It got him a look of worn exasperation from Marlow. “I know. People point it out a lot.”
They would. Cade had never seen anyone with smoke-pale eyes before. One of his dad’s exes had green eyes. Lem had gotten a dilute version of them from her, green splinters in hazel. Gray was even rarer than that.
“This?” Marlow said as he waved his finger back and forth between them. “This is why I wear the glasses.”
“I can see that,” Cade said as he leaned back and tried to look uninterested. “Better to look like a hipster than have everyone stare at you.”
“Yeah,” Marlow said. “They were Piper’s idea.”
Marlow looked oddly lost without the glasses. And young. A lot like the photo of him that Lem had pulled from the police files.
In the back of Cade’s brain, that pinchedsomethinghe knew he should pay attention to, but it was pushed to the side by the thought that Sergeant Piper might have been more than Cade’s boss. How could anyone ever compete with the lover who’d shot you in the back and left you to die? It might not be love anymore, but the emotional real estate that took up had more acreage than the Reserve.
Also, Cade reminded himself in a tart, irritated mental voice, the secret of a homicidal lover’s tiff wasn’t going to help work out what was going on at the Reserve, was it?
Even with his hormones in a riot, money took precedence.
“Well, if he wasn’t a fixer, what was it?” he asked.
Marlow had lost his appetite. He pushed his breakfast to the side and leaned forward, crossed arms braced on the table.
“He did favors,” he said. “Sometimes people knew there were strings attached. Sometimes you didn’t realize till later on.”
From “people” to “you.” What had Piper done for Marlow? Cade wondered. He could push on that later, though. For now, let Marlow keep talking.
“Favors like dumping a body into the system at the changeover?”
Marlow nodded. He picked up the glass and tossed back a shot. He screwed his face up at the bite of it before he swallowed.
It was cute. Cade ignored the sappy part of his brain that wanted to moon over that.
“Never more than one or two a quarter,” Marlow said. “Spread out over a couple of precincts where he had… friends who owed him other favors. One corpse, a set of badly filled in paperwork, and people just shuffled them off to the side, assuming that someone would eventually deal with them. When no one did, they just got filed away as full moon deaths. It happens. People get killed. They die during the shift if they have a heart problem or they’re old. That was the rule, though. Nothing that would raise eyebrows, nothing that would attract too much interest.”
Cade picked up the vodka. The glass was greasy under his fingers.
“You mean, like a dead girl with missing hands?” he asked.
A smile twitched the corners of Marlow’s mouth. “Yeah. Piper wouldn’t have touched that.” He set the glass back down and pushed it over the table. “You want to ask me again?”
They both knew what he meant. Cade thought about it for a second and then downed the vodka. It was lukewarm and thick, with a sweet diesel aftertaste. Five bucks for the bottle would have been an overcharge. Pride made him choke it down without a grimace, while Marlow watched with dry amusement. They both knew it tasted awful, but Cade wasn’t going to admit that.
He licked his lips once it was done and studied Marlow’s face for a moment.
“So, what did you decide? Asshole or flirt?”
Surprise washed visibly over Marlow’s face, and then he laughed as he reached for the bottle.
“Honestly, I still don’t know,” he said. “A few more of these, and I won’t care, though.”
Cade caught the bottle too, his hand over Marlow’s. His fingers slotted into the spaces between Marlow’s knuckles, warm and unexpectedly intimate. Or maybe Cade’s brain was finally heading for the gutter, as he wondered how else their bodies would fit together.
“I was flirting,” Cade said. It was blunt, but he was done with the messy tangle of respect, lust, and interest that stuck to his brain like taffy. Since he couldn’t fit it back into his subconscious, it was time to shove it into a box he was more familiar with.
Future ex-one-night stand sounded about right. He’d white-knuckled through the rubbing alcohol he’d just gulped, so the breathless, dramatic disappointment in Cade’s chest at that idea didn’t stand a chance.
Two days ago, the only time he’d spoken to Marlow had been to rake the hard-to-read cop over the coals for… show, mostly. Two days from now, once the overdose of serotonin from having all this dragged up unexpectedly wore off, he’d wonder why he stopped.
Marlow licked his lips and looked at their hands.
