“It wouldn’t be much of a fight,” Holden said. “I’m led to understand those little cocktail swords don’t hold up well against a real weapon.” He was looking at his fingernails as though he was perfectly uninterested in the whole discussion. I didn’t miss the hint of a smirk, though someone who didn’t know him well might. Sometimes his face barely moved.
Desmond growled but didn’t rise to the bait. He looked back into the kitchen, maybe hoping to find sanctuary within, but all he was going to find there was a shitty Ikea table and a microwave with dried blood in it.
“The sooner you guys tell me why you’re both here, the sooner you don’t have to be in the same place,” I told them.
“It wasn’t planned,” Desmond replied.
“You both happened to show up at the same time?”
“Unfortunately,” Holden said.
“You first.” I pointed to the vampire. “Why are you here?” I knew he was here because I’d asked for his help. It was the same reason Desmond would have come. What I needed to know was if either of them had done anything helpful with their good intentions.
“I found out some things about your missing socialite.”
That got both Desmond’s and my attention. “What do you know?” Desmond brushed past me and went to loom over Holden. If he thought he was going to be able to intimidate a vampire, he had a thing or two to learn about my undead brethren.
“Oh, Secret,” Holden said, gazing up at Desmond. “What big teeth you have.” He batted his eyelashes once for good measure, then waved Desmond away with his fingers.
“For Christ’s sake, Holden, stop being such a knob.”
And with that, the smirk was gone, and his expression was shuttered again. When he spoke again, his tone was cold, and all the humor had leached away. “Last night I went to speak to one of Kellen’s friends. I managed to get some details that had been missing from previous versions of the story.”
“How?” I asked.
He tapped the corner of his left eye. “I can be a persuasive conversationalist.” So he’d pulled a lie-detector-by-way-of-enthralling. Can’t say I was upset with him for it.
“What’d you find out?”
“Turns out someone did see her after she was dropped off. This friend met her off Canal, and they went to a club called Eleven-B.”
Not that I was up on the cool club scene in Manhattan, but I’d never heard of the place before listening to the message on Kellen’s machine. I told him as much, and he shrugged one shoulder. “From what this girl told me, it’s very exclusive,” he mimicked a near-perfect high-society ditz voice. “Not for the rabble, you know.”
“A secret club?” Desmond interjected.
“Sounds like.”
“Did Kellen’s friend see her leave the club?” I continued, trying to keep the information flowing.
Holden shook her head. “Last this so-called friend saw of Kellen was her going into a private room with someone. She couldn’t say who. After that she was too drunk to care.”
Some friend.
“Did she tell you how to get there?”
“She did me one better.” He reached into the inside pocket of his blazer and withdrew a small, silver object. “She gave me a key to the front door.”
Chapter Nineteen
For a secret club in Manhattan I was expecting…more.
When Holden pointed to a dilapidated building a block off Canal Street, I was sure he’d been had. Never mind that he’d enthralled Kellen’s girlfriend into telling him the truth, there was certainly some mistake here.
On one side was a Chinese grocer, whose establishment had the faint dried-fish reek I had come to expect from the shops in and leading up to Chinatown, and on the opposite side a dark-skinned man with ill-advised sideburns was trying to sell a tourist couple a knockoff Coach bag. It was a terrible knockoff too, one where the logo couldn’t have passed muster with a blind fashionista.
It was patterned Hs, for God’s sake, not the famous Cs.
The bottle blonde wearing an I Heart New York shirt didn’t seem to have the faintest clue. She was snapping bubble gum and telling her bored-looking beau how everyone “back home” would think she’d spent a fortune on it.
I wanted to give her a smack upside the head, but I had bigger fish to fry.
Like finding an invisible secret nightclub.
The building between the grocer and the knockoff vendor was our supposed destination, but it was nothing more than a dark, abandoned-looking apartment complex. Not even a hip brownstone that might be an ideal place for drunk rich kids to go, or an empty warehouse in Brooklyn where all-night parties were popular.
This was just…sad.
“Did you write the address down wrong?” I asked Holden.
The vampire made a face that begged the question, Do I look like a fucking idiot to you?
“Geez, just asking.”
I was still uncomfortable standing between Desmond and Holden. There was a little too much testosterone flying, and the divided parts of my nature were all up in arms. The cool collected vampire half was calmly trying to explain why I should ditch the wolf and go with what was behind door number one. My werewolf half, who I now understood was a real, living entity inside me—damn bitch almost got us killed the first time she got into the driver’s seat of our body—was telling me lust was nothing compared to a soul-bond.
The wolf tugged me one way, the vampire held her on a leash.
Neither of them was pleased with the other.
A simple love triangle would have been great. In a human body, as a human girl, I would just have to ask myself Who do I love more? But that wouldn’t work here. I wasn’t a single entity making a decision based solely on love. I was a monster with divided destinies, and each of the men at my side represented a prize at the end of a path.
Choose to be a vampire and I could be with Holden. Forever.
Choose to be a werewolf and I could have Desmond back. Until one of us died.
The lifelines on my palms itched, and I rubbed them against my jeans. How many stupid decisions had I made in love because of something one of my monstrous halves wanted? I’d married Lucas because I thought it was right for the pack.
If only it was a simply human choice. Not one that would define the entire outcome of my future. Love was one thing, and though I wouldn’t call it an easy choice, it was one I could make. But I wasn’t ready to decide on my fate quite yet. I didn’t think the boys would be willing to share me until I was ready. It was bad enough I’d expected Desmond to share me with Lucas.
Look how well that had ended.
“Earth to Secret,” Desmond said, snapping his fingers in front of my face. “The bloodsucker asked you a question. Where did you go?”
“What?”
“I asked—”
“I said—”
They both stopped talking as simultaneously as they’d started, shooting each other withering glares over the top of my head. Which wasn’t terribly difficult since Desmond was over six feet, Holden was just under it, and I was practically miniature.
“I said,” Desmond began again, and paused, waiting to be interrupted. When Holden didn’t speak, the werewolf continued, “Where did you go?”
“Sorry, I was…thinking about something.”
“What?”
I shrugged and gave him a sad smile. “How much easier my life would be if I was human.”
Had I said those words to Lucas, he would have looked crushed. At least during our courtship. Being a werewolf had been what brought us together. Ultimately it was also what tore us asunder, but I wouldn’t expect the wolf king to see it that way. Desmond, though, he understood. Although the soul-bond had been what drew me into his arms in the first place, it was something else that made me want to stay with him.
Love might not have been supernatural, but it was the one fantastic, sublimely magical thing that even the most mundane human could experience.
He wouldn’t be offended by me saying it, because me being human wouldn’t change anything about how I loved him. Desmond returned my smile and touched my upper arm ever so briefly. The gesture was delicate and uncertain, as though he wasn’t sure it was okay to put his hands on me. Or if he really wanted to.
As if he hadn’t fucked the living daylights out of me only the night before.
Holden cleared his throat. “If this lovely discussion about Secret’s hopes and dreams could wrap itself up, what I’d asked was, would you like to go find your missing friend?”
Way to rub salt in the open guilt wound there.
I pulled away from Desmond’s hand, overwhelmed by the nagging feeling that while I stood here thinking about my messed-up love life, Kellen might be somewhere inside the dark building in front of us. And I hadn’t run in headlong to save her. That nugget left a bad taste on the back of my tongue.
“What are you waiting for, then? Lead the way.”
I understood immediately why the building looked abandoned from the outside. The apartment complex had been converted into a garment manufacturing space, and the inside was a shock to the system. The layout of the structure had been completely changed to make room for the large rolls of white cotton and machines used for cutting, measuring and laying out clothing.
In the center of the main floor was an old cage-style elevator, but the walls where the previous apartments had been were torn out. Even the ceilings had been modified. Unless these apartments had once been able to brag about twenty-five-foot, exposed-beam ceilings, it appeared as though they’d actually combined the first and second floor for more space.
The machinery all lay quiet, and there was no one at work to question why we were around. Gawking at the equipment and the strangeness of finding it here, I followed the men to the elevator. As weird as this was, it still wasn’t a nightclub. I couldn’t hear any music, and the air around us was thick with silence.
Closing the cage door brought my wolf out of her love stupor and gave her something new to focus on. We were locked inside a cage. It didn’t matter that it was an elevator car, or that logically I knew we would be out of it in less than a minute. To her, there was no way to explain it in a satisfactory manner. A cage was a cage, and she was freaking the fuck out.
