Patrick cleared his throat. “The case files are classified.”
Jono held up his phone and waved it from side to side. “I’ll keep myself busy.”
Patrick doubted Jono would keep his eyes to himself, but he didn’t want to argue. With the Fates having glued Jono to his side, it would be impossible to keep the werewolf out of the loop entirely. So Patrick put Jono out of his mind in favor of finishing his review of the case file, taking his own notes on a borrowed tablet of yellow legal paper.
An hour and a half later, he finished reviewing every single case file for each murder and absorbed the information found within. The clock on his phone said it was a little after 1400, and his stomach was reminding him he needed to eat something. Patrick started putting the case files back in order. It took him two trips to the bull pen to return them to the secured filing cabinet they were being stored in.
Returning to the conference room, Patrick retrieved Jono. Picking up his messenger bag from the chair, he jerked his head at the door. “Come on. You can have that lie-in back at the apartment.”
Jono closed the game app he was playing on his phone and stood up, stretching his arms over his head. His shirt rode up a little, pulling tight across his broad chest. Patrick thought he heard a bone pop in Jono’s spine, but he was too busy staring at the hint of chiseled abs to really pay attention.
Jono noticed and gave Patrick a lazy smile. “All right. You can join me if you want.”
“Not interested,” Patrick said, lying through his teeth.
If anything, Jono’s smile got wider. “Keep telling yourself that, love.”
Patrick did, every second of the drive back to the apartment. They left the PCB in the early afternoon, the ride made with the music on low, which Jono drowned out with questions after the second block disappeared in the rearview mirror.
“What was that at the bar?” Jono asked.
Patrick braked for a red light and took a moment to check his phone. Setsuna still hadn’t responded to his texts and emails. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“Your magic smells wrong.”
“You don’t need to worry about my magic.”
“I think I should if you’re supposed to stand between me and a soultaker.”
The light turned green, and Patrick stepped on the gas. “Are you really going to complain about that now after last night when I saved your life?”
Jono stared at him and didn’t speak for five blocks. Only when Patrick braked to a halt for another red light did Jono move, preternatural quick, fingers brushing against Patrick’s throat. He reacted instantly even as Jono’s fingers snagged on the stainless steel chain half-hidden beneath his T-shirt.
Patrick twisted against the seat belt in the confined space without taking his foot off the brake pedal. Between one breath and the next, he had his right hand wrapped around Jono’s throat, fingers and thumb digging in hard. His left hand grabbed Jono’s wrist with enough pressure on the tendons there to make Jono’s fingers twitch.
Jono’s wolf-bright eyes narrowed to slits, but he was looking at the dog tags, not the near-murderous expression on Patrick’s face. Patrick had to throttle back the instinctive urge tokillat the unexpected breach of his personal space.
“Military before SOA,” Jono said around Patrick’s tight grip, the words nearly bitten off. “Is that how you got a soul wound?”
Patrick bared his teeth in a silent snarl, fingers tightening a fraction more before he let Jono go. He yanked the dog tags out of Jono’s grip, stuffing them back under his shirt. The light turned green, and he slammed his foot down on the gas pedal.
“You do that again and I will shoot you,” Patrick promised.
The faint bruises Patrick had pressed into Jono’s skin were already fading, the werewolf’s accelerated healing taking care of the minor injuries in less than a minute.
“So you’re Mage Corps.”
Patrick tightened his hands on the steering wheel and pretended it was Jono’s neck all over again. “Not anymore.”
He’d walked away from the military and his team to save his sanity. But Patrick still missed it some days: the uniform, the missions, the regimented way soldiers lived their lives, histeam. The way he’d been able to delay the soul debt he owed immortals by paying his service to his country instead. For all the battles he’d been in, Patrick had been safe there on the front lines from something exponentially worse, as fucked-up as that truth was.
“Sorry,” Jono said a few blocks later.
“My life is not your business,” Patrick ground out.
“Then why do the Fates want me in it?”
Patrick didn’t answer him and kept not answering him for the rest of the drive back to the apartment. He managed to find parking a block away and paid the meter to the limit with his card. Patrick ignored Jono on the walk back to the apartment. Once inside and past the threshold, Patrick set up his MacBook on the dining room table and got to work.
