“You get a whole coven of would-be demons on your tail, planning to cut out your still-beating heart, then we’ll talk.” Sylvie scraped the two pictures from his desk with shaking hands, crammed them into her pockets.

“Monsters have never scared you before.”

“Don’t be more an idiot than your paycheck makes you.”

“Not scared like this,” he said. His dark eyes were on her again, searching, and she’d forgotten how penetrating they could be. She turned her head, looking longingly at the door. But she still had answers to get. “There’s only one thing that scares you that badly. Yourself.”

“Could we stay on topic?” she snapped. “Brandon Wolf. Missing. Dunne. Unhappy. Bad news all around.”

“We’re not here to help you,” Demalion said.

So angry even her voice failed her, Sylvie yanked the door open; there’d be no answers here, and if she stayed . . . Demalion might get a closer look at her weapon than she could afford.

Behind her, he said, “Sylvie.” Not Ms. Shadows. Not Ms. Lightner. Sylvie. She waited, breath coming fast.

“I didn’t hear about Suarez until after,” he said. “If I’d been there, I would have helped.” Quiet footfalls in the carpet warned her of his approach; he put a hand on her shoulder in what felt like honest sympathy.

“Words are easy,” she said. “Belief’s harder.”

She’d trusted him once, and the memory was powerful, with him standing so close, smelling so good, so familiar, his warmth mingling with hers.

Six months prior, Sylvie had taken him out to celebrate, though she hadn’t explained what. Hard to say to a new guy, yeah, I had a good day at work. I pried a werewolf cub from the government’s hands through sheer persistence and at least one screaming argument about children belonging with their mothers, whether they were furred or fleshy on the outside. She felt good, picked Demalion up at his apartment, and headed for the Keys.

They’d been dancing close in the un-air-conditioned bar, slick and easy in the tropical night, and he’d licked a traveling bead of sweat from her breast. She’d clenched her hands in his hair, mussed out of its sleekness, and thought this one, this one she was taking home and keeping.

Then his cell had gone off, and she, teasing, had plucked it from his hip over his protest—fast fingers, trained by Alex—flipped it open, and found herself listening to the ISI: Come on home, Demalion. We got the mother, too.

Result? One crushed cell phone, one shattered relationship. One battered heart. Played from the first.

She met his eyes, remembered that he couldn’t be trusted, and shied away from his sympathy. Crocodile tears or not, she didn’t want it. “Back off, Demalion. We don’t dance anymore.”

When he retreated to his desk, she found another question. “When you played your spy games with Wolf and Dunne, you get a sense of anyone else watching? Anyone who might want a shot at Dunne through Bran?”

“No,” he said, glancing away. Her breath caught.

“Such a lie,” she said. “C’mon, Demalion, we are talking about dirty deeds being done, and you’re going back to Mr. I-Know-Nothing, I-Say-Nothing?”

“I don’t know anything,” he said, voice dropping to a growl. “Yeah, there was someone else watching. No clue as to who or why. It was like having a shadow. We knew it was there, but couldn’t touch it.”

“Not so fun when it happens to you, is it?” Sylvie said.

“Do you want to hear this or do you want to take pot-shots?” Demalion said. “It’s your client, right?”

Sylvie sagged back against the doorjamb and waited.

“Dunne found out about the surveillance,” Demalion said. “He didn’t like it. He nailed them, and he got the mystery observer right alongside the ISI team.”

He continued, voice low and intense. “I don’t know what’s happened to Dunne’s boy. But things are getting ugly. Be careful, Sylvie.”

“Who’s this?” Another ISI agent stopped in the hallway, seeing Sylvie framed in the open door. “Is she authorized to be here? To know about Dunne?” He seized her arm. Sylvie twisted free and stepped back into Demalion’s office, the nearest shelter from a storm.

“Back off,” Demalion snapped. “Jesus, Rodrigo, give us all a break. A pretty girl comes downtown for a pastry and a chat, and you go Nazi on her ass. Don’t you have a dick?”

“I’ll see her out,” Rodrigo said. “You might do things differently in Miami, Demalion. Here we follow the rules.” When he tried to take her arm again, Sylvie flipped him off and stormed down the hall. Rodrigo caught up to her at the elevator and keyed the doors open.

“I know who you are,” he said, shoving her into the elevator; he jabbed the lobby level and locked it in. “I’m not impressed with your mouth. And you’d best stay away from Dunne.” Slackness touched his face, left him staring blankly at her as the doors slid shut.

Sylvie looked at the closed doors thoughtfully. “Okay, that was freaky, even for the ISI.”

At the lobby, she wasn’t surprised to be met by Stockton, as well as two other guards, mustered from God knew where. She smiled at them, showing all her teeth, and stalked out the front door.

Pastry? She had passed a pastry shop two blocks from here. She walked down the street, bought herself a cruller, two double espressos, and took a seat. She knocked back the first espresso, chased it with powdered sugar, and tapped her nails on the cheap Formica table. She had the second espresso at her lips when Demalion arrived.

“That better not be mine,” he said.

She passed it over.

“It’s almost cold,” he said.

“It was almost gone,” she said. “What the hell do you want, Demalion? Not help, you’re not in the helping business.”

He bit his lip, as if he could unsay his earlier words, but then shrugged. “A bargain of sorts. I’ll keep an eye out for Wolf. More than that. I’ll institute a search. If—”

“If,” she parroted. “If what, Demalion?”

“If you tell me what you know about Kevin Dunne.”

“You’ve been watching him. What makes you think I’ll know more than you?”

“I hate to admit it, but you seem to know what’s going on when no one else does—why do you think we watch you so much? You’re like ISI Cliff’s Notes to the Magicus Mundi.”

“That’s flattering,” Sylvie said. She stood and snagged another coffee from the counter clerk, plain old black this time; if she had another espresso, she might find herself throttling Demalion.

“Surveillance has failed on Dunne,” Demalion said, when she sat back down. “Three teams—”

“Dead?” Sylvie interrupted. Her nervous fingers ceased their drumming on the side of her paper cup. “You said—he nailed them.”

“No.” Demalion leaned forward. “Look, it’s this way. The first team we sent—they got nothing. Dunne spotted them right off, went over, and asked them to leave. They did. Now, we even mention Dunne’s name, and they get all huffy, demanding that we leave him alone.

“The second team kept their distance. Dunne and Wolf found them anyway, invited them to dinner. They went, contrary to instruction, then discontinued surveillance and returned to base against orders.”

“So, Dunne threatened them, made them back off. I can see it; he’s a scary guy,” Sylvie said. At least he was spreading the scary around, and she couldn’t think of anyone more deserving than the ISI.

“They weren’t scared of him,” Demalion said, shaking his head. “It’s like they worship him.” She twitched at his choice of words, but, caught up in his problems, he didn’t notice. “One of the men on that team, Erickson, keeps talking about how nice Bran and Kevin are, that we should just leave them alone. He gets heated about it.”

“Guess he met a different Dunne than I did,” Sylvie said. “But hell, there’s no accounting for taste. Look at you, talking to me. Voluntarily.”

Demalion sighed. “Before the ISI took Erickson on, he’d had some disciplinary actions for harassing gays. Enough of them that his career was in a nosedive. You’re not in law enforcement—”