But Cecilia had never been a good liar, and she was even worse at keeping her mouth shut.
“Yep!” she chirped. “I’m gonna make some dinner and hit the sack. My feet are killing me after tonight’s rush.”
Her boss stepped away from the door. She’d never been particularly intimidated by him before. Sure, he was a little scary, but he’d always been so uninterested in the staff that he seemed… safe certainly wasn’t the right word. Unlikely to care enough to hurt her was probably closer to the truth.
But he wasn’t uninterested now.
Cecilia edged toward the opening of the alleyway in what she hoped was a natural-looking movement. Her heart rate jumped as she ran the numbers on how likely she was to survive if he got his hands on her, as she always did when a vampire stalked her down a dark alley. It was a depressingly frequent occurrence.
Well, it used to be, anyway.
She’d known for a long time that there was something wrong with her. Some crossed wire or misaligned axle that linked up arousal to fear. Even at that moment, when Duke began advancing on her, she felt the rush of it down her spine and between her thighs.
Gods knew she wasn’t attracted toDuke,of all people, but the threat of him… Yeah, that was enough to get her fucked up engine going.
“You live close by, right?” Duke offered her a stilted smile full of fang. “We haven’t gotten a chance to talk yet. How about I walk you home?”
Cecilia knew the interrogation was coming, but she expected it to be contained within the relative safety of the bar, not whateverthiswas.
“Dawn’s pretty close,” she informed him, chuckling nervously. “We should just schedule a chat for my next shift.”
And that’ll give me more time to think of what to say besides ‘I’m glad your brother’s dead and he’s been turned into goo.’
She didn’t know forsurethat Devon was goo, but she’d seen enough true crime documentaries to think it was a fair possibility. Another likely scenario was he’d been tucked into a barrel and chucked into the Bay. She preferred the goo, though.
Dust to dust, slime to slime, shithead. You shouldn’t have fucked with my best friend.
“There’s plenty of time,” he replied, laying his hand on the small of her back. Her spine stiffened one vertebrae at a time as he guided her out of the alley and onto the sidewalk.
San Francisco was a daytime city, to be sure, with a population that leaned more toward arrants and elves than nocturnal folk. Despite that, the streets were never completely empty even in the wee hours of the morning.
People passed by them on the narrow sidewalk, their heads down and their steps quick — a necessity when traversing San Francisco’s notoriously bouncy streets. The rumor was that they’d been saturated with magic during the catastrophic event that razed the city in 1906, and it’d taken her and Dahlia a full month to stop looking like fools whenever they stepped outside.
Now city life and all its quirks came naturally to them. The only thing Cecilia had never quite gotten used to was the way strangers pretended like they couldn’t see each other. No one waved or nodded or said good morning. Everyone existed in their own little bubble as they walked as quickly as they could down the street. A sub-ideal quirk for a woman being walked to her doom.
“So, uh,” she began, “what did you want to talk about?”
“You’re friends with Dahlia, right?”
Cecilia tensed. She knew it was coming and she still couldn’t stop the instinctive response to freeze up when her best friend was mentioned.
It took a smooth movement around a woman walking in the opposite direction to break Duke’s contact with her back. “Yeah. We’ve been friends since we were little.”
“I haven’t been able to get a hold of her since she quit.” Duke didn’t take his eyes off her as they turned a corner onto her street. The gold shimmer of the street lights reflected in his flat gaze like oil on water. “No one has. And I’ve heard some really interesting rumors about what she’s been up to since she left.”
“You mean since someone threw a grenade at the rooftop lounge,” Cecilia corrected, her normally cheerful tone edged with more bite than was probably smart.
Duke’s lips thinned. “Since then, yes.”
Keeping her eyes ahead, she said, “Dahlia nearlydied.I can’t blame her for wanting to quit and run as far from here as possible.”
“Is that the only reason she left?”
They slowed to a stop in front of her rundown apartment building. The light above the entrance had been broken for weeks. The harsh lines of Duke’s face, so different from the boyish, pretty-boy looks his brother once sported, were cast in deep shadows as he loomed over her.
Sucking in a deep breath, Cecilia drew her shoulders back and faced the vampire head-on. “Duke, I know you’re looking for your brother. I can tell you with absolute certainty that Dahlia didnotleave the city because of him. She needed a new start and moved in with her boyfriend ofthree years.I’m sorry if that disappoints you, but it’s the truth.”
Was it thewholetruth? Of course not. It wasn’t a lie, though, and that made it a lot easier to sell.
