Then again, destiny didn’t come with an à la carte menu of options. You couldn’t pick and choose where you went—not in any meaningful sense, at least.
Listening to the mournful tick-tock of the clock on her mantel, she collapsed back into the chair and closed her eyes.
No crying, though.
This was just a broken heart. It was not something like what Sissy Barten’s family was going through—and in a time like this, she’d do well to remember that things could be much, much worse.
At least she hadn’t ended up like that poor girl at the theater…
Chapter Fifty-five
Jim was standing in the darkness, watching from the corner of the living room as Duke unloaded big-time to the woman he’d been sleeping with. And as Jim listened, the sense that he’d been cuckolded for the second time penetrated his brain and made it hum.
Oh … fuck…
He’d gotten the wrong goddamn soul again, hadn’t he.
Ducking free of the room, he stepped through the back door, got out his phone, and hit up Adrian.
The angel answered on the first ring. “What’s up?”
Jim rubbed his aching eyes. “When you went to see Colin, back in the beginning of this—you asked him who the soul was, right?”
“Yeah. And he told me it was that Duke Phillips guy.”
Jim shook his head wearily. “I don’t think that’s it. I don’t know … what exactly did Colin say?”
“Look, Jim, seriously? All I was interested in was the intel—”
“I think we’ve been tracking the wrong guy here.”
“Impossible. Under what scenario would Colin be incented to lie?”
“Just what did he tell you?”
“I don’t remember—I asked him who it was, we went back and forth because he didn’t want to tell me. Blah, blah, blah—and then he said …” There was a long pause. “Oh, shit.”
Exactly, Jim thought, closing his lids. “What.”
“He said he couldn’t go all the way. He could only get me halfway there—I took that to mean that all he could do was ID the guy, and he couldn’t help in the field.” There was a pause. “Exactly what the hell’s going on where you are?”
Jim looked through the windows into that living room, where Duke and his lady friend were hugging it out.
“They’re brothers,” Jim said. “And I’m pretty sure Duke’s nothing but the triggering agent. The other one … the evil one’s the soul.”
“I’m coming right now—”
“No! You can’t leave Sissy alone.”
“Then I’ll bring her with me.”
“Never. She is not a part of this—are we clear? Stay the f**k home—”
“Fuck you, Jim—”
“Devina got into our house, okay? She got into my room, and not just once, but several times.”
There was a loooooooooong pause. “What the fuck? When? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I couldn’t find a moment.”
“You didn’t think it might be important enough to pull me aside? Like, for a split second?”
“I didn’t know until this morning when I almost fu**ed her, okay?”
“Oh, shit.”
“That just about covers it—”
Abruptly, Jim stopped talking and turned around. Sure enough, standing right behind him, the demon had made an appearance. “Ad, I got company. Stay where you are.”
As he ended the call, Devina didn’t smile. Didn’t oil on up to him and start stroking his cock. She just stood apart and stared at him—and that was the scary thing. He much preferred her unstable and flying off the handle.
“So, have you thought about my suggestion,” she asked after a moment.
“No.”
“Liar.”
Jim quickly did the math. He was willing to bet his left nut that the crossroads was happening right here, right now, whether it was here in this house or somewhere else. And if he was right, and Duke was not the soul, then he’d had no time to try to influence that other brother—and there wasn’t going to be any.
This was the consequence Nigel had been so upset about. This was the culmination of Jim’s decision to focus on Sissy. This was the payment for the distraction he’d entertained.
Damn it. He’d really fu**ed this round up, hadn’t he—and there was no going back.
So he had two choices. Either he tried to find Duke’s evil half somewhere in the city, and pray like hell that he could talk some sense into a guy he knew nothing about. Or…
“Let’s go,” he said.
Her perfectly arched brows rose. “Where?”
“Anywhere.”
“To do what?” Now she trailed a delicate hand along the tops of her breasts. “Are you going to f**k me?”
“No. But I’ll talk about the future.”
“We can do that here,” she muttered with a bored tone.
“No.” Because if he couldn’t influence the soul in these last few minutes, the least he could do was make sure she didn’t, either. He had no idea what she’d done in this round, but—
“You want me away from this house, don’t you,” she drawled.
“You were the one who brought up that bright idea about quitting.”
She laughed with an edge. “Jim, you know me well enough by now that I’m a lot of things—but never, ever stupid. You want me somewhere else? That’s only happening one way.”
In the pause that followed, he thought of Sissy. And as she came into his mind, the black hole in the center of his chest became filled with a ringing, nearly crippling, pain.
The demon took a step forward. “You and I can both leave here together. But only if it’s to do what I want.”
From out of nowhere, a full-body flush of total-nasty hit him hard. Which was a new one: In all the course of his life in XOps, he’d never had a problem with any kind of torture. He’d been subjected to it once or twice, and hadn’t dwelled on the shit. And the same had been true in this war with Devina. Whatever she’d done to him, and what he’d done with her out of hatred—none of it had stuck in his head for even a moment after they’d parted.
This, however, was going to kill him. If he went with her now, if he did what he knew she was going to ask of him, he was going to die a little on the inside.
Funny, he hadn’t been aware of being alive.
Sissy had brought that to him, however. She had opened him up—and that was why this was going to be the hardest thing he’d ever done.
“Where,” he heard himself say.
“I think the Freidmont Hotel. Yes, I’ll get a suite there, and I think that would be perfect for what I have in mind.” There was a long silence between them. “So are we leaving. Or perhaps you would like to have me here?”
Yes, he had made a mistake in overfocusing on Sissy in the beginning. Yes, it had caused terrible, unforeseen consequences. And yes, to make amends … this was what he had to do.
“Fine,” he said.
Now the demon truly smiled, her red lips parting, her eyes lighting with an unholy joy. “You first, angel mine.”
What. The. Fuck.
From G.B.’s position across the street and down a couple of houses from where he’d followed Cait to earlier in the night, he couldn’t believe what the f**k he was looking at. Duke had come to her front door and she’d been all pissy and shit—fine, good. But now, inside the house, spotlit in that front window, she was hugging him like that?
“You gotta be kidding me,” he muttered.
Maybe Duke’s powers of persuasion had improved with age. And that was going to prove to be very unfortunate for Cait Douglass.
Moments later, his cocksucking brother got into that big-ass truck of his and took off.
Goddamn it, G.B. hadn’t wanted it to go down like this. But if there was even a chance Cait was going to take that fucker back? Well, he was going to have to once again create a situation where Duke had to live with a reality he couldn’t bear.
G.B. had been thrown out with the trash, forced to go and get roughed up at that juvenile detention center for f**king years. Meanwhile, golden boy had gotten to go to high school, and get a scholarship to college, and have that girl of his. Guess the first payback hadn’t been hard-core enough, though—otherwise, the guy would have stayed clear of anyone G.B. had been seeing.
He was happy to raise the stakes.
With a resigned shrug, he reached into the black bag he’d brought with him on a just-in-case. Taking out another pair of black industrial gloves—because they’d worked so well with Jennifer—he pulled them up his forearms and got out of his car. He had a knife with him, holstered at the small of his back, invisible under his loose coat. With a black baseball cap on, and the black trousers he’d worn to the funeral, he was a walking shadow as he crossed the pavement, being careful to stay out of the pools of light cast by the streetlamps.
He sidled around to the back of her house, keeping flush with the clapboards, grateful that she wasn’t much of a gardener and hadn’t put bushes everywhere around the foundation. In the back, there was a glass-enclosed porch with no doors … but he found a rear entry on her porch.
Locked.
Cupping his hands, he leaned into the nearest window. The kitchen was simple and neat … and he could see through to the living room. She was leaning back in a chair, head resting on the cushions, a bottle of water in one hand.
Was she asleep? That would certainly make things easier.
A little farther on, he found a storm door, but that, too, was secured. So was the door into the garage.
Damn it. If he had to break in, this was probably going to get messy before he wanted it to.
Heading around the rest of the house, he was all the way to the front again when he frowned and ducked over to the main entrance. There was no possible way—
The handle turned beautifully. Which meant there was probably a dead bolt—
The door opened in total silence.
And there she was. Eyes closed, breathing evenly, looking for all intents and purposes like she’d passed out.
He shut the door before some change in scent or temperature or draft alerted her.
Unlike Cait, he was careful to turn the bolt.
Moving slowly, soundlessly, he walked close to the walls, assuming that the floorboards were less likely to creak that way. He went past her and kept going, making a fat circle so that he could come up directly from behind her.
He didn’t kneel or anything. He needed to be free to jump when it came to that—
Cait lifted a hand and rubbed her nose; then sighed as she resettled her arm on the chair. “Damn it,” she whispered.
Reaching forward with his gloved hand, G.B. touched her blond hair, stroking the ends. Great hair. It had been what he’d first noticed about her back at the café.
Wasn’t it weird that that chance meeting had brought them to this?
“Wake up, Cait,” he said loud and clearly. “Time to play.”
With that, he turned off the lamp next to her.
Chapter Fifty-six
The sound of a man’s voice directly in her ear jerked Cait to attention, a surge of terror throwing her upright as the room went dark—
Rough hands locked on her hair, digging in, latching on, yanking her so violently to the side that her body flipped off her feet and she slammed face-first into the hard wooden planks of the floor.
Momentarily stunned, she watched in the dimness as a pair of nice black shoes came into her wonky vision.
G.B.’s voice was even. Almost bored. “I can’t believe you fell for his sob story, I mean, really—I thought you were smarter than that.”
He grabbed her head with both hands and dragged her back up, holding her with such vicious strength, she was convinced he was going to snap her neck.
As she struggled, he kissed the exposed column of her throat, running his tongue up to her ear. “But I guess you’re a typical dumb blond. Kind of a shame, I actually liked you.”
With that, he threw her into the wall headfirst, the impact enough to knock her framed diploma off its mounting. The glass shattered, and she stepped in it, pieces cutting through the socks she was wearing.
“I even killed for you.” He banged her again into the Sheetrock. “I mean, I wouldn’t have wasted time on that Jennifer thing—but she almost got you hurt. She ditched that ticket and you were terrorized in that garage. Remember?”
He grabbed on again and cranked her head back to meet her in the eye—and that was when she knew true terror: He was totally placid, his face almost pleasant.
“Remember?” he repeated, retightening his grip on her hair. “Sort of ironic, isn’t it—given how this is going to play out.”
Listening to the mournful tick-tock of the clock on her mantel, she collapsed back into the chair and closed her eyes.
No crying, though.
This was just a broken heart. It was not something like what Sissy Barten’s family was going through—and in a time like this, she’d do well to remember that things could be much, much worse.
At least she hadn’t ended up like that poor girl at the theater…
Chapter Fifty-five
Jim was standing in the darkness, watching from the corner of the living room as Duke unloaded big-time to the woman he’d been sleeping with. And as Jim listened, the sense that he’d been cuckolded for the second time penetrated his brain and made it hum.
Oh … fuck…
He’d gotten the wrong goddamn soul again, hadn’t he.
Ducking free of the room, he stepped through the back door, got out his phone, and hit up Adrian.
The angel answered on the first ring. “What’s up?”
Jim rubbed his aching eyes. “When you went to see Colin, back in the beginning of this—you asked him who the soul was, right?”
“Yeah. And he told me it was that Duke Phillips guy.”
Jim shook his head wearily. “I don’t think that’s it. I don’t know … what exactly did Colin say?”
“Look, Jim, seriously? All I was interested in was the intel—”
“I think we’ve been tracking the wrong guy here.”
“Impossible. Under what scenario would Colin be incented to lie?”
“Just what did he tell you?”
“I don’t remember—I asked him who it was, we went back and forth because he didn’t want to tell me. Blah, blah, blah—and then he said …” There was a long pause. “Oh, shit.”
Exactly, Jim thought, closing his lids. “What.”
“He said he couldn’t go all the way. He could only get me halfway there—I took that to mean that all he could do was ID the guy, and he couldn’t help in the field.” There was a pause. “Exactly what the hell’s going on where you are?”
Jim looked through the windows into that living room, where Duke and his lady friend were hugging it out.
“They’re brothers,” Jim said. “And I’m pretty sure Duke’s nothing but the triggering agent. The other one … the evil one’s the soul.”
“I’m coming right now—”
“No! You can’t leave Sissy alone.”
“Then I’ll bring her with me.”
“Never. She is not a part of this—are we clear? Stay the f**k home—”
“Fuck you, Jim—”
“Devina got into our house, okay? She got into my room, and not just once, but several times.”
There was a loooooooooong pause. “What the fuck? When? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I couldn’t find a moment.”
“You didn’t think it might be important enough to pull me aside? Like, for a split second?”
“I didn’t know until this morning when I almost fu**ed her, okay?”
“Oh, shit.”
“That just about covers it—”
Abruptly, Jim stopped talking and turned around. Sure enough, standing right behind him, the demon had made an appearance. “Ad, I got company. Stay where you are.”
As he ended the call, Devina didn’t smile. Didn’t oil on up to him and start stroking his cock. She just stood apart and stared at him—and that was the scary thing. He much preferred her unstable and flying off the handle.
“So, have you thought about my suggestion,” she asked after a moment.
“No.”
“Liar.”
Jim quickly did the math. He was willing to bet his left nut that the crossroads was happening right here, right now, whether it was here in this house or somewhere else. And if he was right, and Duke was not the soul, then he’d had no time to try to influence that other brother—and there wasn’t going to be any.
This was the consequence Nigel had been so upset about. This was the culmination of Jim’s decision to focus on Sissy. This was the payment for the distraction he’d entertained.
Damn it. He’d really fu**ed this round up, hadn’t he—and there was no going back.
So he had two choices. Either he tried to find Duke’s evil half somewhere in the city, and pray like hell that he could talk some sense into a guy he knew nothing about. Or…
“Let’s go,” he said.
Her perfectly arched brows rose. “Where?”
“Anywhere.”
“To do what?” Now she trailed a delicate hand along the tops of her breasts. “Are you going to f**k me?”
“No. But I’ll talk about the future.”
“We can do that here,” she muttered with a bored tone.
“No.” Because if he couldn’t influence the soul in these last few minutes, the least he could do was make sure she didn’t, either. He had no idea what she’d done in this round, but—
“You want me away from this house, don’t you,” she drawled.
“You were the one who brought up that bright idea about quitting.”
She laughed with an edge. “Jim, you know me well enough by now that I’m a lot of things—but never, ever stupid. You want me somewhere else? That’s only happening one way.”
In the pause that followed, he thought of Sissy. And as she came into his mind, the black hole in the center of his chest became filled with a ringing, nearly crippling, pain.
The demon took a step forward. “You and I can both leave here together. But only if it’s to do what I want.”
From out of nowhere, a full-body flush of total-nasty hit him hard. Which was a new one: In all the course of his life in XOps, he’d never had a problem with any kind of torture. He’d been subjected to it once or twice, and hadn’t dwelled on the shit. And the same had been true in this war with Devina. Whatever she’d done to him, and what he’d done with her out of hatred—none of it had stuck in his head for even a moment after they’d parted.
This, however, was going to kill him. If he went with her now, if he did what he knew she was going to ask of him, he was going to die a little on the inside.
Funny, he hadn’t been aware of being alive.
Sissy had brought that to him, however. She had opened him up—and that was why this was going to be the hardest thing he’d ever done.
“Where,” he heard himself say.
“I think the Freidmont Hotel. Yes, I’ll get a suite there, and I think that would be perfect for what I have in mind.” There was a long silence between them. “So are we leaving. Or perhaps you would like to have me here?”
Yes, he had made a mistake in overfocusing on Sissy in the beginning. Yes, it had caused terrible, unforeseen consequences. And yes, to make amends … this was what he had to do.
“Fine,” he said.
Now the demon truly smiled, her red lips parting, her eyes lighting with an unholy joy. “You first, angel mine.”
What. The. Fuck.
From G.B.’s position across the street and down a couple of houses from where he’d followed Cait to earlier in the night, he couldn’t believe what the f**k he was looking at. Duke had come to her front door and she’d been all pissy and shit—fine, good. But now, inside the house, spotlit in that front window, she was hugging him like that?
“You gotta be kidding me,” he muttered.
Maybe Duke’s powers of persuasion had improved with age. And that was going to prove to be very unfortunate for Cait Douglass.
Moments later, his cocksucking brother got into that big-ass truck of his and took off.
Goddamn it, G.B. hadn’t wanted it to go down like this. But if there was even a chance Cait was going to take that fucker back? Well, he was going to have to once again create a situation where Duke had to live with a reality he couldn’t bear.
G.B. had been thrown out with the trash, forced to go and get roughed up at that juvenile detention center for f**king years. Meanwhile, golden boy had gotten to go to high school, and get a scholarship to college, and have that girl of his. Guess the first payback hadn’t been hard-core enough, though—otherwise, the guy would have stayed clear of anyone G.B. had been seeing.
He was happy to raise the stakes.
With a resigned shrug, he reached into the black bag he’d brought with him on a just-in-case. Taking out another pair of black industrial gloves—because they’d worked so well with Jennifer—he pulled them up his forearms and got out of his car. He had a knife with him, holstered at the small of his back, invisible under his loose coat. With a black baseball cap on, and the black trousers he’d worn to the funeral, he was a walking shadow as he crossed the pavement, being careful to stay out of the pools of light cast by the streetlamps.
He sidled around to the back of her house, keeping flush with the clapboards, grateful that she wasn’t much of a gardener and hadn’t put bushes everywhere around the foundation. In the back, there was a glass-enclosed porch with no doors … but he found a rear entry on her porch.
Locked.
Cupping his hands, he leaned into the nearest window. The kitchen was simple and neat … and he could see through to the living room. She was leaning back in a chair, head resting on the cushions, a bottle of water in one hand.
Was she asleep? That would certainly make things easier.
A little farther on, he found a storm door, but that, too, was secured. So was the door into the garage.
Damn it. If he had to break in, this was probably going to get messy before he wanted it to.
Heading around the rest of the house, he was all the way to the front again when he frowned and ducked over to the main entrance. There was no possible way—
The handle turned beautifully. Which meant there was probably a dead bolt—
The door opened in total silence.
And there she was. Eyes closed, breathing evenly, looking for all intents and purposes like she’d passed out.
He shut the door before some change in scent or temperature or draft alerted her.
Unlike Cait, he was careful to turn the bolt.
Moving slowly, soundlessly, he walked close to the walls, assuming that the floorboards were less likely to creak that way. He went past her and kept going, making a fat circle so that he could come up directly from behind her.
He didn’t kneel or anything. He needed to be free to jump when it came to that—
Cait lifted a hand and rubbed her nose; then sighed as she resettled her arm on the chair. “Damn it,” she whispered.
Reaching forward with his gloved hand, G.B. touched her blond hair, stroking the ends. Great hair. It had been what he’d first noticed about her back at the café.
Wasn’t it weird that that chance meeting had brought them to this?
“Wake up, Cait,” he said loud and clearly. “Time to play.”
With that, he turned off the lamp next to her.
Chapter Fifty-six
The sound of a man’s voice directly in her ear jerked Cait to attention, a surge of terror throwing her upright as the room went dark—
Rough hands locked on her hair, digging in, latching on, yanking her so violently to the side that her body flipped off her feet and she slammed face-first into the hard wooden planks of the floor.
Momentarily stunned, she watched in the dimness as a pair of nice black shoes came into her wonky vision.
G.B.’s voice was even. Almost bored. “I can’t believe you fell for his sob story, I mean, really—I thought you were smarter than that.”
He grabbed her head with both hands and dragged her back up, holding her with such vicious strength, she was convinced he was going to snap her neck.
As she struggled, he kissed the exposed column of her throat, running his tongue up to her ear. “But I guess you’re a typical dumb blond. Kind of a shame, I actually liked you.”
With that, he threw her into the wall headfirst, the impact enough to knock her framed diploma off its mounting. The glass shattered, and she stepped in it, pieces cutting through the socks she was wearing.
“I even killed for you.” He banged her again into the Sheetrock. “I mean, I wouldn’t have wasted time on that Jennifer thing—but she almost got you hurt. She ditched that ticket and you were terrorized in that garage. Remember?”
He grabbed on again and cranked her head back to meet her in the eye—and that was when she knew true terror: He was totally placid, his face almost pleasant.
“Remember?” he repeated, retightening his grip on her hair. “Sort of ironic, isn’t it—given how this is going to play out.”
