Lover Avenged (13 page)

Especially to types like that tap dancer.

Man, the night was going to end badly for that guy.

As Rehv passed by, he nodded to John and the boys, and they all nodded back, raising their Coronas in deference. Thing was, Rehv was an ally of sorts with the Brotherhood, having been made leahdyre of the glymera’s council after the raids-because he was the only one of those aristocrats with the balls to stand his ground in Caldwell.

So the guy who cared about very little was in charge of a hell of a lot.

John turned toward the velvet rope, not even bothering to be smooth about it. Surely this meant Xhex had to be…

She appeared at the head of the VIP section, looking like a billion bucks, as far as he was concerned: As she leaned into one of her bouncers so the guy could whisper in her ear, her body was so tight her stomach muscles showed through the second skin of her muscle shirt.

Talk about shifting in the seat. Now he was the one with the rearrangement issues.

As she marched through to Rehv’s private office, though, his libido went on ice. She was never the type who smiled much, but as she went by, she was grim. Just as Rehv had been.

Clearly, something was doing, and John couldn’t help the knight-in-shining-armor impulse that lit up in his chest. But come on, Xhex didn’t need a savior. If anything, she was the type who would be on the horse, fighting the dragon.

“You look a little tight there,” Qhuinn said quietly as Xhex went into the office. “Keep my offer in mind, John. I’m not the only one hurting, am I.”

“Will you excuse me,” Blay said, getting to his feet and taking out his red Dunhills and his gold lighter. “I need some fresh air.”

The male had started smoking recently, a habit Qhuinn despised in spite of the fact that vampires didn’t get cancer. John understood it, though. Frustration had to be worked out, and there was only so much you could do alone in your bedroom or with your boys in the weight room.

Hell, they’d all gained muscle weight over the last three months, their shoulders and arms and thighs outpacing their clothes. Made a guy think fighters had a point about no sex before matches. They kept adding hard pounds like this, they were going to look like a pack of pro wrestlers.

Qhuinn stared down into his Corona. “You want to get out of here? Please tell me you want to get out of here.”

John glanced at the door to Rehv’s office.

“Stay it is,” Qhuinn muttered as he signaled to a waitress, who came right over. “I’m going to need another of these. Or maybe a case.”

Rehvenge shut the door to his office and smiled tightly, to keep his fangs from making an appearance. Even without the show of canines, though, the bookie hanging between Trez and iAm was smart enough to know he was in deep shit.

“Reverend, what’s this all about? Why you calling me in like this?” the guy said in a staccato rush. “I was just working my business for you and suddenly these two-”

“I heard something interesting about you,” Rehv said, going around behind his desk.

As he sat down, Xhex came into the office, her gray eyes sharp. After she closed the door, she leaned back against it, better than any Master Lock when it came to keeping cheating sports bookies inside and prying eyes outside.

“It was a lie, a total lie-”

“You don’t like to sing?” Rehv leaned back in his chair, his numbed-out body finding a familiar position behind his black desk. “That wasn’t you popping a little Tony B for the crowd at Sal’s the other night?”

The bookie frowned. “Well, yeah…I got me some pipes.”

Rehv nodded at iAm, who was, as always, stone-faced. Guy never showed emotion, except when it came to a perfect cappuccino. Then you got a little bit of the bliss out of him. “My partner over here…he said you sang real well. Real crowd-pleaser. What did he sing, iAm.” iAm’s voice was all James Earl Jones, low and gorgeous. “‘Three Coins in the Fountain.’”

The bookie did a well-you-know jack-up of his slacks. “I got range. I got rhythm.”

“So you’re a tenor like good ol’ Mr. Bennett, huh?” Rehv shrugged out of his sable. “Tenors are my favorite.”

“Yeah.” The bookie glanced at the Moors. “Look, you mind telling me what this is about?”

“I want you to sing for me.”

“You mean, like, for a party? ’Cuz I’d do anything for you, you know that, boss. All you had to do was ask…I mean, this weren’t necessary.”

“Not for a party, although all four of us will enjoy hearing the performance. It’s to repay me for what you skinned off last month.”

The bookie’s face drooped. “I didn’t skin-”

“Yeah, you did. See, iAm is a fantastic accountant. Every week, you give him your reports. How much in on what teams and which spreads. Do you think no one does the math? Based on the games last month, you should have paid in-what was the figure, iAm?”

“One hundred seventy-eight thousand four hundred eighty-two.”

“What he said.” Rehv nodded a quick thanks to iAm. “But instead you came in at…What was it?”

“One hundred thirty thousand nine eighty-two,” iAm shot back.

The bookie started in immediately. “He’s wrong. He’s added-”

Rehv shook his head. “Guess what the difference is-not that you don’t already know. iAm?”

“Forty-seven thousand five hundred.”

“Which happens to be twenty-five grand on a ninety percent vig. Isn’t that right, iAm?” As the Moor nodded once, Rehv punched his cane into the floor and got to his feet. “Which in turn is the courtesy rate charged by the Caldie mob. Trez then went and did a little digging, and what did you find?”

“My boy Mike says he loaned twenty-five large to this guy right before the Rose Bowl.”

Rehv left his cane on the chair and came around the desk, keeping one hand on the surface to steady himself. The Moors stepped back into position, crowding the bookie, holding his upper arms again.

Rehv stopped right in front of the guy. “And so I ask you once more, did you think no one was going to double-check the math?”

“Reverend, boss…please, I was going to pay you back-”

“Yeah, you are going to make good on it. And you’re paying my vig for fucktards who try to play me. One hundred and fifty percent due at the end of this month or your wife’s going to see you mailed back to her in pieces. Oh, and you’re fired.”

The guy burst into tears, and they weren’t the crocodile kind. These were real, the sort that made the man’s nose run and his eyes puff up. “Please…they were going to hurt me-”

Rehv snapped his hand out and clamped on between the guy’s legs. The poodle yelp told him that even though he couldn’t feel anything, the bookie could, and the pressure was in the right spot.

“I don’t like being stolen from,” Rehv said into the man’s ear. “Cranks my shit right out. And if you think what the mob was going to do to you was bad, I will guarantee you that I am capable of worse. Now…I want you to sing for me, motherfucker.”

Rehv twisted hard and the guy screamed for all he was worth, the sound loud and high, echoing in the low-ceilinged room. When the shriek began to trail off because the bookie had exhausted his air supply, Rehv relented and gave him a chance to refresh those pipes with some gasping. And then it was-

The second scream was louder and higher than the first, proving that vocalists did do better after a little warm-up.

The bookie jerked and jangled in the hold of the Moors, and Rehv kept at it, his symphath side watching raptly, like this was the best show on television.

It took about nine minutes until the guy lost consciousness.

After it was lights-out, Rehv let go and returned to his chair. One nod and Trez and iAm took the human through the back way, into the alley, where the cold would revive him eventually.

As they left, Rehv had a sudden image of Ehlena balancing all those boxes of dopamine in her arms as she came into the exam room. What would she think of him if she knew what he did to keep his business running? What would she say if she knew that, when he told a bookie he either paid up or his wife got FedEx packages that leaked blood on her doorstep, it wasn’t a threat? What would she do if she knew that he was fully prepared to do the slice-and-dice himself or order Xhex, Trez, or iAm to do it for him?

Well, he already had the answer, didn’t he.

Her voice, that clear, lovely voice, replayed in his mind: You’d better keep that. For someone who might ever use it.

Sure, she didn’t know the particulars, but she was smart enough to turn down his business card.

Rehv focused on Xhex, who hadn’t moved from her position against the front door. As silence stretched out, she stared down at the short-napped black carpet, her boot heel making a circle around herself.

“What,” he said. When she didn’t look up at him, he sensed her struggling to collect herself. “What the fuck happened?”

Trez and iAm came back into the office and settled against the black wall across from Rehv’s desk. As they crossed their arms in front of their huge chests, they kept their mouths shut.

Silence was characteristic of Shadows…but coupled with Xhex’s tight expression and the protractor routine she was pulling with that boot, shit had gone down.

“Talk. Now.”

Xhex’s eyes flipped up to his. “Chrissy Andrews is dead.”

“How.” Even though he knew.

“Beaten and strangled to death in her apartment. I had to go down to the morgue and ID the body.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“I’m going to take care of it.” Xhex wasn’t asking permission, and no matter what he said, she was going to go after that piece-of-shit boyfriend. “And I’m going to do it fast.”

Generally speaking, Rehv was in charge, but he wasn’t standing in her way on this. To him, his working girls weren’t just a revenue center… They were employees who he cared about and identified with intimately. So if one got hurt, whether it was by a john or a boyfriend or a husband, he took a personal interest in payback.

Whores deserved respect, and his were going to get it.

“Teach him a lesson first,” Rehv growled.

“Don’t you worry about that.”

“Shit…I blame myself,” Rehv murmured as he reached forward and picked up his envelope opener. The thing was in the shape of a dagger and as sharp as a weapon, too. “We should have killed him sooner.”

“She seemed as if she was better.”

“Maybe she was just hiding it better.”

The four of them sat in the quiet for a bit. There were a lot of losses in their profession-people turning up dead was hardly a news flash-but for the most part, he and his crew were the minus signs in the equations: They did the taking out. A loss of their own by someone else sat badly.

“You want the update on tonight?” Xhex asked.

“Not yet. Got a little news of my own to share.” Forcing his head into gear, he looked at Trez and iAm. “What I’m about to say will make things very messy, and I want to give you both a chance to leave. Xhex, you don’t get that option. Sorry.”

Trez and iAm stayed put, which did not surprise him in the slightest. Trez also popped a middle finger at him. Not a shocker either.

“I went to Connecticut,” Rehv said.

“You also went to the clinic,” Xhex added. “Why?”

GPS sucked sometimes. Hard to have any privacy. “Forget the fucking clinic. Listen, I need you to do a job for me.”

“Job as in…?”

“Think of Chrissy’s boyfriend as a cocktail before dinner.”

This got a cold smile out of her. “Tell me.”

He stared at the point of the envelope opener, thinking that he and Wrath had laughed because they both had one: The king had come in to visit after the raids during the summer, to discuss council business, and had seen the thing out on the desk. Wrath had joked that in their day jobs they both led by the blade, even if they had a pen in their hands.

Wasn’t that the truth. Although Wrath had morality on his side and Rehv had only self-interest.

So it was not with virtue that he’d made his decision and chosen the course. It was, as usual, what benefited him most.

“It’s not going to be easy,” he murmured.

“The fun ones never are.”

Rehv focused on the sharp point of the opener. “This one…is not for fun.”

With the night closing down and her shift ending, Ehlena was antsy. Date time. Decision time. The male was supposed to come and pick her up at the clinic in twenty minutes.

God, she was back to waffling again.

His name was Stephan. Stephan, son of Tehm, although she didn’t know him or his family. He was a civilian, not an aristocrat, and he’d come in with his cousin, who’d cut his hand splitting logs for firewood. While she’d been doing the discharge paperwork, she’d talked to Stephan about the kinds of things single people talked about: He liked Radiohead; she did, too. She liked Indonesian food; he did, too. He worked in the human world, doing computer programming, thanks to virtual commuting. She was a nurse, duh. He lived at home with his parents, the only son in a solidly civilian family-or at least they’d sounded solidly civilian, his father doing construction for vampire contractors, his mother teaching the Old Language freelance.

Nice, normal. Trustworthy.

Considering what the aristocrats had done to her father’s sanity, she figured that all seemed like a good bet, and when Stephan had asked her out for a coffee, she’d said yes, they’d agreed on tonight, and exchanged cell phone numbers.

But what was she going to do? Call him and say she couldn’t because of a family situation? Go anyway, and worry about her father?

A quick call to Lusie from the locker room, though, and the news from home was favorable: Ehlena’s father had had a long rest and was now calmly working on his papers at his desk.

Half an hour at an all-night diner. Maybe a shared scone. What was the harm?

As she decided to go once and for all, she didn’t appreciate the image that flashed through her mind. Rehv’s bare chest with those red star tattoos on it was not what she needed to be thinking about as she resolved to go on a date with another male.