He couldn’t possibly know that. Except he did. Future-sight? It was rare among vampire men, but it wasn’t unheard of. He cupped the back of her head, not gently as he usually did, buttightly, protective and possessive all at once. He tilted her head as if he didn’t already have easy view of the wound at her collarbone.
His smooth baritone came out wrong, strained to breaking. “At the meeting tonight, a police lieutenant showed me a picture from a hotel security feed.” His voice fell to a whisper. “Meanwhile you were out hunting again.”
Slowly she nodded, mind scrambling to catch up. Tonight. He’d found out from someone else tonight. He’d studied a picture of her leaving one dangerous man locked in a bathroom while she threw a bloody stun gun dart back in the face of a different dangerous man. Was his police lieutenant friend also Nova’s source? Had they seen the same picture?
“Who did this to you?” The words choked out of him, and his eyes began to glitter like shards of glass as he stared at her collarbone wound, which wasn’t bleeding anymore but still felt raw.
“The police have him by now. He shot me with a stun gun, but it’s not—”
He let out an awful sound, a hiss garbled with a wail behind his teeth. His fingers skimmed above the wound again.
“He did this. To you.”
“Tai, it’s only—”
He was gone from the room. Across the house. In the elevator. Pounding the buttons for the ground floor as if he’d smash the entire panel. Claire darted after him, moving as fast as she’d ever moved in her life to sneak past the elevator door as it slid shut and nearly clipped her.
“What are you doing?” Tai hissed.
“What areyoudoing?” she snapped.
“I’m going to kill him.”
“How? Are you going to march into the police station and demand to see him?”
“You always leave evidence for them,” he said. “DNA, body cam, so they’ll know who I’m after, and they’ll give him away somehow, or I’ll overhear something. Whatever it takes.”
She grabbed hold of his hoodie sleeve and twisted until he met her eyes. “You can’t kill a human. You know you can’t do that, Tai.”
“This human, I can.”
“In front of a whole lot of other humans?”
“They won’t even see me move.”
Tai pressed his hands to the door as the elevator descended, and the metal was about to give, his palms just beginning to leave an impression. Claire got between him and the door, pushed him back against the wall.
“Tai, stop. Stop and think.”
But this was vampire rage as Claire had never seen it. Tai was practically vibrating with fury that seemed to form a field of energy around him, lethal and icy. When the elevator opened, he darted out, and Claire followed him into the parking garage beneath the building.
He was headed for his car. Claire kept pace with him, across the entire lower level in less than two seconds. Only as they reached his vehicle did she realize he’d swiped his keys on the way to the elevator.
He was so fast. Too fast.
She threw her arms around him from behind and held on. He tried to disengage her hold, as if that would work. She squeezed him hard, and he stood still.
“Tai,” she said into his ear. “Stop.”
“He tried to—to—”
“Tried and failed spectacularly. Now calm down. Breathe.”
“He hurt you.”
“Right. I’m the injured party here. So I get to decide what happens next, and I’m telling you tostop and breathe.”
He made that sound again, the wailing hiss. He tried again to shake her off. She wasn’t getting through. Claire had been mad before—deeply, coldly, vampire-mad. The rage had been scary even as it was happening to her, made her grateful that like most vampires, she was nearly impossible to provoke to that level. But this…Tai’s rage made her own look like mild annoyance. And he wasn’t scared of it. He was hissing, tremoring, straining to unleash it.
