He’d tasked Callahan with taking them back to the Order’s command center in the heart of London. Although it was rare--almost unheard of--that civilians were permitted into Order compounds, Mathias was willing to bend that rule for Nova.

If he had anything to say about it, she wasn’t going to be merely a civilian for long, anyway. He wanted her in his life. Hell, he wanted her as his mate, if she’d have him.

The Rover was still idling at the curb. All Mathias needed to do was convince Nova that she needed to trust him, that she needed to do what he asked for once and let him take care of her.

He walked to the back room with Callahan and a few other men. Mathias knocked on the door at the same time he started to open it. “Nova, I’ve made arrangements for you and Eddie at--”

She was gone.

The back room was vacant. The rear door letting out onto the alleyway behind the shop was partially ajar, admitting a thin draft of night air inside.

Nova had left, taking Eddie with her. The reality of it raked over Mathias with cold claws.

Fuck. She was out there on her own right now, while Ozzy’s killer was still very much at large.

She had to be aware of that danger. And yet she’d chosen that risk over staying another minute under Mathias’s watch.

“Damn it, Nova.” He turned to the three warriors behind him, an odd chill blooming behind his sternum. “She won’t be coming back.”

“Where do you think she went?” Callahan asked.

Mathias lifted his shoulder. “I don’t know. She could be anywhere in the city.”

“If she’s on foot, she can’t be far,” Deacon said.

Thane nodded, his black brows knit together over dark eyes. “You want us to go after her, Commander?”

“No,” Mathias said after a moment, the word heavy on his tongue.

Every particle of his being pounded with the need to bring her back to him. But if he sent warriors after her now, it would only make her run farther.

Nova was a smart woman and a proven survivor. He had to trust she’d find a way to keep herself and Eddie safe.

The best thing he could do for her was make damned sure the Breed bastard who killed Ozzy wasn’t permitted to breathe for much longer tonight.

Sloane stood behind Deacon and Callahan at the door. The JUSTIS officer shot Mathias a disapproving look. “You’ve got a body lying in a lake of blood out there, a missing woman and kid, and no one here to explain what happened tonight except you, my friend. I think you’d better tell us what’s going on.”

He had filled them all in briefly when he’d called them to the shop, alerting them to the murder and the fact that the killer had been looking for a woman who worked there. It hadn’t seemed the best time to mention that he’d been at the scene when the assault took place, let alone that he’d been in an upstairs apartment making love to the very woman the attacker had come in to find.

Although Sloane had demanded the answers, Mathias spoke to his team. “I met Nova here at the shop two nights ago, during our search for the tattoo artist who’d left the unfinished work on the last guy fished out of the Thames.”

“A lucky break,” Deacon remarked. “We searched a dozen shops and came up empty.”

“Yeah, well,” Mathias hedged. “As soon as I got near Ozzy’s shop, I sensed something was off. I could tell there’d been an altercation here, a pretty bad one. It made me curious, so I stopped in, asked a few questions.”

“What did you find out?” Thane asked.

“That our dead scarab had, indeed, been in the shop. He came in the night before, and Nova was the one who did the tattoo.”

“But she didn’t finish it,” Callahan said.

“No. The guy was drunk, belligerent. There were words exchanged, then threats. Things turned ugly, and Ozzy killed him to protect Nova. They dumped the body in the river.”

“Jesus Christ,” Sloane muttered.

Mathias went on, holding his old friend’s rightfully indignant look. Sloane wasn’t going to like anything else he would hear now either. “I realized there were things she wasn’t telling me. I suspected some kind of connection between her and the man who came into the shop...and I was right. She knew him. She didn’t know the others in the morgue, but she was scared enough to go there and find out what she could about them.”

Now, Sloane’s hissed curse was even more profane. “You lied to me earlier today, Rowan. You acted like you had no goddamned idea who woman in the morgue video was. Yet all along you knew.”

“I knew,” he admitted soberly. “I’m telling you now, lying to my friends--to my teammates--goes against everything I am. But when it comes to this woman, when it comes to Nova...”

“You care for her,” Thane said.

Mathias nodded. He glanced to Sloane. “When you told me she had been at the morgue to see the other dead men, I didn’t know how deeply she might be involved in any of this. I didn’t know if she had been part of the other killings too. I didn’t know if she’d been lying to me about what she knew. I only knew I had to give her the chance to tell me first. So, as soon as the sun set, I came here to talk with her.”

“You’ve been here all night?” Callahan piped up. “You were here while the killing took place?”

“I was upstairs, in Nova’s apartment with her.” He didn’t have to elaborate on what he was doing up there. The looks he was getting from all four men said they understood plainly enough. “I didn’t know about the attack until after it was over. The boy, Eddie, was in the shop when the killer arrived. Eddie hid back there, in the storage room. He ran upstairs to Nova’s afterward, in a state of shock.”

“He didn’t see who did it?” Deacon asked.

“No, but Nova did.” At the round of confused glances that fixed on him, Mathias explained. “She’s a Breedmate. Her gift lets her see the final moments of someone’s life when she touches them. When she touched Ozzy, she saw a Breed male in a hooded jacket. She saw this male slash open her friend’s throat.”

Mathias now looked to Sloane. “That’s what Nova was doing at the morgue this morning, when she touched the dead men with the scarab tattoos. She saw that there was some kind of meeting taking place between those men and a group of Russians. The thug who confronted her here in Ozzy’s shop the other night was there too. She saw him execute his own men.”

Sloane stared at him, raked a hand over his head. “For fuck’s sake, Rowan. When were you going to divulge all of this intel? Things between our two organizations are touchy enough without the commander of the Order’s operation in London willfully interfering in an open JUSTIS investigation. Withholding information, diverting resources, fucking a person of interest--”

Mathias growled at that last charge, even though he was guilty of everything Sloane pointed out. “I want this thing sewn up as much as anyone else--more than anyone, I’d say. But Nova is my responsibility. I don’t want anyone questioning her, or pointing one damned finger at her without coming to me first--”

Sloane studied him through narrowed blue eyes. “Have you drunk from this female? Have you blood-bonded to her?” When Mathias shook his head in denial, Sloane scoffed. “No, but you want to.”

He wasn’t going to refute that. He couldn’t.

While he’d lived a very long life taking his sustenance from willing human females--women who provided sex and nourishment and little more--he’d had no appetite for basic Homo sapiensblood anymore.

Not since he’d first laid eyes on an ink-covered, metal-studded, thoroughly unconventional beauty named Nova.

If he drank from her, a Breedmate, one sip would mean forever.

A concept Mathias was more than willing to explore with her. If she’d have him, and if he managed to find her before the danger on her heels came any closer than it already had.

“It doesn’t matter what I want right now,” he told Sloane and his team from the Order. “I just need to make sure Nova and the boy are safe, and that starts by finding the murdering bastard who was here in this shop earlier tonight.”