Chapter 20 Asher
“I THINK I found something.”
I glance up as Elaine bursts into my office. I’ve been pretending to work since I got to the office this morning, but all I can think about is Cord.
Waking up next to him.
I may have watched him sleep as the sun rose, spilling golden light over his tattooed body, his dark hair splayed across the pillow. I had all I could do not to go down on him and have his cock for breakfast.
He insisted he was feeling a hundred percent when he woke up. I would’ve preferred he take a day, let me care for him. Spend it in bed with him, but he insisted he needed to get back out there to stop this threat.
I don’t like it, but I let him go. The last thing I want to do is start a fight when we seem to be getting along. He did promise to keep me updated on things, so at least I have that.
“What do you have?” I ask Elaine as she plops down on the chair in front of my desk. “And explain it to me in terms I’ll understand.”
She grins. “Okay, so I was having no luck with my usual methods so I set up a search parameter to crawl everything on the web and alert me if the name ‘the Python’ pops up.”
“And?”
“And I got a hit. It was on a private Reddit chat, of all things. I could tell they were talking in code, but someone mentioned ‘the Python will be there.’”
“Where?”
“That’s what I’m trying to dig up right now. I’ve combed through pages and pages of this chat looking for mention of a location, but I did find a weird series of numbers and letters that could be a coded GPS coordinate. I’m running a cipher on it right now.”
Could this be what Cord is looking for? “How long will that take?”
Her phone dings and she looks down at it. “How about right now?”
She jumps up and heads back out to her computer with me on her heels. Her screen is flashing with a number that even I recognize as a GPS location. She pulls up a map and plugs in the coordinates and it takes a few seconds before zeroing in on a location in the city.
“Can you zoom out on that to tell where it is?”
We both watch as the screen changes, revealing street names. “Looks like an industrial complex in the Meatpacking district.”
I pull out my phone and call Cord. He answers on the second ring.
“Miss me already?”
“Can you come by my office? Elaine has found something.”
Yeah, I could’ve just given him the address, but I’m using any excuse to see him.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
I’m waiting for him when he walks off the elevator with several of the people who work for me. It’s strange seeing him in this environment. He stands out among the conservative suits and dresses, his muscled, leather-clad body seeming larger than life and bristling with danger.
It’s only the second time he’s been here, the first being when I initially moved my company into the building, though that time we came at night when no one was present and proceeded to christen the couch in my new office.
Just the thought of that incident sends a flush of pleasure through my system.
I push that thought aside and take him to Elaine’s desk, introducing them. She seems especially in awe of him.
“So you’re the guy responsible for my sleepless week?”
He glances at me and shrugs. “You’re the computer genius?”
She grins smugly. “That would be me.”
“What’d you find?”
“I’ll get to that in a minute. First tell me what’s the deal with this Python guy, because he covers his tracks like a pro.”
Cord looks at me and is no doubt wondering how much Elaine knows.
I nod to him. “She’s up to speed.”
Elaine has known about me almost from the beginning.
It’s the only way I could convince her to go along with some of the shady shit I’ve asked of her over the years.
And maybe it’s because she has her own secrets to keep or the fact that I kept her out of a federal prison and pay her an ungodly amount of money to do exactly what she loves and give her no restrictions other than don’t get caught.
Yes, she works long hours, but it’s not because I ask her to. She’s just a workaholic.
“Ever heard of an Outlier?” Cord asks.
“No. What is it?”
“An unsanctioned vamp.”
“Unsanctioned? What does that mean exactly?”
I step in, explaining to Elaine that it’s when a vampire is made without the approval of the Clan.
“Jesus, so you guys have your own government to deal with? Kind of takes all the fun out of being an immortal creature of the night, doesn’t it?”
“We have rules for a reason,” Cord says. “To keep from harming humans.”
“Okay, I guess that makes sense. So these unsanctioned vamps, they don’t follow the rules?”
“No,” Cord replies. “They often kill indiscriminately without any regard for the fact that they could be exposing all of us. When that happens, people like me are responsible for hunting them down.”
“So you’re like a bounty hunter?”
He shrugs. “Among other things.”
“And this guy, the Python?”
“He’s the leader of a gang of Outliers who are kidnapping people and either turning them against their will or using them as blood bags.”
“Shit. Okay, so important that you find him, got it.”
“So what do you have?”
She pulls up the map with the coordinates of the place we found. “I got this through a chat room. I’m still crawling the web, looking for any other references to him.”
Cord leans closer to study the screen. “I know that area. I’m guessing those buildings around it are warehouses.”
“I can pull up the street view,” Elaine says. “Gotta love Google Maps.”
We watch as the scene unfolds before us. She clicks on the arrows to move us around the map.
“Definitely warehouses,” Cord says. “Nothing too tall so we can put people on the roof with a crossbow.”
“A crossbow?” Elaine asks. “You don’t use guns?”
“Guns will only piss a vamp off. Plus they’re loud and easy to trace. The Clan is all about stealth.”
“You don’t think anyone would get suspicious of a guy with a crossbow bolt sticking out of him?”
“We don’t leave it there. We’ll load a bolt with sedative to knock a vamp out.”
“You guys are way cooler than I thought,” she muses. I have a feeling Cord just created a fan.
He pulls out his phone and enters the address in his GPS. “This is great. We’ve been searching for days and have come up with nothing.”
“Give me your number and I’ll call you if I find anything else.” She looks at me. “If that’s all right?”
I’m not crazy about her going around me to communicate with Cord, mainly because it leaves me with less of an excuse to talk to him, but I know how important any information could be to his safety right now.
“As long as you keep me informed,” I reply.
“Of course.”
“What are you going to do now?” I ask Cord.
“I’ll take this back to Dante. He’ll likely put a surveillance team on this place until we know what we’re dealing with.”
I can’t get the picture out of my head of Cord bleeding out on the wall of my apartment building last night. “Just promise me you’ll be careful.”
He grins at me. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to let these fuckers get the drop on me twice.” He turns back to Elaine. “Thanks for the information. I’ll be waiting to hear back from you.”
“No problem. Now that I know what it’s for,” she glances at me pointedly, “I’ll be especially motivated to dig through that chat room.”
I guess I should have told her more about my reasons for requesting this search, but Cord was sitting there at the time and I didn’t know how much he was willing to reveal.
“Okay, well, I’ll get out of your hair.” He turns to leave and I grab his arm, pulling him close and lowering my voice so only he hears me.
“Don’t be a stranger.”
His eyes meet mine, sending a rush of lust coursing through my veins. “I’ll be around.”
I watch him walk to the elevator, appreciating the view while worrying about him confronting these people again. After he’s gone, Elaine looks up at me with a smirk.
“How long have you two been together?”
“What gives you that idea?”
She snorts. “Come on. I could literally see the sparks flying between you two. That’s some next-level chemistry.”
I really don’t want to talk about this with her. “We’re kind of on again, off again.”
I turn to go back to my office and she jumps up to follow. That’s the problem with someone who chases secrets for a living. She doesn’t know when to let it go.
“I’d say it looks like it’s definitely on again. Is he what’s had you so distracted lately?”
“Elaine.”
“Oh come on, Asher. Throw me a bone. I don’t have a love life of my own so I have to live vicariously through others. He’s super hot, by the way. Got that whole bad boy energy going.”
I grin at her in spite of myself; I can’t argue with her there. “Don’t you have work to do?”
She pretends to pout. “Fine. Be that way. But if I had that voice whispering in my ear at night, I’d never get out of bed.”
Little does she know I feel the same way.