It hadn’t sounded right. That wasn’t exactly what I wanted to say. But then again, crying hysterically into the phone and sobbing about how his scent made me want to curl into a fetal position wouldn’t do any good. Sorry and tears had to wait until we met and were alone.
I could do this right. I just needed to sleep on it.
CHAPTER 3
The morning brought light and magic. I took a few extra minutes to decide what to wear. Not that it would make any difference, but I put on my pale blue shirt. It matched my eyes and looked nice. I put on my favorite jeans and looked at myself in the mirror.
Full-on makeup would be too much. I brushed some mascara on and styled my blond hair, which was doing its best to grow out of its shorter hairdo. Right after I got kicked out of the Order, I’d “frosted” the tips of my hair blue, but now the dye was all gone and I’d ended up with a head full of highlights instead.
Like a kid before the prom: gussying up and shaking with nerves. I crossed my arms and glared at myself in the mirror. Sniper, death, kill, tough, hooah. Okay, that was better.
Raphael always brought out a strange side of me. The wild side, the one that was knitted from pure emotions. That wild Andrea loved him completely and did irrational things, like sitting by the phone with her heart beating too fast, waiting for him to call, or running headfirst into danger against overwhelming odds to fight by his side. That wild Andrea once got arrested. We had gone away for a romantic retreat and while I left the hot tub in the courtyard of the hotel to use the bathroom, some floozy had attached herself to Raphael, not taking no for an answer. When I returned, instead of beating a swift retreat she suggested we should all have fun together. I had dunked her a couple of times. Unfortunately, I was pointing a gun at hotel security at the time, and the sheriff’s deputies showed up. Raphael ate it up. I was finally acting like a mated shapeshifter: irrational, possessive, and head over heels in love.
I didn’t know if that part of me was my hyena side or just that uncompromising fifteen-year-old girl that lives inside every woman, but now wasn’t the time to let her out. I had to stay rational, so I could apologize and try to mend things between me and Raphael.
Cutting Edge occupied a sturdy building on the northern edge of Atlanta, about an hour from the Keep. The Beast Lord, also known as Kate’s sugar woogums, had chosen the location, and he pretty much picked the closest place to the Keep that was still within city limits. Curran didn’t like to be without Kate and Kate didn’t like to be without Curran.
The door was unlocked. Great. I walked in. Ascanio looked up from his broom.
Despite having very few clients, Cutting Edge had an excess of employees, partially because Kate kept hiring them. According to her, Ascanio Ferara was an intern. In reality nobody with a drop of sense would hire him as an intern or anything else, except maybe as a traffic jam generator. If you stood him on a street corner, sooner or later some female driver would wreck.
Fifteen going on thirty, with glossy black hair and green eyes, Ascanio was beautiful. Not just pretty, not just attractive, beautiful. He had that whole fallen angel thing going—there was a devious, sly mind behind that innocent face and pretty eyes.
Like most male children of Clan Bouda, he was treasured and babied, more so because he was lost for most of his life and his mother had just found him a few months ago. In this short period he had gotten into every possible trouble imaginable, culminating with being arrested for having a threesome on the courthouse steps. The boy did not understand how the Pack worked, and finally Aunt B foisted him off on Kate. It was that or kill him. Kate’s solution was to make this raging ball of problems and hormones into our intern. How her mind worked, I would never understand. It was a mystery.
Ascanio snapped to attention and saluted me, holding the broom like a rifle.
I pointed at the broom. “No.”
“Why not?”
Because it would’ve made every ex-military instructor I ever had foam at the mouth. “You salute with your weapon as a sign of respect.”
He presented me with an expression of puzzled innocence. “I don’t have a rifle or a sword. The broom
Smartass. “Kid, you make my head explode.”
Hail, Andrea, those who janitor salute you. Kate was forcing Ascanio and Julie, her ward, to learn Latin, because a lot of historical magical texts were written in it and apparently it was an essential part of their education. Since the lessons were conducted in the office during our copious spare time, I was learning the language along with them.
I pointed at Ascanio. “Not another word. Latin is a dead language, but that doesn’t mean you get to molest its corpse. Finish sweeping,
He spun the broom with the dexterity of a Marine on Silent Drill Platoon, planted the handle into the ground, jumped, spinning around it, his legs straight out, and landed on one knee, his head bowed, his right hand extended, holding the broom in his fist parallel to the floor.
“You had coffee this morning, didn’t you?”
He looked up at me and nodded, a big grin plastered on his face.
Teenage boudas. Enough said.
I sat down and tried my best to concentrate on going through my case. The survey of the evidence only confirmed what I had already realized last night: I didn’t find any smoking guns. Most of what I had picked up looked just like common trash, which didn’t necessarily mean it was trash. It was evidence, the significance of which wasn’t immediately apparent. I catalogued it anyway. Crimes were rarely cracked by the super-brilliant detectives in a blaze of intellectual glory. Most of them were solved by the patient and the meticulous grunts just like me.
The roar of a water engine–powered vehicle thundered outside of our door and died. Raphael. Had to be. Kate would have parked in the far corner of the parking lot on the side, because she had trouble backing out.
I pretended to be absorbed in my likely worthless evidence. I had spent the entire drive to the office trying to figure out what to say, how to say it. I wanted to explain why I had done things. I wanted to tell him I loved him. I had tried to prepare myself for the possibility that he would tell me off, but most of me hoped with a desperate naive hope that he would forgive me and we would go home together.
A knock sounded through our absurdly reinforced door.
What the hell did he just say?
The door swung open. A new scent swirled around me, a heavy fragrance—rose, patchouli, and coriander— an expensive perfume. A tall woman stepped inside. She was close to six feet and her shimmering golden heels added another four inches to her height. Her hair, the color of luminous white gold, fell down over her shoulders past her butt. She wore a really short black dress or a long T-shirt, I couldn’t quite decide which. Whatever it was, it was cinched to her improbably narrow waist by a white belt with golden studs. Her face, pretty and painted with makeup to near perfection, had that slightly vapid expression sometimes seen on models: she was either sleepy, horny, or just badly needed to sneeze.
A dark figure stepped into the office behind her. Six foot three, lean, wearing a black leather jacket and faded jeans…He stepped into the light. Dark blue eyes looked at me and the world fell apart around us. His face, framed by soft black hair, wasn’t perfect in the way Ascanio’s was, but it was masculine and handsome, and his eyes communicated a kind of sexual intensity, a promise and a challenge, that made women lose all of their self- respect and try to proposition him in plain view of their dates. The familiar scent washed over me like a pain-filled perfume.
As if in a dream I saw him put his hand on the woman’s butt, gently pushing her toward the two chairs by
