Everyone at the table nodded in agreement except for Meiling. She started to laugh again. “Seriously? If you don’t want to crack heads tonight, you might want to break out the decks of playing cards you have stashed somewhere under the tables. I think the cops are about to pay us a visit.”
Annoyance flickered across Fyodor’s face. “I know it’s that damned Brice Addler hoping to catch us at something illegal.”
“One of these days he’s going to set you up,” Timur warned.
“Even if he managed to send me to prison, Evangeline would never desert me,” Fyodor assured them. “If there’s one thing I can count on, it’s that my wife would never leave me while I was in prison. She isn’t that kind of woman.”
“I didn’t mean for prison,” Timur said. “I think eventually he’ll set you up to be killed.”
Gedeon noticed that the moment Timur voiced his very real concerns, the security detail around Fyodor, Kyanite and Rodion alerted instantly. Elijah did as well. Timur was serious, Gedeon decided, and he wanted his brother to be serious, but Fyodor instantly rejected the idea.
“Addler is a straight arrow, Timur. He won’t bend the rules, not even for a man he despises. He’s just too perfect.”
“He’s obsessed with your wife,” Timur snapped, out of patience. This was obviously an argument that had been going on for some time. “I’m your head of security. You should trust my judgment.”
Fyodor sighed. “I do, Timur. It’s just that this cop has a long history with our family, and you have every reason not to trust him.”
“It’s always best to trust your security man,” Elijah counseled as decks of cards appeared on the tables and were dealt out to those supposedly playing.
10
MEILING opened the sliding doors to her wide, enormous deck and stepped outside. The night air was cool, which she was thankful for. More and more she seemed to be getting so hot she sometimes felt she was burning from the inside out. It didn’t seem to matter what the actual temperature was; she was just a hot mess. She ached everywhere—her joints especially.
Ordinarily if she felt restless, Meiling went for a run. Now her body hurt too badly to run. Thanks to Gedeon’s generosity when he was attempting to bribe her to stay and be his partner, she had the best bathroom ever. How he managed it when her suite was on the third floor, she didn’t know, but her tub was deep and the hot water was endless. She could immerse herself in the hot water and soak her aching joints and muscles. Sometimes it helped, but the achiness was getting worse, not better, as time went on.
She and Gedeon had been back in New Orleans for three months when she began to experience waves of heat and aching muscles and joints. Her first thought had been that she’d picked up a virus of some sort, but she’d never gotten sick in her life. Then it occurred to her that she did, in fact, have a female leopard, and the leopard was making herself known.
Meiling paced across the balcony to the wide railing and leaned against it, lifting her face to the breeze. She didn’t know where she had gotten the idea that she didn’t have a leopard or why she believed so strongly that she didn’t have one, but it was as if it had always been that way. One of her earliest memories was of Libby’s mother telling her she was useless to the leopard community because she could never provide children for them. Libby had snuck into the little closet that had been her room and consoled her when she’d cried herself to sleep. Had Libby’s mother caught her crying, she would have really gotten into trouble. She wasn’t supposed to cry. She broke so many rules.
Meiling had gone to her room at ten that evening, using her private entrance, so restless and unable to understand why until the terrible sexual burning had started. Only then did it hit her that there was a real chance that she was going into the emergence of her kind: the Han Vol Dan, which was when her leopard wanted to arise.
Meiling sighed and looked out over the lights of the city. The house was close to the edge of the swamp, overlooked the city and yet also provided a view of the powerful Mississippi River. Gedeon managed to purchase his property in the perfect neighborhood, especially for a leopard. They had escape routes from every outlet.
She had a major problem—more than one. She would have been ecstatic over the discovery of having a leopard, but she knew it would change her life forever. She loved being Gedeon’s partner. They worked well together. In fact, they were good together nearly all the time in every aspect of their partnership.