Hale ordered a ridiculously expensive piece of Texas Wagyu striploin steak with two sides of garlic whipped potatoes.
“Meat and potatoes. I should have known,” Karissa muttered with a laugh, earning a chuckle from Hale.
“When am I ever going to get another chance to eat a piece of Wagyu that costs this much? And besides fries, there’s absolutely nothing that goes better with a good steak than mashed potatoes.”
Unable to come up with anything to refute that, Karissa took a moment to throw a covert glancetoward Patterson’s table. While the man sat there looking completely relaxed as he chatted casually with the governor and several of those closest to him, his son was obviously tense. Glenn was constantly turning his head to look around him, like he thought the hit man would pop up in the middle of dinner.
“Did you have a chance to talk to your STAT contact about the hit man yet?” she asked, turning her attention back to her dinner date. “Not that I’m trying to rush you or anything, but there are lives on the line—mine included.”
Their server interrupted before Hale could answer, bringing glasses of water and a basket of warm bread, along with their wine, which he made a show of pouring. Karissa wondered if Hale would use the distraction to avoid answering the question.
“Gage and I talked to STAT’s resident expert on supernaturals, Davina DeMirci, this morning,” he said, ignoring his wine and instead taking a sip of water. “She’s a witch who runs a club for supernaturals out in LA. She’s helped us more than a few times over the past year or so when we ran into supernaturals we didn’t know how to handle. Davina promised to give this request her full attention. I’m hoping she has something soon.”
Karissa wondered what it said about her life that the idea of a witch providing intel for the feds and the Dallas SWAT team barely got a rise out of her.Just another day at the office, she supposed. She was about to ask just why a SWAT team was getting mixed up so much with supernaturals, but Hale interrupted her with his own question.
“So what was it like growing up as a Paladin? I mean, it can’t have been easy going to bed as a typical teenage girl and then waking up as someone so completely different. It seems like a pretty big responsibility for a sixteen-year-old in high school to take on.”
Karissa started to answer but then stopped when she realized that no one had ever asked her what being a Paladin was like. Of course, no one but her familyknewwhat she was in the first place, but it wasn’t like any of them had ever openly wondered what all of this meant for her life. Not even Deven.
“It was great,” she said.
When Hale sat there regarding her with a dubious look on his face, she sighed.
“Okay, parts of it were great, but there were a lot of aspects of the gift that…well…they kind of sucked.”
Karissa paused to try her wine, deciding the citrus and apple notes of the chardonnay really were as delicious as the server claimed.
“It was really cool at first,” she finally said. “I went from the little baby sister that nobody in my family looked at twice to a kick-ass superhero overnight. My brothers didn’t know how to deal whenI started kickboxing with them without breaking a sweat.”
Hale held out the basket of bread to her. “But?”
She took a small piece of pumpernickel, absently spreading butter on it. “But then one day I was walking down the street and found myself following a man I’d never met before,” she whispered, remembering that moment like it was only yesterday. “I couldn’t have said why I did it. I simply knew that I had to follow him.”
Hale didn’t say anything, instead giving Karissa time to collect her thoughts and decide exactly how much she wanted to tell him. She nibbled on the bread, savoring the creamy taste of the butter. Surprisingly, she found herself feeling extraordinarily open at the moment.
“I followed the man halfway across the South Side of Chicago, sure I was losing my grip on reality,” she said, sipping more wine. “Until he slipped through a fence around an abandoned power station and led me to a room full of teenage girls he’d left tied up in there. They were half starved to death and terrified.”
“What did you do?” Hale asked.
Karissa got the feeling he already knew the answer to that and wasn’t judging her at all. That felt strangely nice.
“My sword appeared in my hand,” she said, her mind going back to that moment, when she’dyearned for a way to make that horribly evil man regret every life choice he’d ever made, only to suddenly feel a leather-wrapped hilt under her fingers. “And I discovered my new purpose in life—protecting the innocent and destroying evil.”
“So you went to work for your parents’ security company to protect the innocent and destroy evil?”
She winced a little at that, recognizing what Hale was implying with the otherwise-innocent question. But only because she’d changed from the girl she’d been back at sixteen years old.
“My parents’ company was just getting off the ground back then,” Karissa murmured. “With my three oldest brothers helping, they’d picked up quite a few local clients but were always complaining about not being able to pull the bigger corporate jobs that would take the company to the next level.”
“And then you and your gifts came along,” Hale said, pausing as their server appeared with their dinner.
Karissa glanced at Hale’s steak, surprised that the chef had been able to cook it so fast. Until she realized the thing was still practically mooing. Well, Hale had asked for it very rare.
“Exactly,” Karissa said, picking up her knife and fork. “The original plan was that I’d join the Chicago PD for a few years to gain experience like my three older brothers did and then work for myparents doing support stuff. But when Dad realized what I could do, the plan changed. It wasn’t very long before he started putting me on protective details with my brothers.”
“At sixteen?” Hale asked, looking at her in surprise as he cut his steak. “I know your dad was a cop for twenty years or something, but how the hell did he pull that off?”
“Fake ID,” she said with a shrug, glancing over to make sure everything was still good with Patterson before cutting into her chicken and taking a bite, picking up the thyme and lemon as soon as it hit her tongue. “I didn’t care. I liked the idea of being involved because it finally made me feel like an important part of the family. And I was important, because with me around, it wasn’t long before Mom and Dad’s company started growing by leaps and bounds, first across the U.S. and then around the globe. To this day, I’m still shocked I was even able to finish high school.”
