Page 29 of Grave Curse

The second fact I needed to face was that Tyr had clearly waltzed into my loft like he owned the damn place. Of course, there was always the possibility I forgot to lock the door. After all, I couldn’t even remember how I got upstairs to my bed, so itwas totally a possibility. But I doubted Tyr had come all the way out to my loft after midnight on the hope I’d somehow forgotten to lock my door. No. He’d had every confidence he could gain access to my place. That meant only one thing.

He had a way in.

Truth be told, there had been several times since I’d been living at the loft that I’d sensed someone had been in my house. Just a few weeks ago, a book I’d been reading had been left open on my nightstand, with the bookmark wedged in the wrong place. Another time the coffee table had been left slightly off from the heavy indentation it had made in the rug it sat on. More than once, closet doors had been left ajar when I hated that above all things, and always kept the closets firmly shut when not in use.

So many odd moments I had explained away as being too sleepy to remember what I’d done, or doors not latching fully, or having moved things around myself without my noticing. Now I saw these moments for what they were—big, blaring alarms ofintruder alert.

My home, my sanctuary, was not my own.

For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why.

Tyr watched over Vixen’s Den. I knew that, but in my mind it was understandable. As the leader of the breakaway Gravediggers, it was standard operational procedure to make sure everything within his territory was locked down and under his control. Anything less would have made him appear weak, and weakness was one thing that could never be allowed in the Gravedigger world. So having a camera mounted on the security kiosk across the street aimed directly at the shop’s front door made sense. My shop was in his territory. It had to be under his protection.

But my loft was a good five miles away from the Gravedigger compound, well away from what could be considered Tyr’sterritory. Since I grew up in his uncle’s home, maybe he thought of me as a Colgrave responsibility, but that didn’t really track. Tyr hated everything that had to do with his uncle Hades, including me, or so I’d thought. There was no logical explanation for Tyr to keep such a close eye on me unless…

Unless he liked to watch me.

The genie’s out of the bottle now.

That led me to the third and final fact that I could no longer ignore. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Tyr was hot for me. There. I made myself think it over and over again, trying to make it my new reality, when before all I knew was that he hated my guts for being the weapon Hades had once used to punish him.

Tyrwantedme.

Unless, of course, this was Tyr’s new tactic to muddy the waters for Hades.

That didn’t make sense, though. Yes, Tyr was a masterful tactician, and I wouldn’t put it past him to set me up as a soft target for Hades to attack, only to be there to crush his uncle once and for all. But in order to do that, Tyr would have to be public about starting a relationship with me—making me look like I was all-important to him, and that I was his only weakness.

Yet Tyr was doing none of that.

In fact, the very last thing Tyr wanted was for us to be public about the sudden and highly baffling change in our ever-evolving relationship. How had he put it? Let the world think we hated each other. For crying out loud, Tyr actuallywantedpeople to think we hated each other. That certainly didn’t seem like a man who was eager to use me as bait.

But this sudden change in Tyr’s attitude toward me… I couldn’t understand it. Where had it come from? Was it real?

Did I even want it to be real?

One thing was certain. I couldn’t stand there dithering about it. The answers were out there—specifically, right across thestreet in an office inside Ride Or Die Choppers. What’s more, the man clearly expected me to have questions that only he could answer, because he’d invited me to come over and see him about them. So if that was what he wanted…

“Hey.” Looking bleary-eyed despite the fact that it was almost one in the afternoon, Roxie crept gingerly in through the door and closed it behind her like it was made of the finest crystal. Clearly, someone still had trouble with loud noises. “I’m sorry I was so short with you earlier this morning, Ginger. Yeah, I was hungover, but so were you and there you were still managing to be civil while I was a total bitch—”

“Roxie, no. Don’t worry about it.” Shrugging my coat back on, I crossed to where she was and gave her a gentle hug. “It was a super-early call and I was in the same boat. I’m feeling much better now, though, thanks to that awesome hangover care package I got.”

“Oh, right. The package.” With her fine brows pulling together, Roxie hung her coat up near the door and ventured around the counter to log in to the register. “What was the story behind that?”

“I… really can’t say.” At the last second caution overrode the need to share, mainly because I knew just how awful Hades and his tactics could get. On the off-chance he ever got a hold of my friend, he’d soon find out she knew absolutely nothing that could boomerang back to Tyr. In fact, the less Roxie knew, the safer she would be. “The dark sunglasses and the box of Alka Seltzer were a huge hit with me.”

“Oh my God.” Roxie stared at me with big eyes. “Are you telling me you got something delivered to you by someone you don’t know… and you ingested some of it anyway?”

“All that lovely tamper-resistant packaging was good enough for me.”

“Yeah, but there are still ways around that sort of thing. What if it was that Hades stepdaddy asshole you’ve told me so much about? What if he’d decided to poison you?”

Oy. “It wasn’t Hades.”

“You don’t know that.”

Yes, I did. “Roxie, I took it at eight this morning and I’m feeling great. See?” I did a little pirouette to give her the full view. “This is me, rocking my post-hangover look, totally not poisoned and feeling like a world-beater.”

“Well…okay. So who sent it?” Still looking doubtful, Roxie crossed her arms. “Who even knew you went out drinking with me last night? Was it Misty?”

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