He tosses me a candy bar. I catch it, rip it open and munch it, and begin making plans to get my sword back. I know Jayne. He knows if I survive I’ll come after it, so he’ll take it somewhere he thinks I can’t get to it. He won’t want to waste too many of his men guarding it because he wants them out on the street, fighting. I waste a couple secs trying to figure out where he’d take it, then realize I don’t have to. All I have to do is spy on him and follow him back to wherever he takes the Fae he catches to be slaughtered. I can’t believe he’s so stupid he really thinks he’ll be able to keep it!
“Stay there and I’ll get you some clothes,” Christian says.
He lopes off, moving long-limbed and easy, not gliding in the weird way the princes do. Down the other end of the long room he rummages through an armoire, and comes back with a pair of flannel pj bottoms with a drawstring waist and a huge cream fisherman’s sweater.
I suit up under the covers, tying off my waist tight and rolling up the legs and arms about a hundred times. When he tosses me a pair of balled-up socks as he heads off to the kitchen, I’m distracted, still thinking about Jayne, and miss them. They go sailing past me, hit the wall and fall down in the crack. I roll over and reach down, rooting around for them.
It takes me a second to figure out what I close my hand on.
Hair. Attached to a head. There’s a head in the narrow space between the bed and the wall. I freeze, totally horrified and massively grossed out.
I jerk my hand back and just sit there, swallowing the creeped-out sound trying to claw its way out of my throat, then look over my shoulder at him. He’s humming a weird song under his breath that sounds a lot like the music they play at Chester’s and disappearing into a pantry off the kitchen.
I force myself to reach back down and pat around, never taking my eyes off the pantry door. “I’m hungry, Christian,” I call. When he answers, I can make a good guess at how deep the pantry is, how far in it he’s gone. How much time I have to figure out what the feck is going on here.
The head has a neck attached to it, and sure enough there’s a body, too. It’s naked and female and human. She’s stiff with rigor mortis and ice cold.
I barely let myself breathe. I hear boxes being moved around on shelves.
“Sorry, lass, I’ll have more for you in a second. I thought I had some Snickers in here but so far I’m only finding Almond Joy.”
I yank my hand out of the crack and scoot back to the middle of the bed, and when I answer him I sound relaxed, playful. “Aw, dude, keep looking. You know how I love my Snickers.”
The boxes stop moving. “Something wrong, lass?”
There’s a dead woman wedged between Christian’s bed and the wall. Normally I’d say that’s a whole lot of wrong and I’d get real vocal about it, but I’m in the killer’s apartment, wearing his pjs with no shoes and I got no fecking sword that kills Fae because that fecker Jayne took it, so I’m in no hurry to do that right now.
There’s no way I tipped him off. My delivery was perfect. “No, nothing. Just starving out here!” Another flawless lie. I may not do it often but I shine at it like I do most things.
He steps out of the pantry and looks at me. The Highlander is gone. He’s full Unseelie prince, iridescent eyes tinged with crimson. “Och, lass, Mac never told you, did she?”
“Told me what?”
“I’m a walking lie detector, Dani, my darling.”
“Nobody is.”
“It’s inherited, like your sidhe-seer gifts.”
“Which I’m going to use to kick your ass from here to next week.”
“And that was one big fat fuck of a lie. You found her, didn’t you? I knew I should have put her away. But you were here, and bleeding so much, and I needed her off the bed. Saving you was all that mattered.”
“So you shoved her off the side of the bed and thought I wouldn’t notice? You stuffed her in a crack!” My hands are fists. The ignominy of it. Dead and disposed of like a used condom. If I hadn’t missed the socks, I’d never have known. I’d have left thinking Christian was wicked cool for saving me and not been one ounce the wiser that I’d been in bed next to a dead woman, eaten and dressed without even seeing her two feet away. “Dude, you are one sick feck.”
“Och, Dani, my love,” he says, gliding toward the bed, “you’ve really no idea.”
NINETEEN
“I stand alone”
I kick up into freeze-frame without even thinking. I don’t lock one thing down on my mental grid. I hope I do a lot of damage, break everything I hit and just don’t knock myself out, because I have a feeling if I do, I’ll wake up strapped down to a rack with an insane ex-Highlander about to do seriously fecked-up things to me.
If he can sift, I’m dead meat.
I make it to the door but he’s there in front of me, arms spread, crouched low, looking like he’s about to bum-rush me and take me off my feet. His face is contorted with anger, kaleidoscopic tattoos rush beneath his skin. His eyes are full black. Only thing that’s missing to complete the Unseelie prince picture is a radioactive torque and huge black wings spreading, getting ready to crush me in a deadly embrace. I backpedal frantically and he lunges.
Then I’m on the floor and he’s on top of me, and I know the second he hits me that Christian is so much stronger than me that I don’t stand a chance of taking him. I can’t believe the strength I feel in his body! The Unseelie part of him has kicked in with a vengeance. It’s not just power oozing off him. He’s turning into pure sex just like the rest of them. I shake my head, trying to keep it clear. I think about horrible things like the dead woman stuffed into the space between his bed and the wall, and how I don’t want to end up like her.