6. Chapter Six
Chapter Six
At ten past five, I texted Rook a third time, which he ignored like the first two. Bloody hell, when I saw that bastard, I would—
“Chill the fuck out,” said his voice behind me.
I turned around and forgot what vengeful thing I was plotting to do.
He looked different tonight. He’d combed his hair back, and the autumn wind rustled the open button-up thrown over a black t-shirt.
His jeans, tight and ripped at the knees, stretched over his muscular legs. He smirked when he saw me notice.
I blinked and glared at him. “Do you not own a clock?”
“Do we have an appointment?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought. Whoever we’re about to pound the shit out of will wait another five minutes.” He strolled over to me with no hurry and waited.
“We aren’t ‘pounding the shit out of him,’ you caveman. He’ll talk to us.”
“Who is he?”
I sighed and started to walk, then found myself even more annoyed when Rook’s steps fell in perfect time with mine. “His name is Charles. He’s an errand boy for the Council, human and insignificant. He’s acted as an informant for me before when Blackwell started looking too closely at my business.”
We stopped at a red front door in a connected row of brick townhouses.
I lifted one hand and knocked, and for once, Rook didn’t jabber in my ear.
The door opened a crack, just wide enough for me to see the man’s round face go white at the sight of me and his eyes bulge behind his glasses before he tried to slam the door in my face.
Rook’s boot crashed into it before it closed, so hard the wood cracked at the edge.
“You broke my door!” Charles stammered, backing up into his couch and falling onto it as Rook let us both in and closed the door behind us. He turned and waved his hand over the crack, which sealed itself back together with nothing but a small scar that ruined the paint.
“Fixed it,” Rook said with a shrug.
“Austin,” Charles said, sounding like he was trying to gulp the name back down rather than say it.
He was a tall, gangly man with the baby face of a twelve-year-old, but he might have really been nineteen or twenty.
“I know why you’re here. I don’t—I don’t know anything!
Everyone on the Council is just as clueless as you. ”
I arched an eyebrow. “Did you just call me clueless?”
“N-no! That’s not—” He pushed himself up on one elbow and tried to sit properly before he slid back down and landed on the floor, curling his knees against his chest. “I don’t know anything.”
I traced my finger along a dusty bookshelf cluttered with knickknacks, binoculars, and books on birdwatching.
I would have thought a seventy-year-old lived here, not someone barely out of their teenage years.
“I haven’t asked you any questions yet, so neither of us knows that you don’t know anything.
Now, you can sit up properly and answer my questions or my…
friend,” my nose wrinkled at the word, “can help you sit.”
Charles took one look at Rook standing like a wall between him and the door, and scampered onto the couch, trembling.
“What does the Council know about the recent murders?” This is always how I worked an interrogation. Start broad, put pressure on them, and drill it down to the fine details once they’re ready to talk.
“Why would I know that? I file papers and take coffee orders. They don't tell me anything!”
“Yes, but you’re a good listener, aren’t you, Charles? You hear things when you’re filing those papers.”
He swallowed so hard his skinny throat moved. “Sometimes,” he admitted.
“So what’s the office gossip?” In my peripheral vision, I saw Rook roll his eyes and lean against the wall, looking bored with this conversation.
“They’re scared,” Charles said. “They have no leads at all, and they can’t connect the two, um…Mr. Blackwell and the other one. They’re completely different.”
I wouldn’t share that I already found a connection, not when this little ass kisser might take it back to his bosses.
“Have the autopsies revealed anything interesting?”
He opened his mouth and closed it again before he said, “I don’t know anything about that.”
Rook strolled over, taking up an obnoxious amount of space and making Charles curl his arms around himself.
“You sure about that?” he asked.
“I’m just the office guy! They don’t tell me things like that! They don’t even talk about it in front of me!”
Rook smashed his fist into the poor kid’s nose and blood trickled out. I contained my shudder as it gathered on Charles’s upper lip.
“I told you we weren’t harming him!” I snapped, whirling to face him.
Rook shrugged. “Bet he knows something about the autopsies now.” He turned to Charles and grinned. When the kid hesitated, Rook raised his fist again.
Charles squeaked and raised his hands to defend his face. “They can’t figure out how the killer caught them or killed them! There was no trace of magic on the bodies, and there were no…what do you call it when they didn’t fight back?”
“They had no defensive wounds,” Rook supplied. I saw his eyes flit in my direction for half a second, searching for my reaction.
“Yeah, that,” Charles said. Blood crusted under his nose.
“Who are they replacing Blackwell with?” I asked.
“No one yet. They haven’t voted,” Charles answered, “but no one wants the job now. There is only one candidate so far. His name is Emmett Graves.”
I filed away the name to look at more closely later.
I reached into my breast pocket and removed a business card. “This is my personal number,” I said as I handed it to him. “If you learn anything else of value, please call me. I’ll pay you for it next time.”
Charles nodded shakily as we left.
“That was more information than I expected,” I said, strolling up the street under lamplight.
“You’re welcome,” Rook said.
I turned and glared at him. “Your interrogation methods are crude.”
“No, I just don’t throw money at every little problem.”
“Throwing money at small people with no importance makes my life easier,” I said. “If you think that’s the only way I solve problems, I’d be happy to tie you up in my basement so you can see my other methods.”
“Joke’s on you,” he said with a smile. “I like being tied up.”
“You think you’re incredibly clever, don’t you?” I growled. “You may have ruined the whole thing. He might not call me now that his nose is broken, even for the money.”
“I got you the information you needed. We needed. I’m a target too,” he argued.
“Maybe I overestimated your importance.”
I didn’t realize how quickly I walked, but he jogged a little and caught up, his strides falling in time with mine again. The breeze from earlier had died off, and now the stagnant air made me sweat under my suit, despite the season.
“It’s early,” he said. “Let’s go for a drink.”
“Not thirsty.”
He laughed and stepped in front of me, so that I nearly ran straight into him and had to stumble back two steps.
“You don’t drink because you’re thirsty. There’s a bar about two blocks from here. Get a drink and we can discuss strategy or whatever. C’mon, what’s your poison?”
I considered walking around him and calling my driver to come get me, and then they started to chime in.
Get the drink. What if he has something important to say?
Nothing he said could be that important.
You’re just going to go home and mope, anyway.
“Get the drink, and I’ll tell you a secret,” Rook offered. He had that smirk plastered on his face again, the one I couldn’t decide whether I should remove with my fists or my lips.
A secret! This is juicy! Go to the bar.
“You’re bluffing,” I said, forcing my legs to work and go around him. He reached out and gripped my shoulder with his warm hand, turning me back to face him.
“I’m not bluffing.”
“I could just torture it out of you.”
“But you won’t.” I shrugged his hand off a few seconds later than necessary. “Because that would be a lot of effort, that suit is too nice to get blood all over, and you look like you haven’t slept in a year.”
I scrubbed my hand down my face. “One drink.”
***
The bar he chose was surprisingly clean and sleek, not the seedy dive I expected, though we were on the north end of the city—the nicer part of Ashbruck.
I shouldn’t have been so surprised when I sat on a leather stool at a gleaming bar top.
Rook took the seat next to me, leaning his elbows on the polished wood.
“What is this secret?” I asked as we waited for the bartender to finish up another customer’s drink.
“Nope,” he said, his lips popping on the end of the word. “One drink, and then I’ll tell you.”
“When this is all over, I might kill you myself,” I muttered.
“You won’t,” he said. He ordered a dark beer when the bartender came over, and I ordered top-shelf scotch, something warm to sip on while I listened to this idiot prattle on about whatever. “You won’t kill me,” he continued when the bartender walked away. “I’m too pretty.”
“You are an obnoxious prat.”
“Still pretty.” Our drinks appeared and he sipped his beer. “You got a boyfriend? Girlfriend?”
“We are not doing this.” The scotch was smooth against my tongue. “I am not telling you about my personal life, nor do I want to know about yours. I should also point out that you are completely mental. I tried to strangle you, and you’re asking about my romantic life.”
He narrowed his eyes at me and tilted his beer bottle in my direction. “I get it now. You don’t have a life. Your business is too important.”
“And you have endless time to date? You must be doing a poor job of running your business.”
“Maybe you just suck at time management.”
“My business is actually important, and it requires a delicate balance to keep it running smoothly.”
He snorted, his hand rising to muss his hair. “That’s a fancy way to say, ‘I have no life,’ England.”
I nearly spat out my scotch and dabbed at my mouth with a napkin. “Stop calling me that.”
He ran his thumb along his jawline and shrugged. “That’s my favorite one, though.”
“Your favorite…?”
“Name I came up with for you. I’ve got Tea Pot, Fish and Chips, and Posh, if you like one of those better.
” He cut me off when I tried to argue with him.
“Okay, tell me this…how did you survive the bullet?” He leaned slightly on the counter and cocked his head to one side, reading something in my face; not my reaction, but maybe trying to decide if a truth or a lie would come next.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, which I won’t, by the way.” My drink was only half gone, and I sipped it faster.
“Are you immortal?”
“No.”
He flagged the bartender for a second beer, which was my cue to finish before this could turn into a second drink. I threw back the rest of my glass in one burning gulp and licked my lower lip.
“There. One drink. What’s this exciting secret you’ve been keeping?”
Rook glanced around the room, which was quickly filling up until there were no seats at the tables and people crowded the bar close to us. He beckoned me forward with two fingers and I leaned in to hear his whisper.
“It was a good kiss.”
I snapped back on my barstool and glared at him, slamming down my glass so hard that the bottom cracked.
The bartender froze where he was shaking a drink and started moving in our direction.
Before he could reach us, I threw cash on the counter to cover my drink and a larger tip than I owed him, and stormed out of the room.
I didn’t look back to see if Rook followed me.