I knew she was a liar, but I didn’t think her acting chops were good enough to fool me.
“If you’re not with them, you’re in the city for something else.”
“Truth is…” She looked away and fidgeted. “I’ve been back for about three weeks.”
“Excuse me?”
“I split from the Siberian pack, found transport back to the US and hitchhiked from Alaska, of all fucking places. Not the most fun trip I’ve ever had, but here I am.”
“Why would you come back here? When Lucas finds out—”
“I’ll make my appeal to the king when the time comes. But last I heard you two weren’t exactly joined at the lip anymore, know what I mean?”
“And you think he’ll ask you to jump right back in his bed?” I rolled my eyes at her. “I don’t care how cute you think you are, he still values trust over a hot piece of ass.”
“Trust was what landed him on the cover of Us Weekly with that skanky actress?”
I’d almost forgotten about Lucas’s relationship with Willow Chalmers, starlet of the year. The incredibly tense dinner Holden and I had shared with them wasn’t a memory I wanted to revisit too often.
“You seriously came to win him back? That’s pathetic.”
“I came to be a part of my pack again. It has nothing to do with my relationship with Lucas. I have other reas—”
“Oh my God, enough.” I holstered my gun and held my hands up in defeat. “I will do whatever it takes for you to shut the hell up. If that means trusting you, so be it.”
“Shooting her is also an option,” Holden suggested.
It was, but I didn’t have a surplus of bullets I could go around wasting.
“We’ll take her back to the hotel and see what His Majesty has to say. If he wants me to shoot her, I’ll gladly oblige. But I’m not going to lie, another able body with a gun isn’t a bad thing right now. You know how to use that thing?” I asked her.
“I shot you once, didn’t I?”
“Not quite.” I gritted my teeth and thought of Rio’s fluffy kitty belly and Christmas lights at Rockefeller Plaza. I focused on anything other than the tangible memory of Desmond’s weight falling on me after he took the bullet Morgan had meant for me.
On the plus side, I was getting better at controlling my panic attacks.
There might be hope for me yet.
“You’ve got to be pretty happy about this,” I told Holden.
“Why in God’s name would I be happy about this?”
“Because there’s no way in hell I’m running into a necromancer den, guns blazing, with this psycho bitch tagging along.”
He gave me a thin smile, then looked at Morgan. “In that case, welcome to the team.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Three other teams were waiting in the lobby when we returned.
Nolan and Rebecca had found a single necromancer with only a handful of guards holed up at Grand Central Terminal. Bradley and Merlin had come up empty-handed, but Chuck and a sentry named Yara had found two necros together in the New York Public Library by Bryant Park.
Seemed the theory we’d been running on held some merit. They were favoring older stone-and-brick buildings near subway lines. It was smart. They could avoid street travel and not have to interact too much with the bodies they were controlling. With the power out they’d be able to move freely through the subway tunnels and gain access to most major points around the city.
I felt a sense of dread, imagining what might have happened to the civilians trapped below. If they posed any kind of risk for the necros, what was to keep the bikers from killing off full carfuls of innocent people?