“I’m really glad it went well.”

“We’ll see. Hey, you know Abalone’s daughter, Paradise? Who helps out at the audience house?”

“Oh, she’s lovely.”

“She lasted the longest. That girl has a core of steel.”

“Abalone must be so proud.”

“He will be.”

They fell silent. Until she spoke up again. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

Butch immediately started to jump up, but she patted his arm. “I mean that more as an expression than an actual intention.”

“Do you want to go back to the car? I can bring the remains out to you.”

Marissa shook her head. “No, she’s mine. Until we find her proper family, she’s mine.”

Butch put an arm around her shoulders and drew her in close. “Be ready for that not to change even when you give her back to her bloodline.”

“Is that how you … when you were working, is that how you felt?”

“With every one of my victims.” He exhaled long and slow. “For me, they never went away. Even now, when I can’t sleep, I see their faces on the ceiling above our bed. I remember what they looked like in life, and can’t forget how they lay in death. It’s a stain on my brain.”

Staring at his profile, his hard, beautiful, imperfect profile, she plugged into all the love she had for him. “Why don’t you wake me up and talk to me when you’re like that?”

His tight smile was all about the downplay. “You have a job, too.”

“Yes, but I—”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s in the past now.”

Not if it’s still keeping you up, it isn’t, she thought.

“You and I are so alike,” she murmured. “We’ve both shelved our old lives.”

“You make that sound like it’s a bad thing.”

Before she could say anything else, the door across the way opened and a nurse in a white uniform walked in with a black box that absurdly—and inappropriately—made Marissa think of the pair of Stuart Weitzman stilettos that had been delivered to her the other night. Same size.

She’d expected the container to be bigger. Smaller. Different.

God, she didn’t know.

“We’re so sorry for your loss,” the nurse said as she went to hand it off to Butch.

Marissa stepped in and took the thing. It weighed less than she’d thought it would. Then again, it was only full of ashes, wasn’t it. “Thank you.”

The female flushed at the lack of protocol: As Marissa was a female from a Founding Family, it was assumed that she would never touch anything pertaining to the dead: In the Old Country, such contact was seen as bad luck, particularly if one was pregnant or of young-bearing age.

Screw that, though.

“Was there anything else with her things?” Marissa asked.

The nurse cleared her throat like she was trying to swallow her disapproval and choking on the stuff. “Actually, there was something.” She glanced at Butch as if she were looking for him to step forward and get his mate to be reasonable. “Ah…”

To his credit, Butch just cocked a brow like he didn’t know what the hell the female was going on about.

The nurse cleared her throat again. “Well, there was one thing. It was the only personal effect we found—it was tucked into her…”

“Into her what?” Marissa demanded.

“Into her brassiere.” The nurse put her hand into the pocket of her uniform and took out a length of black something or another with a ribbon of red fabric on it. “Are you sure you want to…”

Marissa snatched the thing out of the nurse’s hold. “Thank you. We’ll be going now.”

Before anything else could be said, she headed over and punched the “up” arrow on the wall. As if the elevator had been waiting to help her GTFO, the doors opened and she stepped inside. Butch was, as always, right behind her.

It was only when they were ascending back to ground level that she looked at what she’d taken from the other female.

“What is this?” she said, turning over the four-inch-long piece of black metal in her hand. There was a red silk tassel hanging off a cut out on one end, and on the other, a pointed, notched portion seemed like something that would fit in a lock. “Is this a key?”

Butch took it from her and examined the thing. “You know, it might be.”

Chapter Fifteen

By sundown the following evening, Peyton had decided he didn’t like any of them.

Look, it wasn’t that he thought he was better than the other five trainees. There was just something off with each one.

Axe, that outlier with the punk/Goth, yeah-we-get-it-you’re-a-hard-ass style? Obvious. The bastard was one kitchen knife away from being a serial killer. Boone, the Adonis with those muscles? Uh-huh, we know you can walk on your hands and throw your ass around like it’s attached to your throat with a rope—but who cares. You’re here to fight, not slap on a tutu and try to get into the Cirque du Soleil. Anslam? Nothing but an also-ran in the glymera, not even from a Founding Family. Irrelevant, and a shock that he’d made it as far as he had.

The one he really didn’t like, though, was that Craeg guy—although that was actually more because of the way everybody, even Paradise, treated him like he was the anointed leader of the group.

Not that Peyton was looking for that job, but come on. Nobody had a lock on any of this yet. There was no reason to be getting out the pedestal so soon.

And that wasn’t the only thing that bugged him about the guy. There was something else about the male, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. An instinct, maybe? A sense of some kind of threat?

He didn’t know—but he was damn sure going to figure that one out.

And then there was that Novo female.

Stretching in his chair in the break room, Peyton surreptitiously glanced in her vague-ish direction. She was laying out on the sofa to the left, her long, long, long legs crossed at the ankles, her hands clasped over her flat stomach like she was dead. Her hair was iris-black, stick straight, and plaited tight as a rope. Her skin was honey-brown, and he had never, ever in his fucking life seen a female built with that kind of muscle.

He’d spent most of the day trying to avoid measuring her breasts—mostly because he wasn’t sure whether she’d cut his balls off if she noticed.

Rubbing his eyes, he wanted a blunt so badly he was shaking from it.

Maybe Paradise had a point about the drug use.

Then again, it had been one long frickin’ night and one weird frickin’ day. After he’d made sure Paradise was awake and eating, the rest of them—except for Craeg the Great Fanged One who was better than everybody else—had gone for a wander around the facilities, found a doggen and asked for more food. Then they’d come back here to find Paradise once again in the bunk room asleep, and Craeg sitting up in a chair with his eyes closed.

Probably contemplating how superior his belly lint was to everyone else’s.

At that point, without a lot of conversation, they’d each picked a spot in the unadorned room and proceeded to not sleep very much or very well. Much as he hated to admit the weakness, he was still jumping at any sound that was out of place, his adrenal gland on hyper-alert even though the nurse who’d examined him had told him that the trial was over and nothing else of an electrical-shock/throat-punch nature was going to come at them—

Without warning, Paradise stuck her head out the bunk room door, like maybe she was expecting to find herself left behind.

As Peyton opened his mouth to say her name, he caught Craeg’s eyes shifting over to her … and pulling the classic head-to-toe males did when they were frickin’ man-whore sonsabitches.

It was his own signature move, for fuck’s sake.

Before he could bark at the guy to back off, the door to the outer hall opened wide, and two enormous males walked in like they owned the place.

Brothers.

Talk about coming to attention. All six of the loafer trainees were up and out of their whatevers like someone had goosed them in the ass. By the bunk room door, Paradise straightened and pulled her robe lapels even closer.