Page 8 of Sinner's Secret

Nah, he hated waking up in morgues. Too damned cold.

Chapter Two

Baz hated police stations. Too many noisy, smelly people in too small a space, and cops always had too much damned paperwork for you to do.

He gave his statement as concisely as possible and would have left, but he had to wait for the lady cop to put on a waterworks show before she came out, her head low and shoulders hunched once again.

He got her into his cab and drove toward his neighborhood.

She smelled way too good. Sort of coconutty. This close together inside the cab, he couldn’t get away from it, and it was giving him a boner. “Where are we going?”

“Head back to the diner.”

He started the car and drove off. “Your name really Nika?” he asked to distract himself from how bad he wanted to find out if she tasted like coconut.

“Yeah.” She opened the glove box and red the car’s registration. “The Breznik corporation? That you?”

“That is my cousin,” he said quickly. “Not me.”

Nika just stared at him.

“A couple of other assorted relatives, too.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Fine,” he said after a minute. “I’m the family fuck up, okay? It was either buy me out or kill me.” He glanced at his passenger and grinned. “They did give me a choice, which I thought was fair considering how badly I fucked up.”

“What’d you do?”

He sighed. “I got drunk, followed them all to church one Sunday and denounced them all as servants of the devil. I managed to trash the place pretty thoroughly before they got a hold of me.”

“Why did you do it?”

For a moment Baz considered lying. Fuck it. He could blame it on the coconut. “My wife and son were killed in a home invasion. I was away on family business. I sort of went off the deep end.”

She blinked, then nodded once. “That would do it all right.” She was quiet for a couple of blocks, then asked, “So they bought you out?”

“Yeah, it only took two years to spend it all.”

Out of the corner of his eye he watched her study him.

“Let me guess, alcohol and gambling?”

“Mostly. I gave some to that church I trashed. I figured it was the least I could do. Stayed pretty drunk for a long time. When I finally sobered up, the money was gone.”

“And most of your liver too,” she muttered.

“I wish.” He hadn’t meant to sound so damned angry and depressed, but from the quick concerned glance she threw at him, he hadn’t succeeded.

“How long ago was it?”

“I don’t know, three, five...hundred...years.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.” Sarcasm was a handy thing. He told the truth, yet it was so ridiculous, no one realized he was being serious.

As far as the world was concerned, vampires were nothing more than supernatural creations of the imagination. They had no idea that there were in fact, humans who weren’t so human anymore.

Nika was silent for a long time, then said very softly as he pulled up in front of the diner, “I think you know to the day how long ago it was.”

She paused, but he wasn’t going to look at her or give her any other indication she was right. He knew. He knew a lot of things that would make this confident, competent woman want to put a bullet in his brain.

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