Marked by Midnight

Intrigue sparked in the Breed male’s eyes. He was intelligent, to be sure, but at the moment, Nova read a note of suspicion in his keen gaze. “If the Order were to shut this shop down tonight, you’ll both have nothing but time on your hands.”

Ozzy snarled under his breath, but let the warrior continue. Without waiting for permission, the vampire took his comm unit out of the pocket of his black fatigues and flashed a photo on the device’s display. “This look familiar to anyone?”

It was a close-up of a tattoo, an incomplete piece. The Celtic cross portion of it was older, a finished work, but the star behind the cross was only an outline with partial coloring applied.

“Not sure? Here’s a different shot.”

The warrior clicked to another photo, this one taken slightly farther away. A wide enough angle to show the full length of a man’s bare arm from below the short sleeve of a sodden, dark T-shirt to the tips of his thick fingers. Against the colorful ink and black lines of his many tattoos, the man’s skin was u

Cadaver-white.

Nova’s pulse kicked up a notch.

“This body was fished out of the Thames about an hour ago,” the warrior confirmed. “No ID on him. JUSTIS is checking for criminal records to see if they can identify him that way, but it’s doubtful they’re going to find anything. All we know for certain right now is that whoever put that star on him was likely to be one of the last people to see this guy alive. If not thelast.”

Nova set down her tattoo machine and blotted the ink on her client’s pec. “Let’s break for a bit,” she murmured to him. “Go on in back. I’ll come get you in a few minutes.”

“Nova.”Ozzy’s voice vibrated with warning.

“It’s okay,” she assured her overprotective boss and mentor. “I can handle this.”

The Breed male was determined to have some answers, and as well-meaning as Ozzy was, his lack of cooperation was liable to get them all arrested. Or worse.

After her client had shuffled to the break room and it was only Oz and her left to contend with their unwanted visitor out front, Nova walked over to the counter where the warrior stood. “The star is my work.”

He didn’t seem the least surprised to hear it, didn’t even blink at the admission.

Up close, his face was even more captivating than she thought. Sharp cheekbones, strong, proud jaw line. Green eyes the color of palest sage. “Tell me what you know about the dead man, Nova.”

Her name on his lips sent a shiver of awareness through her that she had to fight hard to ignore. She shrugged. “I can’t tell you much, other than he was a real asshole. Came in here late last night, drunk, belligerent.” An errant lock of her chin-length hair slipped from behind her ear and into her face, but she ignored it, her hands down at her sides, encased in ink-stained gloves. “As we told you, we don’t take walk-ins. That goes double for intoxicated walk-ins. But this guy was insistent. No matter what we said, he wouldn’t leave.”

“Seems to be a pattern lately,” Ozzy muttered, still glaring at the warrior.

“Like I said,” Nova went on, “the guy came in late, just about the time we were closing for the night. He refused to leave without getting some fresh ink--something about commemorating friends who’d recently passed.”

Now the warrior seemed surprised. One of his brows quirked in reaction. “He had a lot of tattoos, from what I saw. I’m no expert, but seems to me he had some hardcore art on him. Death scenes. Kill counts. Some kind of affiliation mark...”

Across the studio, Ozzy cleared his throat.

“I wasn’t looking at him that closely,” Nova said. “I wouldn’t know what other ink the guy had on his body. Even if I saw it, I’d make a point not to notice. That’s what we do in this line of work, especially with the kind of clients that come through that door.”

The warrior gave her a slight nod. “Why didn’t you finish the tattoo?”

“I didn’t have the chance. I didn’t like working on him. When I told him as much, he got upset. Really upset. He stormed out in a rage, and he didn’t come back.”

“Son of a bitch left without paying too,” Ozzy grumbled.

Those penetrating green eyes hadn’t strayed from her for an instant. They studied her, made her skin feel too warm, too tight under his stare.

“Besides demanding a tattoo to memorialize his dead friends, then storming off before you could finish the work, did the victim say anything else to you, Nova?”

He did it again, spoke her name in that smooth, deep velvet voice that made her forget for a second that he was not only one of the Breed, but the Order as well. A dangerous combination that she couldn’t afford to get too close to, for a hundred different reasons.

“Look, I don’t know what more I can tell you,” she said, impatient to be done with the conversation and get back to her work. Back to her life. “I didn’t spend much time talking to the guy, or looking at him. I didn’t want to. I just wanted to do whatever it took to get rid of him.”

“Kind of like you’re doing with me?” the vampire drawled knowingly.

Nova stared at him, refusing to take his bait. Ozzy didn’t give her the chance anyway.

He walked over to join her at the counter. “I got a business to run here, and Nova’s got a customer waiting on her out back. Like I told you, we don’t take walk-ins and we don’t have time for questions. Least of all, questions about our clientele. If the Order wants to conduct some kind of investigation, I’ll thank you to do it on your own turf, on your own time.”

It took the warrior a moment before he acknowledged with a tight nod. “Fair enough.”

He reached for a pen that lay on the counter, and jotted something down on an errant scrap of paper. He pushed the note toward Nova. “In case you change your mind and want to talk more. You can reach me anytime.”

She kept her arms at her sides, her eyes steady on the shrewd gaze that seemed more suspicious than he was letting on.

Finally, the warrior turned and walked out of the shop.

Nova stood unmoving as he stepped out the door and into the night. Then she waited some more, until she was certain he was gone and wouldn’t be coming back.

Only then did she reach out to retrieve the scrap that held his bold, efficient handwriting.

He’d written down a phone number and his name.

Mathias Rowan.

Nova stared at the note for a long moment.

Then she crushed the paper in her gloved fist, and dropped it into the trash bin under the counter. She had no intention of ever calling the number.

If she were lucky, she’d never run into the warrior again.

She glanced over at Ozzy, her voice quiet as she spoke. “Do you think he believed me?”

CHAPTER 3

She lied to him.

Mathias had known it even before he left the tattoo shop a couple of hours ago.

Hell, he’d known it almost as soon as the petite, pierced, walking, talking work of art had opened her tough little mouth.

Mathias’s Breed senses had lit up about a block from Ozzy’s studio, and the imprint of violence had only grown stronger the closer he got to the door.

Something bad had occurred inside that shop last night.

Something more volatile than a simple confrontation between Nova and the angry drunk later pulled out of the Thames by Gavin Sloane’s unit.

Whether it was the man’s actual murder or an event leading up to it, Mathias couldn’t be sure. His ability didn’t translate into such neat black-and-white terms. But after talking with Nova and her surly old boss at the tattoo shop, Mathias was certain the pair were hiding something.

He meant to have the truth.

To get it, he needed to talk to Nova again--preferably without the old man there to hover over her like a snarling guard dog. It was obvious the pair’s relationship went deeper than colleagues or friends, and based on the shop owner’s age alone, Mathias doubted a fiery twenty-something like Nova would be sharing the man’s bed.