25. Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Five
I lay on my side, face-to-face with Rook, one of my legs sandwiched between the powerful muscles of his thighs. We’d been silent a long time, lying there soaking up each other’s body heat.
“Are you afraid?” he asked, breaking the silence as he brushed a strand of hair off my temple.
As soon as we’d made it upstairs, I’d allowed myself to become as rattled as I felt, safe behind the walls of my penthouse with Rook.
My clothes were in a careless heap near the bedroom door and my hair had escaped its careful style and spread loose and disheveled over my pillow.
“No.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
He chuckled, raspy and half-hearted. “Because someone wants to kill you, and they’re getting loud about it. I’m afraid for you.”
“People always want to kill me,” I said. “You weren’t worried about it before.”
“No, I wasn’t.” That raspy laugh disappeared as if it had never happened at all. I’d never seen him look so stone-faced. He clasped my hand under the sheets and held it to his chest. “Things change.”
Rage, concern, anxiety—the masked man tied my emotions together in a knot, and Rook’s worry cut through them like a knife severing their hold on me.
“You don’t have to be afraid for me. I’ve handled worse, and if he kills me, I’ll just come back.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better. Besides, I’m kind of attached to your hands and tongue.
” The joke didn’t land. I scooted so I could rest my forehead against his bare chest and he wrapped one hand around the back of my head, his fingers diving into the strands of my hair and massaging them in a way that soothed me.
“I’m the safest person on his hit list,” I said. “Everyone else will die the first time he kills them.”
“There will be two more,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Pope, Blackwell, Kathy the file clerk, he fucked up with Emmett, but will probably try again. One evil with seven faces. There will be two more before he gets to you.”
“You think I’m number seven?” I asked.
“If the giant collage of sevens on the front of your building is a clue, yeah, I’d say so.”
“This is too planned,” I murmured against his skin. “It isn’t random. There’s a list, an order. What is he trying to accomplish?”
“It isn’t the election, no matter how the Council is trying to paint it for the public,” he said. “Pope doesn’t fit the pattern, and neither do you.”
“Maybe. Wesley Lake and Emmett Graves have both approached me recently. Wesley specifically asked for my vote when the time comes. I’m Council adjacent now, whether I want to be or not.”
“And the masked man has been watching you since before that,” Rook pointed out.
“His proposed legislation goes out tomorrow. I can get a copy and see if there is anything there worth killing for.”
His hand stopped petting me. “It’s all worth killing for.”
“What do you mean?” I tipped my head up and tried to read his expression in the dark.
“Emmett disagrees with Wesley’s position. If he gets him out of the way, he automatically wins. It’s all about power.”
“Perhaps.”
“No fights on Mondays,” he said. “I could help you look it over.”
“That’s a very poor idea for a date,” I laughed. “Besides, I have that meeting with Gray in the morning, and then I intend to spend all day at my warehouse examining the death collection from Prague.”
“Good. Text me the address and I’ll meet you there. I can help you do boring, smart stuff.”
I snorted. “Fine. Warehouse at eleven. You can be my very attractive assistant for the afternoon.” I sighed and planted an open-mouthed kiss right over the heartbeat that pulsed in his chest. “Now, do we have to keep talking business tonight? Pleasure sounds much more entertaining.”
He grabbed my hair roughly and dragged me up for a kiss. “Pleasure isn’t something I talk about. I’m more of an action man.”
So I stayed up all night letting him show me things far more important than the killer or the election.
***
“Is this what you do all day?” Rook groaned, setting aside a bulky illuminated manuscript about Medieval burial practices.
I closed a book of folklore halfway through a story about a peasant who met Death in the form of a knight on the road. I’d made it through fifty of the seven hundred books and still hadn’t found the grimoire.
“You’ve been here twenty minutes. You can’t be bored already.”
“Do your dead buddies follow you all the time?” he asked. “Are they here right now?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “You’re changing the subject to procrastinate work.”
“You can’t blame me for being curious. Wait, have they seen us…”
“They watch my life like it’s bloody reality television. You are their primary source of entertainment right now. They’re insufferable busybodies.”
“Ask them how I look naked.”
“They can hear you.”
If my husband looked like that, I might have found something to live for.
“Have you ever heard of TMI?” I grumbled, then turned to Rook. “They say if they’d known such a specimen while they were alive, they might have found a reason to cling to the mortal plane a little longer.”
Rook smirked and flexed one arm.
“I’m so glad you can use my unfortunate connection to the dead to stroke your ego.” I reached into my bag and shoved a stack of papers at him. “This is Wesley Lake’s proposed legal changes. Make yourself useful.”
“I could get you off instead. You’ll be more efficient if you relax.”
“Legislation. Now. I won’t be distracted by your nonsense today.” I know he caught the twitch of my mouth, that little movement in the corner I couldn’t quite suppress.
He sighed and read the first law out loud. “MS2005 - magician’s severance act - magicians will sever from the Council, effective immediately upon election, to form their own governing body responsible for handling species-specific threats and legal matters.
“SE1995-A2005 - amendment to supernatural enforcement act of 1995, magicians will have the power to carry out punishment, up to and including execution, for threats directly to their people without the oversight of the greater Council.”
I sighed and picked up the next book in the stack. “The whole Council will fall apart if that passes. Each group will want the same power.”
Rook shook his head. “The fae already do, and everyone knows it. They even have their own bounty hunters to track down people who piss them off.”
“The fae are the least of my concerns right now.”
Pain pulsed in my temples. Maybe I should have left my time with Rook to the bedroom and kept my work to myself.
“Hey,” he said, cutting through the headache. “I’m sorry. I can be helpful, I promise.”
He skimmed the rest of Wesley’s suggested changes, then reached for the next book in the stack on the table.
I turned the brittle pages of the volume I read carefully, searching for spells or rituals sprinkled in amongst stories and historical accounts—and found absolutely nothing. My eyes went dry, gritty, and the headache intensified.
“You should take a break. You look kind of pale.” Rook’s hand fell on my shoulder, warmer than I expected. When he pressed it to my neck, I leaned into the heat. I was freezing under my clothes, cold sweat dripping down my spine, shining along my temples, pooling in the creases of my elbows.
Iciness exploded at the back of my neck, and I jerked away from Rook, shouting as I fell over the table and clutched my head. Fireworks sizzled in my brain, popping and burning cold.
A figure draped in a gray cloth. Fire burning it away until only a blackened skull remained.
All at once, the pain stopped. The chill dissipated and I shook against the wood of the table until the buzzing in my ears stopped and Rook’s words broke through.
“Austin. Austin, baby, please talk to me!” He knelt down next to the table and took my hand.
“I-I’m fine.” I lifted my head and immediately regretted it; let it fall back to the wood and the open book in front of me.
“You’re not. You're shaking, and you scared the hell out of me. What was that?” He helped me sit up, and as I did, the image of that flaming gray cloth singed itself behind my eyes. I turned to Rook.
“I don’t know.”
But the cold inside me refused to let go, throttling me in an icy grip that felt right at home in this warehouse filled with Death.