Demon Marked (5 page)

Still, when Andre's sleep-scratchy voice picked up on the fourth ring, her relief was so strong that she would have leapt into his arms and hugged the bastard if he'd been standing in front of her. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been so grateful to hear someone's voice.

“Andre, it's Emma,” she said, her voice shaking more than she would have liked. “Sam's sister. I—”

“I know.” He sounded sharper, all fuzziness banished from his tone. “What's wrong? Are you okay?”

“Uh ... no.” The understatement of the year. “I ... I've run into some trouble.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm at the bar.”

“I'll be there in ten, fifteen minutes.”

Emma shook her head, shocked speechless for a moment by the realization that he didn't even want to know what was wrong. He hadn't hesitated, hadn't yelled at her for waking him up late; he'd simply heard that she was in trouble, and that had been enough. It was ... surprising. ...

“But the barricade is closed until—”

“I can get through.” Of course he could; he was the nephew of the most powerful mobster in the city, a man who owned half the guards working the barricade. “Just sit tight and—”

“No. We shouldn't meet here.” Emma was suddenly hyperaware of the dead body just outside the back door. She didn't want Andre coming here. It was too close to the scene of her crime. It wouldn't be right to implicate him in that without his prior knowledge, and this confession wasn't the kind of thing done over the phone. “I'll meet you at the coffee shop just off Broadway, near the barricade.”

“Fine. Fifteen minutes.”

“Okay. And ... thanks, Andre.”

A moment of silence, and then Andre sighed. “Just be careful on your way over there. Jace will kill me if you get hurt when I'm supposed to be looking out for you.” And then he hung up before Emma could say another word.

Probably for the best. Telling him she didn't need anyone looking out for her would be dumb. Ninety percent of the time, the words would be true, but tonight ... well, she needed all the help she could get. Even if it came from a chickenshit, asshole lawyer.

S
outh of the barricade, Andre Conti's Canali suit stood out like a perfectly shaped thumb in a hand full of sore fingers.

Just the fact that he'd brushed his teeth before jumping in the car that had spirited him through a sleepy Manhattan would have attracted attention, but the suit ... It was definitely overkill.

Heads turned, and bleary, red-eyed men and women stared as he slipped into the coffee shop. The small, cramped room smelled of burned beans and fried eggs with a top note of sweat—compliments of the drunk people who had spent most of their night partying before stumbling into Hair on Your Chest just before dawn to wait for the barricade to open. The tile was dirty and cracked, the white walls smeared with streaks of brown, and not even the large, framed photographs of the ruins just after the demon emergence were able to distract from the absolute filth.

It figured Emma would want to meet in a place like this.

She was the complete opposite of her sister. Sam ran a flower shop, dressed in flowing, filmy skirts, and surrounded herself with soft, fresh-smelling things—except for her husband, Jace, of course. Emma ran a bar, wore black unisex jeans and T-shirts, and gravitated toward the roughest crowd she could find.

Andre spotted her right away, huddled in a corner booth over a cup of coffee, her dirty blond hair hanging limply around her narrow face. She was thin but muscular, with well-defined arms that made her look like she could kick a little ass if she had to.

Which she did, occasionally, working at the Demon's Breath. Andre would have said it was a dumb call to give a teenage kid responsibility for managing a rowdy bar, but Emma usually handled herself. She was tough, hard ... acidic, like the oily coffee in the cup she clutched so tightly her fingertips were nearly white.

“Your nails are filthy,” Andre said; the words came out of his mouth before he could think better of them. But then, her nails
were
filthy, and it wasn't quite five in the morning. He couldn't be expected to achieve lawyer levels of diplomacy this early.

Emma looked up, her brown eyes soft and vulnerable for a moment before the familiar toughness seeped in. “Yeah ... well, that's the least of my problems,” she said, letting her gaze roam over his suit as he sat down. “You're looking pretty. As usual.”

“Thanks. Due in court later this morning.” Andre smiled, deliberately ignoring the derision in her tone.

Emma didn't care for him, and that was fine. He didn't really care for her, either, but his cousin Jace had asked him to take “excellent” care of his wife's little sister while he was away, and that's what he intended to do. Even if she was a little ... rough around the edges for his taste.

He might take hygiene to obsessive-compulsive-disorder extremes, but she didn't take it nearly far enough. She was usually clean, but the girl neglected all the little touches that made a pretty woman beautiful. An eyebrow wax, makeup, highlights, and some intense exfoliation could have made Emma the type men dropped their briefcases and turned to stare at. As things stood, she was more the type some beefy biker would throw over his shoulder and drag back to his seedy apartment.

Which made Andre wonder ...

Did her “trouble” involve a man? If it did, if some Southie piece of shit had messed with his cousin's wife's sister, he was going to have to call Uncle Francis. He didn't dirty his hands with that sort of thing anymore, but he couldn't deny that he'd want a man who hurt one of the women in his family castrated or worse.

Realizing that Emma might have been hurt, remembering how small and frightened she'd sounded on the phone, made him feel like an ass. She looked okay—aside from the filthy hands—but he knew better than most people that some scars couldn't be seen by the naked eye.

“So ... what's up? Are you okay?” He deliberately softened his tone. He and Emma might be total opposites and suffer from a case of mutual antipathy, but they were family now. He owed her protection and civility if nothing else. “You aren't hurt, are you?”

“No, I'm not hurt. I'm just a disgusting girl with filthy fingernails,” she said, her sarcasm offering assurance her words didn't. Emma's smart mouth was clearly in working order; she couldn't have been hurt too badly. “I don't see how you can stand to sit across from me.”

Andre inclined his head, giving her the point she was obviously looking for. “Sorry. I'm an asshole.”

“You
are
an asshole ... but I appreciate you coming.” She paused, eyes darting back to her coffee. The cup was completely full. It didn't look like she'd taken a sip. “I didn't know who else to call.”

Andre sighed. He really
was
a jerk. At thirty-one, he was more than a decade older than Emma and—despite working in the bounty-hunting business with his cousin Jace during his undergrad years—Andre hadn't experienced one-third the violence she had endured in her life.

Jace had never told him the entire story, but Andre gleaned from their conversations that Emma had nearly died when she was a baby in the same cult ritual that had left Sam blind. He knew that she'd had a very rough childhood in a halfway house upstate. And that was
before
she'd spent nine months locked in a basement, the prisoner of some psycho who thought she could help him pacify a bunch of invisible demons.

She'd been through all that without losing her mind and had even retained her sense of humor—a dry, cynical one, but a sense of humor nonetheless. So she had a tendency to bait him and get on his last nerve. So what? He should be above responding in kind. He should know better than to pick fights with a messed-up kid. He was an adult.

Allegedly ...

“You did the right thing.” He reached across the table, encircling her slim wrist in his hand and giving a gentle squeeze. “I'm always here, anytime you need me.”

She looked up, eyes narrowed, as if searching for the punch line in a bad joke.

“I'm serious,” he said, thumb rubbing back and forth against the bare skin at her wrist. She felt so much softer than he'd imagined she would, her narrow bones delicate and fragile in his hand. “You're family. Anytime you're in trouble, you can call me. And I promise not to be an asshole next time.”

“I don't know if that's possible.” Emma pulled away from his touch, crossing her arms at her chest, brown eyes rolling toward the ceiling. “For you, anyway.”

Andre laughed and motioned to the waitress staring at him from behind the greasy counter that he didn't want to order. He'd rather lick his own shoe than willingly put anything made or washed in this establishment in his mouth.

“Well, I'll at least try. How's that?”

“Thanks.” She smiled, a tight twist of her lips that quickly faded. “But I don't really care if you're nice ... as long as you get the job done.”

“What kind of job?”

“I ... I found a body ... behind the bar.”

“You what?” he asked, looking around, making sure no one was listening to their conversation. But they were seated a good distance from the other patrons, and Emma's voice was a soft, husky whisper that didn't travel.

“I found a body, a dead body. Behind the bar.” Her hands returned to her coffee cup, clutching it like it was the last thing she had left to hold on to. “I stuffed it between the Dumpsters.”

“What?” The stupidity of touching a corpse was ... epic. He had to fight to keep his voice calm and even. “Why didn't you call the police?”

“I couldn't. The guy was Death Ministry.”

“And?” It was all he could do not to grab her by her scrawny shoulders and shake some sense into her. Relations between the Death Ministry and the Contis were at an all-time terrible. The last thing they needed was someone close to the family implicated in a gang-member death. “That's even more reason to call the—”

“No, I ... just ... I couldn't.” Her voice was infected with a healthy dose of pure fear. “I'm not sure how he died.”

“You're not sure how he died? What do you mean you're not sure how he died?” he asked, already knowing he wasn't going to like her answer. He'd heard that tone before, usually right before people told him—

“I think ... I'm worried that ... I think maybe
I
did it. That I killed him.”

Right before people told him that they were in some kind of deep legal shit they expected him to dig them out of.

Damn it.
He'd gone back to school to get his master's in taxation law for
exactly
this reason. He was sick of dealing with the criminal element—his family included. He might cook the books and bribe a judge or two when the occasion called for it, but he didn't mess with murder and mayhem anymore.

Not even for blood relatives, let alone a cousin-in-law by marriage.

“I'm sorry.” Andre flicked an imaginary piece of dirt from his sleeve. “I can't help you. I—”

“Please.” She grabbed his hand when he tried to stand, her strong fingers threading through his in a way that was surprisingly intimate.

How long had it been since he'd held hands with a woman? Months, maybe? Even longer, perhaps? He'd had a couple of women in his bed this week alone, but he hadn't held hands with a single one. As a tried-and-convicted womanizer, Andre knew better than to give a female any evidence that he might be looking for more than fun of the horizontal variety.

Or the vertical variety.

He'd had Terry in the shower last night, pressed up against the slick wall, driving inside her until they both screamed, their wellpleasured voices echoing off the tile. Just thinking about it made things stir low in his body, and that all-too-familiar hunger sparked inside him.

He was going to have to figure something out for tonight. He couldn't call Yasmin or Hannah again—they'd been over last week, and he didn't like to issue invitations two weeks in a row—but most of his other go-to girls were out of town. But ... it
was
Wednesday. The sex addicts support group met on the Upper East Side tonight. If things at the office were quiet, he could make it up to the meeting by six o'clock. The group leader frowned on addicts facilitating each other's dependency, but what Amir didn't know wouldn't hurt him.

And what did he really expect? That he'd get a bunch of sex addicts together in a room talking about their driving urge to screw and
not
have them hooking up as soon as they hit the streets? It was ridiculous. He expected far too much of people who would do just about anything to get laid.