Chapter 9 #3
Resting his hand over his left pec, he reminded himself of the other reason he had to keep his head on straight.
He closed his eyes and called up Mari’s face in his mind, holding onto her image with the ferocity that had driven him forward every hour of every day since her death.
The ache in his chest intensified as his thoughts strayed to his daughter.
Angelica was waiting for him to make it safe enough for her to come home.
With every day, week, and month that passed, he came closer to losing her, to having her resent him for the rest of their lives for the distance he’d been forced to create between them.
He had to put this to rest, even if it meant stalking Melody through the French Quarter until he had figured out what the fuck she was into.
There was a chance she was a victim, playing a role forced onto her by association.
He’d have Darcy examine her background, maybe see if there was a connection to Suede.
He hadn’t sent their intelligence specialist Melody’s picture yet, for a number of reasons.
At first, he’d been held back by Donovan’s insistence that she couldn’t be important to their case.
Then, he had felt guilty for following her and intruding on her privacy.
Now he realized that he should have followed his first instinct.
He’d put Darcy on the job first thing in the morning.
Melody’s voice startled him out of his reverie
“I’m all yours now.”
For a moment, he couldn’t speak because he hadn’t registered anything past those four words. It took him a moment to notice the expectancy in her eyes or the furrow of her brow when it took him a little too long to respond.
I’m all yours now.
She couldn’t know what those words, in her voice, did to him.
Finally, he forced his limbs to move as he realized she did, indeed, refer to the promised dance.
He was suddenly nervous, like he was about to slow dance at the fucking prom.
Melody gripped his hand, which made sense given the way the crowd pushed around them as they walked toward the stairs.
But even her light grip was enough to have him wanting to snatch away and nurse his hand against his chest. Forcing himself to relax, he followed her down into ‘Hell’, then took the lead to shoulder a path to the dance floor.
Orange and red light pulsed in rhythm with the music, which had just begun to wind down from a thumping House mix to a throbbing, atmospheric Alternative R&B.
The crowd, which had practically thrashed and rolled a moment ago eased into a rippling wave that coaxed them closer to the center of the room.
A flash of orange light illuminated Melody’s face, sparking amber prisms in her eyes as Mateo was forced to grip her waist and pull her against him.
The crowd swelled and pressed in, forcing them far closer than Mateo had intended.
She was pressed against him from chest to hip, her hands gripping his shoulders.
For some indeterminable length of time, they didn’t move.
Melody stood in his hold, staring at him with unblinking eyes.
Mateo stared back, trying to see past the defenses erected around her.
Defenses made of smokey eyeshadow, glossed lips, and a haughty tilt to her head.
They stirred at the same time, the music pushing and pulling them in ebbing waves.
He tried to put the barest inch of space between them, but someone nudged him from behind and pressed him against her again.
The feel of her had Mateo gritting his teeth so hard his jaw ached.
The rest of him was going liquid, melting against her gentle curves.
She used a hand against the back of his neck to pull him closer, until his cheek fell against hers and her mouth pressed against his ear.
“I didn’t think you would come tonight.”
It took him a few seconds to digest her words, caught up as he was with the weight of her fingers on the back of his neck. He felt like he would go to his knees, a tremor rippling down his spine.
“Why would you think that?”
He felt her lips part in a smile. “A conference call, dude? Really?”
Mateo winced. “I really did have a call.”
The words sounded pitiful, even to him. But what else could he say to her?
“I’ll accept that even though I know it’s bullshit.” There was no frustration in her voice, only amusement. “Anyway, I took that as a sign that you weren’t interested.”
“In what, exactly?”
“In me.”
Oh, he was interested in more ways than one. More ways than he cared to admit. Still, he had to come up with some reason for his odd behavior.
“I didn’t think you wanted some old guy hitting on you,” he replied, which wasn’t exactly a lie.
Not knowing her age didn’t make him uncomfortable so much as it made him aware of his own mortality.
She seemed so full of life and vitality, and he woke up most mornings feeling as if he’d been beaten in his sleep.
She reared back to look up at him and laugh. Her expression told him she found him ridiculous.
“Old?” she yelled over the music. “You can’t be older than forty!”
“Forty-two,” he corrected, pulling her back against him. That scent of hers was wrapping itself around him, overcoming the odors of sweat and liquor permeating the air.
“Not old,” she murmured. Her hands had found their way inside his blazer, and now skimmed his sides toward his lower back.
He tensed but didn’t pull away. “Older than you.”
“I’m a grown ass woman, Mateo.”
The way she was writhing against him left no question that she was every bit a woman. Her hips rolled and her hands tightened at his back, pressing him tighter against her. His every nerve ending lit on fire, the flames licking at him from the inside.
“On top of that,” he said, struggling for words, for coherent thoughts. “I’m not going to be in town for long. I don’t want to lead anybody on.”
“Yeah, about that. You never actually told me what kind of work brought you to New Orleans.”
“I can’t really say.”
“Ooh, mysterious. You really know how to keep a girl’s interest.”
He snorted a sarcastic laugh. “I promise, I’m not that exciting.”
“I think you could be exciting … if you wanted to be.”
“I don’t have time for excitement.”
“The job?”
“The job.”
“Well then, what can you tell me?” she snapped, finally seeming to grow frustrated with him. “You show up here, you watch me, you turn up in my neighborhood and flirt with me, you ditch me in the middle of a coffee date, you come back here and flirt with me some more, you watch me—”
His hands tightened at her waist, choking her words off on a gasp. He jerked his head back until they were eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose.
“Yeah, I watched you. I couldn’t take my fucking eyes off you.”
The words were spilling out before he could weigh them and calculate the advantages and disadvantages of letting them fall off his tongue.
He wavered on the line between telling her the truth and keeping her in the dark for the sake of his investigation.
He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her, demand she tell him how she was involved with Suede, Wilson, and Morrison.
Whether she even knew what that smoking purple drink was named after.
Whether she had ever watched anyone butcher a prostitute’s womb before draining her of all her blood.
“You’re stunning,” he rasped. “But that’s not why I can’t stop watching you. I can’t stop watching you because you’re clearly in over your head.”
She flinched as if he’d doused her with cold water. “What do you mean?”
“Those guys in VIP. Do you know who they are? What they are?”
Slamming her hands into his chest, she put some distance between them. “Do you?” she yelled before turning on her heel to try pushing her way through the crowd.
Mateo grasped her forearm and dragged her to him, pressing her back against his front.
She sank against him when he threaded his arm around her waist. He lowered his head to whisper in her ear, but caught her scent again.
He closed his eyes and swam in it, pressing his nose against the curve of her neck and following that perfume up to the line of her jaw.
“I know what they are,” he said. “What I can’t figure out is what you’re doing within a hundred feet of them.”
“I’m just a waitress,” she insisted. “I’m nobody.”
“I’m not buying that.”
She twisted as if to pull out of his hold. “Too fucking bad. My life is none of your business.”
“I’m making it my business,” he said before releasing her.
She spun to face him, her eyes wide and open like they had been that day at the café. Fear shone in their depths before, with a blink, she had eradicated it. She fisted her hands at her sides and raised her chin.
“Stay away from me.”
Mateo didn’t pursue her when she ducked between writhing bodies and then disappeared in a flash of lights.
He went in the opposite direction, scowling at anyone who got in his way.
He jerked at the priest’s collar, which had suddenly become too tight.
His fingers came away damp with sweat, and when he held his hand up to inspect it, Mateo found it shaking.
He blinked, disoriented and needing to get outside where the air was fresh.
He became more aggressive in his attempts to get off the dance floor, feeling like he might rip his own flesh off his bones from the sensation of being constricted. It was too crowded in this club.
He stumbled to a stop on the edge of a circle that had been cleared on the edge of the dance floor.
Someone in the middle had the crowd’s attention as the music began to change, the beat ramping up as the light went from pulsing to flickering.
The man roared and beat his chest, before grasping the neckline of a dingy tank top and ripping it down the middle.
Mateo rolled his eyes and moved to skirt the circle when the man turned, giving a view of the tattoo covering his upper back.
Mateo blinked to clear his vision, sure he was seeing things.
But the black lines etched into the man’s skin were unmistakable.
Two triangles forming a pentagram cradled by a crescent moon. A perfect circle notched with lines at geographical points.