coffin. If Lenore sees you as a threat or someone who’s in the way of what she wants, she’ll be done with you.”
I clicked my teeth together as something else troubled me. “Does she know you know?”
“Are you mental? I don’t care to be looking over my shoulder for the next time that woman will come after me. As it stands, she seems to trust me, so I’ll use that to my advantage.”
I leaned forward and sharpened my gaze, my voice as steady as a rock. “Why are you telling me this now? I’m not going to argue with you about why you kept this a secret since you always think you know best. But I’m smarter than you give me credit for. I wouldn’t have killed her.”
“No, but you would have confronted her.”
“So?”
He leaned back on his hands. “It’s best for people like her to stay in the dark. The more they know, the more they plot. And things have gotten rather sticky with her newfound love interest.”
I paced away from him and then turned on my heel. “Why is this coming up now? If you think it’ll piss me off, why would you tell me when we’re going to be sleeping next door to her and—” The pieces clicked. “Ahh. You want me to help you kill her, don’t you?”
Christian leaned forward, his black eyes boring into mine. “I want this more than you’ll ever know. I’ve been waiting almost a century to do it myself. Why do you think I haven’t found her a competent guard by now?”
I threw my head back. “Now it all makes sense.”
“We won’t have a better chance than we do now. You said yourself that this Sparrow fella removed your gifts for one night, and that means she can die easily—no power to fight us. She won’t hear us sneak up on her. We can’t squander the opportunity. Now is it. We won’t get a shot like this again. It’ll never be this easy.”
Light danced at my fingertips, and he noticed.
“How much cider did you have?” he asked.
“Just a sip.”
“Then I wager we have a few more hours, assuming she only had a glass. If she had more, all the better.”
I laughed and approached the wall, my gaze fixed on an intersection light. “We can’t. Viktor will know.”
“No one has their gifts, Raven. Only Niko. We can make it look like a murder, and that shouldn’t be hard to do in a dump like this. For feck’s sake, a man tried to shoot you dead in the lobby.”
“Thanks for that, by the way. It was sexy as hell how you broke that gun, but now I’m too pissed at you to care anymore.”
