26. A Second Too Late
A SECOND TOO LATE
NICO
Iwalked like a man who had been fucked into the foundations of a house for four days straight, because I had been.
Draco had turned into an insatiable beast.
The study. The Crimson Room floor. The kitchen counter while Bastian was forty feet away pretending he couldn't hear us.
The hallway outside the library where Draco pinned me against a wall that was definitely paying attention.
The shower. The bathtub again. The master bedroom four times in one night, which I hadn't thought was physically possible for a human body until Draco demonstrated that he was willing to hold me together long enough to prove otherwise.
Mateo and Rowan had been pulled in twice.
Draco's decision, not mine, although I hadn't argued.
The first time was in the study after a meeting that had gone badly.
The second time was the master suite, all four of us, and the sounds Rowan made when he finally stopped pretending he was a professional about it were going to live in my head rent-free for the rest of my life.
Both of them were smug about it. Mateo had the decency to limit his smugness to a grin he tried and failed to suppress every time he looked at me. Rowan didn't bother trying.
I was tired. I was sore in places I didn't know could be sore. I was also happy.
But I needed to work.
Draco had resisted letting me go back to the shop for two additional days after I'd told him I was ready.
We'd had the argument in the bedroom, which was unfair because he was naked and I was still wearing the marks from the night before and arguing with a naked vampire who had been inside you four hours before required a level of emotional detachment I didn't currently possess.
He'd won the first round. I'd won the second by getting dressed at six in the morning and standing at the front door until Mateo and Rowan materialised behind me with the resigned energy of men who had been told this was coming and had hoped it wasn't.
“He's going to call me fourteen times,” Mateo said, in the car.
“He'll call you twelve,” Rowan said. “Amara gets the other two.”
“I'm a grown adult going to my own shop.”
“You're a human whose vampire boyfriend took on a centuries-old bounty hunter and is currently operating on the assumption that every person in this city is a potential threat to your life.” Mateo checked his phone. “Thirteen. He's already started.”
The shop was already busy when I walked inside, and the bell gave its cracked brass note, and my shoulders dropped three inches.
Remy was behind the counter with the inventory ledger, which was new. He looked up and smile while trying to check if I was okay, followed by the relief he tried to hide by looking back at the ledger. He was getting better at it. Another month and it might pass for casual.
Evie was in the back, and I could hear her talking to someone whose voice I didn't recognise for a half-second before I did.
“Tomas?”
I came around the partition and Tomas was standing at my workbench with his reading glasses on his nose and a Georgian tea caddy in his hands.
He looked up. Salt-and-pepper beard, rolled sleeves, hands scarred from forty years of restoration work, the permanent smell of varnish and coffee that had been part of my life since I was twenty-two and had walked into his shop with a portfolio of bad photographs and a willingness to work for below minimum wage.
“You look terrible,” he said.
“Good morning to you too.”
“You're moving like your back's out. You sleeping on the floor?”
“No.”
“You need a better mattress.”
“I have a very good mattress.”
“Then why are you walking like that.”
Evie, behind him, bit the inside of her cheek and said nothing with a heroism I deeply appreciated.
“I'm fine, Tomas. What are you doing here?”
“Your brother called. Said you were short-staffed and he didn't know how to appraise the Devereaux estate lot that came in Thursday.” He set the tea caddy down. “He was right not to try. Half of this is reproduction and the person who sold it to you knew that.”
“I was going to check it this week.”
“You're checked now.” He pulled a list from his shirt pocket. “Seven pieces worth keeping. Three borderline. The rest is firewood dressed in shellac. I've separated them in the back.”
I took the list. His handwriting hadn't changed since the first day I'd worked for him, neat and precise and slanted slightly left, the hand of a man who had learned to write before computers made penmanship optional.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don't thank me. Pay me in coffee.” He took his glasses off and looked at me properly. “You look different, Nico. Not bad different. But different.”
“A lot's happened.”
“I can see that.” He folded his glasses into his pocket. “When you're ready to tell me, I'm here. When you're not, I'm still here.”
I nodded because my throat had gone tight and I didn't trust my voice.
Drake was asleep on Tomas's jacket, which Tomas had draped across the velvet chair by the front window. The cat had arranged himself in the exact centre of it. Tomas had been coming to the shop for years and Drake had claimed him early.
I settled into the rhythm of it. Inventory, pricing, a repair estimate for a Victorian card table that had a split in the veneer.
Tomas worked beside me the way he always had, correcting my grain direction without making it a lesson and handing me tools before I asked for them. Remy ran the front. Evie handled calls.
It was ordinary. It was mine.
The call came in at eleven forty.
Remy held the phone out. “Guy wants to talk to you. Says he has a piece he wants appraised in person.”
I took the phone.
The voice on the other end was old. He said his name was Arthur Marsh, that he lived in a townhouse in Carroll Gardens, and that his wife had died three months ago.
He'd found a desk in the attic that she'd inherited from her father, and he didn't know what it was worth, but he thought it might be worth knowing.
“Can you describe it?”
“It's dark wood. Very heavy. The drawers have brass fittings with a design I don't recognize, some kind of crest or symbol. There are hidden compartments. My wife told me once that her father said it was French, pre-revolution, but I don't know enough to confirm that.”
Pre-revolution French, with hidden compartments and unidentified brass cresting. That was either a fantasy or one of the most interesting calls I'd had in months.
“I can come to you this afternoon, if you're available.”
“I'd appreciate that. I'm home all day. I don't go out much anymore.”
He gave me the address. I wrote it down, thanked him, and hung up.
“Mateo.”
He looked up from the front window, where he'd been standing with his arms crossed, watching the street with the same alert stillness he used whenever he was on the clock, eyes moving over everything while the rest of him stayed relaxed.
“I need to go to Carroll Gardens. Appraisal call.”
“Both of us,” Mateo said. It wasn't a question.
“Both of you. Yes. I know the rules.”
Rowan materialized from wherever Rowan went when he was being unobtrusive. “I'll drive.”
Tomas watched the three of us head for the door. He didn't ask why I was leaving my shop with two men whose combined size tended to end most arguments before they started. He picked up the tea caddy again and went back to work.
The townhouse on President Street was narrow and old, with the settled look of a building that had been owned by the same family for generations.
The brickwork was original. The stoop had iron railings that had been painted and repainted until the layers gave the metal a soft, rounded quality.
The garden was overgrown in the way that meant someone who'd cared about it had stopped being there.
I rang the bell.
No answer.
I rang again and waited. The street was quiet. A woman walked past with a stroller and didn't look at us, which in Brooklyn meant she had looked at us thoroughly and decided not to show it.
“He said he'd be home,” I said.
Mateo's head tilted. Rowan shifted his weight.
I tried the door. It opened.
“Nico.” Mateo's hand came to my shoulder. “Let us go first.”
The hallway was dim. The overhead light was off, and the curtains on the front windows were drawn, giving the interior the quality of a room that had been closed for a while.
The wallpaper was old and floral. A coatrack by the door held a single tweed jacket.
A table nearby had mail piled on it, unopened, going back weeks.
The house was in disarray. Dishes in the sink. Newspapers on the floor. A clock on the wall that had stopped.
Then Mateo's nostrils flared. He and Rowan went still at the same time.
“Stay here,” Mateo said.
They moved down the hallway toward the living room. I stood at the front door with my hand on the frame, my pulse climbing, the quiet of the house pressing in around me.
Mateo's voice, low. “Nico. Don't come in here.”
I went in.
Arthur Marsh was on the living room floor, on his back, eyes open, the tweed pattern of his trousers visible beneath the overturned coffee table. The blood had pooled under him and spread outward across the hardwood in a dark, still circle. His throat had been opened.
I stepped back. My heel caught the edge of the rug, and I stopped where I was and made myself breathe.
“This wasn't random,” Mateo said. “Whoever did this knew what they were doing and didn't rush it.”
“He called me three hours ago.”
“I know.”
Rowan was moving through the rest of the ground floor, checking rooms. He came back through the doorway a minute later. “Study's off the hall. Found something you'll want to see.”