“Tell me who the killer is.”
Winding my fingers around the bars, I beckoned him closer. He came, closer and closer until our noses nearly touched through the cold steel. Then, I whispered my answer. “Killer is still me, asshole.”
He blinked a couple times, inhaled deeply, and moved back a bit. The distance gave me room to breathe again. “You’re confident in this, so I have to say I’m inclined to believe you. But, prove it.”
“I can kill you right now, if you’d like,” I said sweetly. “Let me out of this cage and I’ll show you.”
His laugh was so sudden and barking he drew the attention of the guards at the door and they peeked their heads in. He waved them off. “I very much enjoy your zest. Telling me about your kills would be a solid first step toward proving it, love.”
“The most recent one was a fae. I tortured him before getting to the killing, and he was drained of most of his blood by the time I dumped him into the ocean. His head was also no longer attached to his body. I buried it in the forest.”
“Tell me another story.”
“A few months ago, I had to kill a vampire Alpha in the back alley of Club Chaos instead of torturing him, which was a bit of a letdown. Unfortunately, Emmett caught me in the act and I needed all my magical energy to immobilize him and erase his memories. He gained them all back when he saw me at the club the night you took me, so Shan and Cas know about my killing now too. They didn’t, before.”
He hummed, undoing and doing up the bottom button on his shirt compulsively. “So Emmett will tell me the same story if I ask?”
“Honestly, I doubt he’ll tell you fuck all, because he doesn’t trust you.”
“I could incentivize a truthful response.”
“Or I could ask him to tell you what happened, and he’ll know I want the story told.”
“I wish we had someone here for you to kill,” Nolan said with a sigh. “That would be the best indicator. You can always tell when someone has killed before by the surety of their blade. Maybe I’ll have to enlist Amabella to find someone worthy of a premature death.”
That was exactly the type of insane thing I’d expected Nolan to say. What was surprising was that he didn’t seem to have any prisoners here, or anyone he cared little about. From my light inquiries into Kylan’s business, he killed someone random at least once a week. Sometimes for a perceived insult, sometimes for simply walking directly in his path. Bloodshed Brewing went through staff like a child went through candy.
Despite sharing the same family name, they were vastly different people.
“If you refuse to believe me any other way, we might have to wait for the occasion to present itself.”
“It’s not that I refuse to believe you, it’s more that I need to be sure you’re qualified if I’m going to hire you to kill Kylan on my behalf.”
The silence filled with a faint hum from the heart of the building, matching Nolan’s hum as he watched my reaction. I was trying to process what he’d said, but it wasn’t fully registering. Did we have the same goal? “You want to kill your cousin?” I asked dumbly.
“No, I wantyouto kill him.”
“That’s basically the same damn thing.”
“I guess so,” he said. “We’ve never particularly gotten along. Don’t you want to kill him? I thought you’d gone to him with intent to find an opening. I hadn’t imagined you might resist his Alpha scent long enough to actually do it.”
“Of course I want to kill him, but why do you?”
Surely there was some familial bond between them — at the very least, wouldn’t his parents be angry with him for killing their nephew? And for some reason, I couldn’t picture Nolan running the empire Kylan had created with his iron fist, so what would happen to the Jitara vampire mafia after Kylan was headless and in the ground?
Waving off the question, I caught a hint of a cringe beneath Nolan’s smile. “Plenty of reasons. Too many to get into at the moment. Don’t worry about my motivations, love, worry about yours. If you prove yourself capable, I’ll hand you every weapon you could need to kill him. Finding him is a bit more difficult of a matter, considering his constant travel between the realms and tendency to be paranoid, but with patience an opportunity will come up.”
“He travels to Zemterra often?” I asked.
If he’d come here legally, he was allowed to visit, but only through the portal sanctioned and guarded by the Angelic Enforcement Agency. All other portals between Zemterra and Earth were forbidden, and using them could result in him being deported or imprisoned. I doubted he was using the angel’s portal. Then again, he was an extremely powerful figurehead. The AEA would need a more ironclad way to deport him.
“The climate there is truly better for a vampire’s skin,” Nolan said. “If I spent more time in Zemterra, I might not have all these freckles.”
“It’s a good thing you don’t, because the freckles are cute.”
I didn’t think through how flirtatious that sounded until it came out, but Nolan froze and blinked at me. His cheeks went pink before he got his reaction under control, which was even cuter. The man who kidnapped me shouldn’t be adorable and charming, but I had to admit he was. I shouldn’t have admitted it out loud, but my mouth had gotten ahead of me.
“Um, thank you,” he said, tugging awkwardly on the bottom of his shirt. “Anyway, Kylan has political enemies and allies in Zemterra that he needs to wrangle. He’s the main point of contact between the King’s Council and Earth. That’s the only reason the Next Life Company hasn’t dismantled his operation yet. If they intervened, it would bring down the wrath of far too many demons. Your pet angel probably has a bounty on his head already as the Company tries to rationalize one of it’s agents going rogue.”
