Chapter 5
Chapter
Five
SO SAYETH THE KING
What the hell was I doing? Like, seriously, what?
I was free of that lab and got the feeling it wasn’t me those cops had been looking for.
Sure, yes, I was getting fucked within an inch of my life and loving the hell out of that, but should I really be following—er, driving—an escaped supernatural creature around town?
Shouldn’t I be saying thanks and goodbye?
But then I had to wonder if I could even go back to my old life.
Aside from the fact that I was probably fired for not locking up at the diner last night or showing up at the bar at all…
Yeah, I didn’t have much to go back to if I was fired from both jobs.
But I also knew stuff now. I knew what went on inside some crazy lab place and I knew what had been in there. That made me a liability, right?
I couldn’t go home.
So, okay, then I needed to stick with Hamilton and hope he had more to offer than phenomenal sex skills and magical cum.
I had to assume he had a life—and expensive one, if I was reading him right—and he knew people who could disappear video evidence.
That sounded like folks I’d like to make friends with, too.
Maybe I could get a new identity. Maybe a monetary thank you for helping Hamilton escape.
Just a little something to help me start over on the other side of the country.
Or, hell, maybe a different country altogether.
“Wiley?”
I startled and looked at Hamilton in the rearview mirror. “Yeah?”
He smirked ever so slightly. “Ask your questions.”
Dragging my gaze back to the road in front of us was tough. He looked good sitting back there like some posh prick with his tie matching my shirt—I hadn’t missed that detail when he’d dressed. Something more than sex was going on with us, but I had no idea what.
And I didn’t want to ruin it by asking what it was.
“So, um, you said to exit at the university, but then what?”
He nodded for a moment, like he was collecting his thoughts. “There’s a branch of governing body that rules over those like me in an office building near the university. They’re called The Coalition.”
“Those like you, like, supernaturals?”
“Essentially, yes. An elected member of each race represents their people to this giant committee that has branches all over the world. We need to get to them so that I can alert them to what’s happening—”
“At the lab from hell.”
“—at the Barnabas Institute of Genetics.”
“How did you find out that’s what they’re called? Like, you saw their sign as we flew away?” Because I’d completely missed seeing a single thing that could’ve labeled the place.
“It was on every computer as a screensaver and every piece of paper as a letterhead.”
I glanced back at him. “How long were you in there?”
“I don’t know precisely.” He looked out the window. “I could guess.”
“Okay?” When he closed his eyes, I backtracked because it looked like he didn’t want to answer. “Look, if you don’t want to say or think about it or whatever, you don’t have to tell me.”
He heaved a sigh. “You weren’t the first man they brought me. I need to feed at least once a week. There were five before you.”
And he didn’t escape after the first one or the fifth, so it was entirely possible those men were all dead. By him drinking all of their blood? By a soldier’s bullet afterward?
“They kept me in that form,” Hamilton said in a deadened tone.
“They knew how to keep me in that form by spraying a drug on me. They took samples of my hair, blood, and cum. They dug into my wings, muscles, bones…” He closed his eyes and dropped his head.
“I killed those men. I may not have drained them completely, but they didn’t walk away from me, and I doubt anyone helped them recover. ”
I sat with that for a few minutes. I’d seen Hamilton tear through soldiers and lab workers like they were nothing, all rage and revenge.
But he’d also taken me with him, tried to keep me safe, and trusted me with his truths.
It was clear to me that he hated himself for what he’d done to the others he’d drunk from.
He felt the guilt, even if it wasn’t all his.
I still didn’t know why I was the one he hadn’t killed, but I couldn’t condemn him for what might’ve happened to the others.
“You shouldn’t carry around other people’s guilt. They were alive when they left you. You can feel guilty for biting them, but not for whatever happened after you let them go.”
I saw him snap his gaze to mine, surprise all over his handsome face, and grinned at him before giving my attention back to the road. We were fine.
“So you’re thinking maybe six weeks?” I said with another glance in the rearview. “One guy per week? They knew that’s how often you’d need to feed, too, so it sounds like they’re well aware of supernaturals. You weren’t their first one at all.”
“Yes,” he said, “I believe I was there for six weeks, and I was definitely not their first Contestrello. I can’t speak to whether they know of other supernaturals because I never saw anyone else, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility.”
“Well, if The Coalition people want to talk to me, I’ll tell them everything I remember, too.
It’s not much since I was so out of it, but it’s theirs so they can stop the institute of fucked up bullshit.
” I laughed at my next thought. “Wouldn’t it be cool if tearing apart the elevator made the whole building collapse, though? Like, problem solved!”
He huffed a laugh but didn’t say anything more. A little part of me was okay with not saying more myself, but there was still one thing I really needed to know.
“Why was I the one that made you strong enough escape?”
“If you wouldn’t mind,” he said a bit slowly, “I’d prefer to explain that once we’re safe with The Coalition. Perhaps tonight.”
He was playing with the end of his tie, and I thought maybe he was uncomfortable. Worried? For the first time, I couldn’t quite read him, so I nodded and kept driving.
“That’s fine,” I said. “It’s a date.”
Hamilton’s expression shifted to one that told me loud and clear that dates with him would always end in sex. I bit my bottom lip as a blush hit my cheeks, really okay with that promise.
The Coalition’s unmarked building—literally, there was a street number and nothing else—was seriously corporate.
Like, if the security guards and receptionists working the lobby were anything other than human, I couldn’t tell.
I felt like I was going into a bank or some fancy company that I had no business bothering.
Hamilton gave our names to a blond woman behind the desk, a guard wanded us both, and we were given badges to wear.
Mine had visitor in big red letters, while Hamilton’s…
“Hey, your badge looks like you work here.”
He clipped it to the pocket of his suit coat and smirked at me. “I do.”
“Oh.” I shouldn’t be surprised since I’d never asked him what he did. “As what?”
“A lawyer and…consultant.”
I had a feeling he was being cagey on purpose, so I just squinted at the back of his head and followed him to the elevators. The inside of the car gleamed with mirrors and chrome—very different from the elevator he’d destroyed—and Hamilton pressed B7. We started going down.
Okay, that was concerning. This building was a skyscraper, but we were going underground? In the movies, nothing good ever happened in the basement levels. I looked to Hamilton, not sure why the hell he would take us down there.
“Stop panicking,” he said mildly.
“This isn’t panic,” I said with a hand over my pounding heart. “This is growing concern.”
“These are the good guys, Wiley.”
“But I’m not one of them.”
“You’re my— You’re with me.”
Oh, okay, he wanted to put a label on me. I smiled up at him, maybe a little bit daring him to just say it out loud. Could that be the conversation he wanted to have later?
Hamilton huffed a laugh and took my hand. I switched it from holding on to lacing our fingers together because if we were going to be anything, everyone was going to know. He gave my hand a squeeze, and I felt myself calming down.
“The people we need to talk to about what happened to me,” he said, “are down here. This half of the building is more reactive to problems. Tactical. Strategic.”
I just nodded, feeling a little dumb for freaking out. Especially since, hello, there was a scary thing who liked protecting me riding the elevator with me.
When the doors opened, there were more receptionist-type people and more guards, the lighting was definitely not fluorescent, and every single person stood at attention when Hamilton stepped into the room.
They didn’t salute or holler anything, but they stood still and straight, looking like they awaited orders.
“Thank you, everyone,” Hamilton said in a pleasant tone and not at all loudly. They all heard him, though, because each person returned to whatever they had been doing like he’d dismissed them.
Well, everyone except the woman whose black hair was in a messy bun and stabbed by at least ten pens and maybe a pearl-handled letter opener.
She wore a perfectly normal gray pencil skirt, white shirt with ruffles on either side of the buttons down the center of it, and black stilettos with gleaming metal heels that looked like they could act as ice picks in a pinch.
She made a ting-ting-ting sound as she ran over.
“Lord, Fawkes! Where have you been? They sent a team out to investigate, but no one could follow your scent passed the city limits.”
I didn’t know what Hamilton thought about that, but I thought it was nice to know people had been worried about him. The people who’d be wondering where the hell I was either wanted my labor or my money.
Shit. That was depressing.
Hamilton gave her a tiny smile that had a blush blooming on her pale cheeks. “I need to speak to Quillan,” he said pleasantly, but it had the effect of making her eyes bulge and that blush vanish.
“Right away.” She hustled back to her desk and picked up the phone. “I’ll let him know you’re coming.”
Still tethered by our linked hands, I followed Hamilton past all these desks and through a sliding glass door. We had five different halls to choose from, and he chose the second from the left. Clearly, he knew exactly where he was going, but my mind was still on the woman.
“Who was she?”
“Liana.”
“So when Liana doesn’t look like that…”
He grinned at me. “Mermaid.”
“No shit? That explains her eyes.”
He slowed his stride. “Her eyes? You could see her eyes?”
“Of course, I could see her eyes. Two of them. Huge. Right there in her face.”
“Ah.” He started power walking again.
“And full of ocean waves.”
He smiled at me like he was really pleased about something.
I mentally whacked myself in the forehead. “Oh, that’s what you meant about her eyes.”
“It is. Not everyone can see the small tells that reveal us.”
“Cool.” I looked him over. “What’s your tell?”
He smiled bigger, showing more teeth, and there was a pair of fangs peeking into view. “And my eyes reflect red in low light.”
“Do human eyes reflect a different color?”
“Yours don’t reflect at all.”
I squinted at him. “Why? Because we’re prey?”
He chuckled and scanned the hallway before holding my throat and pushing me against the wall. Getting very up in my personal space, he rumbled low and dangerously, “You’re less animalistic than we are.”
And cue full-body shivers and my blood flowing south! Hamilton totally knew what he did to me, too, because then he was notching his leg between mine and leaning down to ravish me. Goddamn, the man could kiss! If we were quiet, would anyone ever know we’d fucked in this hallway?
But then a door opened somewhere, and he popped off my mouth and stood back, leaving me having to lock my knees and cling to the wall to stay upright.
“Fawkes?”
I turned to see a man with wavy brown hair to his shoulders who had to be at least six-six and all muscle. If he took too deep a breath, he might bust the buttons off of his short-sleeved pale pink shirt. Short sleeves… That was a choice. And one that I doubted anyone would ever bring up to him.
“I thought you might’ve gotten lost,” the man continued, “but now I see that you…haven’t.”
Weird. Well, less weird once I noticed the dude sniffing the air. My guess was that he knew exactly what we’d been doing out here and probably what I still wanted to do. Which did help cool me off at least.
“Quillan,” Hamilton said as he walked closer, “this is Wiley Winslow.”
I followed after Hamilton and got a nod from Quillan.
“I don’t really have a waiting area,” Quillan said and pointed opposite his door, “but there’s a lounge down that way where you—”
“He stays with me.” Hamilton walked into Quillan’s office like that was the end of that.
I shrugged and followed him inside. “So sayeth the king.”
“He’s a marquess actually.”
“Mapquest?” I asked distractedly.
I’d been in bathroom stalls bigger than Quillan’s office, so I spent a minute watching him cram himself behind his desk and into an office chair that didn’t have room to roll anywhere.
“Dammit, Quillan,” Hamilton growled from the only visitor’s chair.
“What? Does he not know you’re royalty?”
“Royalty?” I looked between the two of them, feeling like we weren’t speaking the same language all of a sudden. “I was making a joke with the king comment.”
“Oh.” Quillan started shuffling papers that didn’t look like they needed shuffling.
“Hamilton,” I asked seriously, “are you, like…actual royalty?”