ChapterTwenty-Six
Dominic Dane
I knewsomething was wrong the moment I stepped into the hotel lobby. There was something in the air, something that smelled like rot, and it lingered in my nostrils as if desperate for attention. My beast reared his head up, too, sensing the unease that suddenly grabbed me by the throat.
When they called this morning to tell me that they’d found Noah Bennett’s body, I thought that was it. The ODP had lied through their teeth—he hadn’t been hiding since his father’s death. He’d disappeared, and the business manager, a man who’d worked for the Bennetts his entire life, had been the one to manage this entire fucking operation in the first place.
Why? It didn’t even matter anymore.
The ODP had received an anonymous tip, an envelope slipped under the main doors of the San Francisco offices a few streets down from our hotel. When they’d gone to check the penthouse in one of the tallest buildings around us, they’d found Noah Bennett cut to pieces, the exact same way as his father—and the pixie girlfriend dead on the couch with a bullet hole in her forehead.
I’d been ready. I thought as soon as we went there, they were going to show their faces—the high fae who’d done this. There was nobody else left in the Bennett family for them to slaughter. That’s why they’d brought the body that had been dead for at least twenty-four hours to San Francisco where we were. A message to show us that they knew exactly what was going on.
They would be there, hiding, waiting until they had eyes on us and made a plan of attack, and then I’d be face-to-face with the people who’d ruined my family.
Yet, we’d gone there, and we’d stayed for two hours in that room, waiting, but nobody came. Nobody attacked us. Nobody shot at us from outside, either.
Nothing happened. That’s when my instincts started to insist that something was wrong, but I didn’t believe it until I was inside the hotel.
The other agents stopped in front of the elevators, but my nerves already had the best of me. I couldn’t stand there and wait for the car to arrive. I took the stairs instead.
And I didn’t smell the first dead body until I was on the seventh floor.
The man had had his skull smashed in completely, and I could literally see his brains splattered all over the stairs. My heart leaped in my chest, and I started running, my beast seconds away from taking control.
No, no, no, I said to myself. Nothing had happened to her. The agents were there. Derek was there. He’d killed that man on the stairs with his bat, I was sure of it.
But then I found the second and third body in front of the doors to the thirteenth floor—both of them agents, the same ones who were supposed to keep Teddy safe.
And in the hallway, there were more—two other agents and another three men who weren’t ours, sprawled all over the floor.
Silence.
The scents were mixed together—blood and the spicy scent of magic. Teddy’s scent, too. And Derek’s.
My heart had nearly beat out of my chest by the time I made it to the half open door and walked inside without breathing.
Every muscle in me locked as my beast froze with the realization—Teddy was not here.
Only one heart beat in the suite, and it was Derek’s. He was lying against the wall across the room, eyes closed, breathing even. Unconscious. The thick blinds covered the windows completely, all the lights of the room on. There was a body of a woman right there on the floor in front of the broken bedroom door, with a pen sticking out of her eye. Dead.
Another body with its back completely smashed, its organs on full display, inside the bedroom, too. The air was still thick with magic, and I crossed through the hole of the broken door, still not allowing myself a chance to think.
If I’m not here when you get back, they took me. My blood is in my pens. Use it to track me.
The words were writtenon the left wall in blue, the letters large. I recognized Teddy’s handwriting instantly. She’d used the pen she’d enchanted for me to write the message, and she knew only I would be able to see it.
Footsteps outside, coming into the suite. Agents called my name and they spread around the suite fast, searching for clues, for danger, but it was useless. It was already done.
They had Teddy.
My back leaned against the wall and my beast roared inside my head in rage and desperation.
Mine, he demanded. She was mine. Nobody could take her away from me now. She belonged to me, just as much as I’d belonged to her ever since the day we met. My scent was all over her. My cock had been inside her. I’d held her in my arms the way I only ever allowed myself to imagine sometimes because I’d been too weak to resist her. I was always too weak when it came to that pixie.
My pixie.
But mypixie was gone.