The Given (23 page)

“Hostage,” Dennis guessed, when he asked him the same thing. “Watch. They'll want to trade Zicaro for the map.”

The map he didn't have. The map that probably didn't even exist.

“Sure you don't know anything about it?” Dennis prodded, holding up his hands when Grif glared.

“Get bent, Carlisle. You should know better than to ask that of me. I'm a good man.”

“Yeah? So am I, Shaw,” Dennis said, leaning too close. “And I don't like working this way. It straddles the line, and I'm a good cop, too.”

He was. The aura around him glowed in a healthy ring. He was fully recovered, and it looked like he was destined to stay that way. Grif realized he was glad. So he put a hand on the man's shoulder, and nodded once. “I appreciate it.”

“I didn't do it for you,” Dennis snapped, still hot.

And there it was, finally out between them. Grif tucked his hands in his pockets. “I know that, too.”

Turning away, Dennis stared with clenched jaw at the video screens behind the bar. Whatever he was seeing, it wasn't topless hula girls, swinging hips.

“You broke her, you know,” he finally said, causing Grif to jolt. He hadn't been expecting that . . . or the quiver in Dennis's voice. He shook his head, still not looking at Grif. “I don't know how she's walking by your side, and talking to you now—she couldn't even move at all a couple of months ago.
She
was a ghost.”

Grif found he was unable to defend himself. “She's very strong,” he said instead.

“She's more than that, Shaw,” Dennis shot back, and now he did look at him, his honed gaze finding Grif's. “She's honest and good. She's beautiful and pure and you don't often find that in this world. Not all in one person. And you . . . you just broke her.”

“Can you please stop saying that?”

“No,” Dennis said sharply, nostrils flaring. “Because you need to know. This obsession you have with the past? This Evelyn Shaw you keep mentioning? It's costing you the kindest person I've ever known. Like I said, I don't like to work this way, but I'd damned well cross the line for her. She's worth it, and you're an idiot if you don't know it.”

“I do know she's worth it.” Grif swallowed hard. “I just don't know what to do about it.”

“Then you're an even bigger idiot than I thought,” Dennis said immediately, then shook his head before Grif could answer. “Forget it. I'm gonna pull the car 'round. Bring those assholes back through the kitchen. I'll tell the bartender that we need some discretion.”

Then he was gone. Grif took a minute to breathe. He rubbed his jaw and realized his hand was shaking. He stopped it with effort, but couldn't halt the sense that despite trying, he was doing nothing right.

Taking a deep breath, he headed back to the two men waiting on tenterhooks in the corner, determined to change that.

K
it dropped behind the leather sofa, falling more than dodging the shot that rang across the room. She couldn't find air; there suddenly seemed to be so little of it, and none within reach of her lungs. And while she was also shaking, she instinctively knew that she had to move. So she fought through the scent of gunpowder shocking the air to remember how to work her legs.

The door leading to the club banged open, and Kit's head swung around. The woman who'd led her into the room took one look at her trembling on the ground, then at Ray, still on the other side of the room and still, apparently, holding a shotgun in lieu of his towel. The hostess then swallowed hard, backed out of the room, and closed the door behind her.

Ray's footsteps resumed and Kit tried to inch back, but her skirt kept hampering her. She was climbing up into it, getting caught in the voluminous folds, and while one part of her was screaming to make her shaking hands work, to reach for the gun in her skirt pocket, another part was already anticipating a second shotgun blast through her head. At least I'll spend eternity in fabulous clothes.

Jesus.

“I liked you, Craig,” Ray said, voice closer. Kit knew he could shoot her right through the sofa, but he didn't. Not yet. “But Barbara was right. You're just as dangerous as Shaw is, in your own way. All those questions bubbling up behind that pretty little face.”

Kit didn't answer. She was too focused on those footsteps, which were a metronome of aggression, and frighteningly calm compared to the calamitous beat of her heart.

“But right now what I want from you is an answer. Where's the map?”

The map. The mystery. The diamonds.

“I don't—”

“I know Gina gave it to your father. I saw her. So where is it?”

Kit would give it to him if she knew. She realized in that moment that she would give him anything if it meant she would live. Then, suddenly, the answer was there, like it suddenly crystallized in the shocked air. “Marin has it.”

That was what she was withholding from Kit. The information her father had died for . . . that Grif had died for . . . and that Kit was going to die for, too.

“Does Barbara know that?” Ray asked, and appeared around the sofa's edge, naked as the day he was born, if heavier and hairier and holding a shotgun in front of him. Kit kept her eyes on his face, because when he decided to shoot her, she'd see it there first.

Barbara's dead, Kit was about to say, but Ray knew that. He was just on a rant.

“Because Barbara has no right to those diamonds. That necklace was made for my mother, by my father. Barbara took everything else from my family. Those diamonds are mine.”

Kit needed to buy time to find something with which to distract him. Struggling not to move, to
scream
—fighting just to think—she managed, “I— I thought you were working with her.”

“I thought you were,” he answered immediately. He sounded calm, but too calm. Like a receded shoreline right before a tsunami. “It would be just like her to enlist someone else. She never got her hands dirty. She liked to say she had people for that.”

For some reason, that made him sneer and pump the slide on the shotgun.

“We— We're not,” Kit said quickly, and she was unable to help herself now. She shoved herself backward on her palms, but got caught up in her skirt again. Reaching down, she pulled the folds free. Ray's eyes flickered, lighting on her legs.

“I knew that as soon as I saw her reaction to the news that you and Shaw were a couple, but honestly? I don't care. I just want you all out of my way.”

Kit needed more time. Drawing her legs in tight, she went with her gut. “Barbara killed your father, didn't she?”

Ray's expression darkened at that, and his mouth slowly altered, some sort of mute misery drawing it down at the sides. “Her story was that Gina rolled back into town and killed him, which is possible, given that Gina disappeared again, too.” Ray sighed heavily. “But I don't think so. Gina was genuinely spooked. I know, because I followed her that day.”

Kit froze, trying to wrap her head around that. “So you . . .”

“I left the house.”

He had left.

“You . . . you followed . . .”

Ray's mouth re-formed into its hard line as he waited for her to catch up, watching her struggle for words with a look that was almost hungry. When she finally figured it out, jolting as she stared at him, his lips shifted again, this time turning upward.

“Life can be so ironic,” he finally said, almost to himself. “I mean, who'da thought I'd be using the same gun on you fourteen whole years after I killed your father?”

Silence flooded in so quickly that Kit had the sense of dropping into it, as if submerged. Yet it was also the loudest thing she'd ever heard in her life. Both out of breath and unable to take another, she couldn't even feel her ribs in her chest. Instead, she floated up, up, and up as Ray aimed the shotgun at her, and from within the folds of her skirt, her arm rose as well.

The bullet that tore through Ray's naked body was muted, too. All Kit heard was its sizzle as it left the gun, and the only thing that brought her back around was the recoil of the .22 in her palm.

Ray's body jerked first left, then right—she must have shot him twice, she thought dreamily—and even after he toppled behind the sofa, his surprised expression was burned into the air where he'd stood.

Gunpowder fogged the room. It had tears springing up in her eyes and felt thick in her buzzing ears. It worked to clog her throat, and seeped into her pores as well. It weighed her down. Violence now lived inside of her. She breathed death.

A sound, half sigh, half moan, filled the air like keening as she wiped at her face. Was that her? Then she began to shake, the shudders so great that her breath sawed through the loaded silence. She felt like toppling to her side, curling into herself, and never getting up. She should move. She should run out the back door and never look back, but all she wanted to do was squeeze her eyes shut—like so—and . . .

“He was going to kill you, you know.”

Kit's eyes flew wide as she gasped, and she froze, surprised into stillness. She knew she was going into shock . . . but she also knew that voice.

Gaining her knees, jerking up that damned skirt—now with two holes blasted through its pocket—she pulled herself up by the back of the sofa and peered over the edge. When she saw the half-transparent form there, blond and beaming, she felt herself sway. “Nic?”

“Hiya, girly-friend,” Nicole said, perching on the arm of the leather sofa, downy wings folded as she shot her a sweet smile. Kit wobbled and fell back to the floor.

And Nicole Rockwell, her best friend in the world, dead an entire year, called out to her from the other side of the room. “Go ahead and take a moment there. No one is coming in for a bit, and this guy certainly isn't going anywhere.”

Kit's mouth moved, but no sound emerged and she had to blink furiously to keep her eyes from rolling back in her head. It wasn't enough. She slapped her own face, then did it again when she realized that made her feel more present, more solidly there.

Nic snorted from the other side of the sofa.

When she was finally able to take in a real breath, Kit managed to pull herself to her feet—though she still needed the sofa to steady her shaky weight.

Nic, whose grave Kit had sobbed over, was wearing gold-tipped wings that rose in beautiful ivory arches. Her hair was somewhat mussed, giving an indication of its state when she died, but she otherwise looked whole and perfect, and would have even appeared serene were it not for the psychedelic swirling of stardust winking in her otherworldly gaze. Kit took a shaky step in her direction, and Nic smiled encouragingly.

“How am I able to see you?” Kit managed to ask.

And when, she wondered, had she become so comfortable talking with angels?

Nicole frowned, as if the question disappointed her. She snapped her fingers like that would suddenly make Kit understand, yet the movement produced the sound of bells, which only had Kit jerking her head in disbelief. “C'mon, honey. After all you've seen and done this past year? After
that
?” She pointed down at what Kit presumed was Ray's body. “Don't be dramatic.”

“Are you a—”

“If you're going to say ghost, I'm leaving now.”

The sarcasm was pure Nicole, and that's what really, finally calmed Kit. She hadn't been about to say ghost. She didn't believe in ghosts, she believed in angels . . . specifically in Centurions.

“How long have you been listening?”

“I got here when you did. It's my punishment for disobeying heavenly orders.” Seeing Kit's dropped jaw, she shrugged. “I take it Grif didn't tell you about my new gig.”

Kit shook her head. It came out as more of an uncontrolled jerk.

“I'm not surprised. He probably didn't want to upset you, and he really just learned of it himself. My Take is usually some sob story.” She cut her eyes back at Ray. “But I get the occasional riffraff as well.”

Which meant Nic's soul was tortured. She'd be stuck with a Centurion's responsibilities until her soul healed enough to forgive and let go of her earthly regrets. Kit's heart sank, and she placed her hand over her chest as tears filled her eyes.

“Don't.” Nicole held up a hand and softly added, “Don't cry for me, Kit.”

The understanding in her gentle tone ripped a sob from Kit anyway.

Nicole sighed. “Okay, it was hard at first. I mean, letting go of your dreams about a life not lived is like a death all in itself. But I've seen some awesome things since then. I get to go to amazing places, and I don't have to pay some crappy airline to do it.”

That surprised a laugh from Kit. She immediately covered her mouth. There was nothing funny about this situation.

“And before you can say it,” Nicole went on, “I know you're sorry. I'm sorry, too, but the only way to move on is to let go, and . . . I think I'm almost there.” She nodded at Kit, an acknowledging bow. “You guys have helped, you know.”

“Us . . . ?” Kit asked, inching around the sofa. They were only feet apart now. Two more steps and she could reach out and touch her old friend . . . if she were still alive. She had an almost uncontrollable urge to try, but refrained, just to maintain the illusion.

“You and Grif,” Nicole clarified. “I've been watching you. Especially you, Kit. Every time I'm assigned a Take I pop back to the Surface a little early and find you. As a Centurion, I can always spot others like me, and your man Grif is like a beacon to me. So I find him”—she shrugged—“and I find you.”

“You've got it wrong. He's not my man, Nic.” Kit shook her head, not bothering to hide the sadness in the movement. Nic would see it even if she weren't a Centurion.

“We haven't been together for months.”

“Honey, didn't you hear me?” Leaning forward, Nicole quirked an eyebrow, causing the stardust in her gaze to shift and swirl in a different direction. “I've been
watching
. I saw you together. I saw you apart. I even saw you following him when he didn't know you were there.”