Edge of Night (25 page)

Like the well-trained agents they were, they swung into action without further prompting. Two strides took Luca over to Tess, who was just starting to uncurl from her fetal position in the hallway. He bent down to grab her upper arms and lifted her to her feet. “Tess, are you all right?” He shook her a bit when her gaze tried to move past him to the bloody mess in the morgue. “Tess!”

Her nod was jerky, but her eyes were sharp and clear when she looked at him. She croaked, “Fine. I’m not hit.”

“That’s good.” Taking her elbow, he steered her into her office. “Why don’t you have a seat in here? Or you can head upstairs and wait in my office.”

Tugging her arm from his grip, she stared at him. “Why would I want to hang out in your office? I have no interest in being alone with you. I think I’ve mentioned this about fifty times since we broke up.”

“Because you’re going to have to give a statement about what happened here.” He sighed. “Believe it or not, Tess, it’s not all about you, me or what we used to be to each other. I’m even less interested in you now than you are in me. So get over yourself.”

The stunned look on her face was priceless, but he didn’t have time to savor it. Her brows drew together and her mouth opened to snap back at him, but he cut her off. “Stay in your office, then. I have work to do. Someone will get around to taking your statement when we have time. You can cool your heels until then.”

He shut the door in her face, and he heard a muffled curse from the other side. Yeah, well, she’d have to get over it. He swung around and Delta was already in his face. She asked, “Can someone tell me how the hell she got a
loaded weapon
into the building?”

“She didn’t,” Luca and Merek spoke at the same time.

“What?” Delta’s eyebrows went up. “I don’t know what y’all are smoking, but you need to share that good stuff, because Medusa most definitely had a gun.”

Merek snorted and Luca coughed into his fist, trying not to grin. Luca said, “The make and model were the same as the one her daughter-in-law used on her son. If someone wants to check the evidence room, I’m guessing that gun is missing.”

“How did she get in the evidence room?” Jack joined the conversation, stepping out of the gore-filled morgue. But then he answered his own question. “Oh, collecting her son’s personal effects.”

“That’s my guess as well.” Luca slid his hands in his pockets. “You’ll probably find an incapacitated or mesmerized agent down there.”

“That’s what I saw too.” Merek tapped his temple.

“I’m on it.” Delta wheeled around and headed for the elevator. Before she pushed the call button, the doors swung open and a cadre of other MCU personnel stepped out.

Luca went to direct them, and the next seven hours passed in a blur of procedure, paperwork and explanations to more people than he cared to count—his superiors, Elinor’s next of kin, an All-Magickal Council representative, and the Vampire Conclave leaders, which included his father and uncle. For that last meeting, they’d demanded he come to the Conclave headquarters to deliver his report in person. That took a solid two hours of answering questions—or not answering them, if FBI regulations came into play.
 

One of Luca’s superiors happened to be a Normal who’d worked for the regular FBI for decades. A recent promotion meant he was in a classification of humans who had to interact with the Magickal branch of the Bureau, which included Luca’s team. The guy had just found out magic existed three weeks ago, and he was doing his best, but Luca had known at first glance that this human was in over his head. Luca would bet the Normal wouldn’t last long before he was reassigned. At that point, he wouldn’t need to know about magic anymore and his memories would be adjusted. Probably for the best. Explaining supernatural crime and how vampire culture affected this case had been a lesson in frustration.

Luca was exhausted and annoyed by the time he dragged his ass back to his office.

Tess was sitting there waiting for him. He didn’t even bother with a greeting, just grunted at her. Charitable wasn’t exactly in his vocabulary today. “Did you need something?”

The look she gave him was about ten shades of resentful. “When Peyton got back, he told me to come here to wait. He said it has to be treated as a crime scene, I’m not the pathologist assigned to the case since I’m a witness, and I needed to be somewhere else. Like up here.”

Just as Luca had suggested, but he didn’t point that out. It wasn’t as if she didn’t already know. He shrugged out of his jacket, draped it over the back of his chair, and sank down with a groan. Rubbing the nape of his neck, he closed his eyes. “Has anyone taken your statement?”

“No.”

“Okay, let’s do that and then you can go home.” He blew out a breath.

It didn’t take long, thankfully, because he was ready to finally get that information about Asher Kondan and spend the night providing close quarters protection for Erin. He almost managed a smile at that last thought, but he was too tired to quite make it.

“What are you smirking about?” Tess leveled a cool gaze on him.

He shrugged. “Frankly, that’s none of your business.”

It felt good not to care what she thought of him anymore. Sure, he still cared about her, but no more so than he did about Jack or Delta or anyone else on his team. Tess worked with them enough that he’d come to respect her medical opinion, and he hoped she got past this ugly bitterness she kept festering inside her, but that was her problem and not his. It was a relief, really.

She glanced aside. “You saved my life today.”

“Better late than never,” he replied, referring to the night she’d been taken hostage and Changed by terrorists. Though in truth, he’d saved her that night too. If he and Merek hadn’t arrived when they had, Chloe, Alex and Tess would all be dead now. He doubted Tess’s memories of that time were clear enough to remember that.

“I still hate you.”

“No, you don’t.”

Her eyes flashed defiance. “Your hands weren’t even shaking after she almost put a hole in both of us. You really are a coldblooded bastard.”

He stared at her for a long moment, feeling…strangely unmoved. There was a time he would have sold his soul to keep this woman. She’d been human when they first met, working as a medical examiner for the Normal side of the FBI, best friend to a witch who was right smack in the middle of one of his investigations. Their affair had been hot and heavy, emotionally and physically, right from the start. He’d fallen hard for her, allowed himself to imagine the possibility of what it might be like to make a life with her, turn her into a vampire.

But then it had all gone sideways.

Her friend’s case had blown wide open, all of them—Luca, Tess, her friend Chloe, several members of Luca’s team—had come inches from death at the hands of werewolf terrorists. Tess had been Changed into a wolf that night, snatched from Luca forever. He’d been willing to try, despite the fact that she was a wolf and he was a vampire, but she’d been unable to forgive him for keeping the secret of Magickals from her, for lying and for putting her in harm’s way with his lies.

The guilt and pain had burned like acid for far longer than it should have. He’d held on to hope, letting her lash out at him, because he thought he deserved it. But somewhere along the way, things had changed for him. Maybe they’d changed for both of them. They’d become different people in the two years since that night—people who no longer suited each other. Some changes were just too fundamental to ever go back.

And he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to go back to the way things had been when they’d first met, even if it were possible.

But he watched that loathing in her expression intensify, and he realize that it was time to have this out, once and for all, and put it behind them. He wasn’t going to enjoy this, had avoided it for longer than he should have, but it had to be done.

Sitting back in his chair, he sighed. “You need to let that night go, Tess. It’s not healthy.”

“Easy for you to say.” She bared her wolf fangs at him. “You don’t know me as well as you think you do.”

He nodded easily. “You’re right. I don’t. Our relationship only lasted for a few weeks, was over before it had a chance to come to its full potential. I’ll always regret that.”

“You should regret far more than that.” She sneered.

It wasn’t as difficult as he would have thought to hold on to his temper. She wanted to provoke a fight, but that would give her one more reason to despise him, and one less reason to confront her real problems. Which had nothing to do with him. “I take responsibility for my part in what happened, in the chain of unfortunate, unnecessary events that led to you being Changed. I’ve thought about that night so many times—”

She groaned, rolled her eyes. “Do we have to rehash this again?”

“I don’t love you anymore, Tess.” He rolled his eyes back at her. “I’ve said I’m not interested in being with you, so when I talk about that night, it’s not to defend or justify my decisions or try to convince you to give us another chance. I don’t want another chance, not anymore.”

Her chin lifted. “You think I care? I stopped loving you the moment I found out you lied to me. About everything.”

“I accept that.” It had taken him far longer than it should have to come to that acceptance, but he’d had to wrap his head around his own shame, guilt, and sense of failure before he could deal with the implosion of his relationship. He leaned forward, folded his hands on his desk. “Do you know what your problem is, Tess?”

“Oh, I’m sure you can’t wait to tell me.”

He ignored the sarcasm dripping off her words. “Your problem isn’t that you blame me for what happened that night.”

She folded her arms, one eyebrow arching. “Oh,
really?
This should be rich.”

“Really. Your problem is that you blame
you
.” He’d seen it in her gaze more than once, the same self-recrimination that he’d felt on the days he’d failed to save someone, especially those he knew and cared for, especially when it was
himself
he hadn’t been able to save from harm. It had taken him longer than he’d like to admit to work through his own psychological crap surrounding the night Tess had been taken, and many people he’d sworn to protect had come a hairsbreadth from death. Including himself. But coming out on the other side of that shame meant he could finally see Tess without the blinders of his own problems. “You blame yourself because you think you should have done something to save yourself.”

Her mouth was already open, ready to tear into him, but what emerged was the sound of a wounded animal. He’d never seen such grief, such self-loathing, on anyone’s face before. Tears filled her eyes while her mouth worked. “You don’t…you can’t…”

“You need to let this go, Tess,” he reiterated. “It’s not healthy to hold on to that night. It’s not healthy to keep
torturing yourself
over what happened to you.”

“How can…” The words shattered on a sob before she wrapped one arm around her middle and curled forward in her chair.

He rose from his desk, came around it to hunker down in front of her. He took her hand in his, his heart aching for what she had been through, and what she still had to go through. Healing from traumatic experiences was a long, ugly road. One he’d been down before, and it never got any easier.

“If I had just—”

“No.” He cut off her muffled words. “You were a human against a swarm of supernatural terrorists. You fought to the best of your ability, but there was nothing you could have done to save yourself.” He hooked a finger under her chin and forced her to look at him. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Tess. Those terrorists did. It’s hard to accept that you were a victim—a helpless one at that—but that’s the truth.”

He watched her flinch, and another tear rolled down her cheek, but she’d stopped protesting and had started listening. A good first step. So he kept talking. “It’s almost easier to pretend you had some kind of control, I know. You can second-guess yourself and try to find every tiny detail that you could have changed in order to make things turn out differently, but that’s a mind-fuck you don’t want to inflict on yourself anymore. Believe me, I’ve been there. With that night, and with a lot of others that came before it.”

She pulled her chin from his grasp, her gaze focusing on her lap. “I hate feeling like this. I hate hating myself. It was easier to tell myself that it all started with you lying to me, and so that was the real root of the problem. It was easier to just blame you.”

“I know.” His grinned wryly. “But the sad truth is I was pretty helpless in that situation too. I wasn’t allowed to tell you anything about magic, and even if I had it wouldn’t have stopped what happened. A terrorist cell of well-armed, well-trained magic-wielding operatives…there wasn’t a damn thing I could do. But I went down fighting, and so did you. We tried. That’s all we can expect of ourselves.”

“It wasn’t enough.” Her lips shook as if she was holding back more tears.

“No,” he agreed. “It wasn’t enough to keep you from being Changed, but it
was
enough to save your life. You’re still alive, and they’re not. So consider who really came out the winner in that fight.”

She blinked, but didn’t say anything.

“Let go of this, Tess. It’s
not
your fault.” He locked his gaze with hers, hoping that she heard him, that she listened, that she believed. “The people to blame are dead, and you need to move on with your life. You deserve to be happy and healthy. Don’t let them take that from you too.”