Page 16 of Lucky or Knot
What a fucking clusterfuck. A slight throbbing had set up residence in the edges of my head, probably a reaction to magic.
Or to one of those unknown “hypotheticals” the fairy had said he didn’t like to think about. Great.
The G-string caught a stray shaft of sunlight from around the curtain, and its glittery accents winked sadly at me from the dingy carpet. Ugh. Well, I wanted to wear it again even less now that it’d been on the floor of the hotel room, but on the other hand, I couldn’t afford to keep replacing my stage outfits if they could be salvaged. Even with whatever I could get for that coin, I had to put every penny toward my debt. I snatched up the G-string, stood, and stuffed it into my pocket…
And then froze. My pocket was empty. I scrabbled into the other front pocket of my jeans, and then the two back pockets, just in case.
Nothing.
The coin hadn’t gotten stuck in my jeans somewhere, that was absurd. I’d feel it, or it’d have fallen out when I got dressed.
But I still took every scrap of clothing off and checked in my boots before I got dressed again.
Then I got down on the floor and looked under the bed. Another pair of flimsy, tacky underwear appeared to be wedged at the head of it, halfway behind the headboard. Fucking gross. But no coin, and no corners where it could’ve rolled to.
Besides, I absolutely knew I’d put it into my pocket! And when I’d undressed and dropped my jeans the night before, I hadn’t seen it fall out.
Frustration almost had me roaring again. But I forced myself to keep it together, to be methodical, because the moment I admitted that searching would be completely fruitless, I’d have to face the truth.
I went through that fucking hotel room like a forensic analyst, every second expecting a knock on the door from one of the hotel staff demanding I get out before they called the cops. By the time I’d finished, I was sweating and dusty and desperately in need of a shower after all. I stopped short of taking apart the built-in air conditioner under the window, but Icame close.
Finally, standing there in the middle of the room, all the furniture pulled out and at odd angles, I didn’t have any choice but to acknowledge that the coin had disappeared just like the fairy.
Withthe fairy, in fact.
He’d enchanted me, lied to me, cheated me, and then enchanted me again so that he could steal from me. I’d been made a fool of in every possible way, and the humiliation of it burned like acid in my gut.
No. No one did that to me and got away with it.
I was going to find that motherfucker and get what was mine if it was the last thing I ever did.
Chapter 6
My first stop for information, the club, yielded exactly fucking nothing. When I finally slammed the hotel door behind me and headed back around the corner, no one I needed to talk to was at work yet. Coffee and a bite to eat at a diner didn’t take nearly long enough, but after a couple of hours of seething and pacing, I finally managed to buttonhole one of the bartenders who’d been on shift the night before.
She rolled her eyes, shrugged, and agreed to look at the credit card info from last night—only to inform me that he’d used a prepaid card.
Plan B, trying to get a look at the security camera feed from the parking lot the night before, also hit a dead end. If the fairy had parked there and I’d been able to get his license plate, I’d thought I could probably find someone able to pull his info for me. If nothing else, Louie would have a contact, although trying to convince him that doing me a favor would lead to him getting his cut of a magical coin sounded…exhausting.
But the club’s head of security, a werewolf who didn’t appreciate how much bigger my shifted form was than his, absolutely refused to show me any of the footage or even check it for me. He explained, in excruciating and condescending detail, his ethical standards for overseeing the privacy and safety of our customers.
His implication, unstated but obvious, had been that I wanted to stalk one of said customers for my own creepy purposes.
He really didn’t like cats in general. Or me in specific.
I struck out with Scott, too, tracking him down in his booth where he’d gone with the largest paper cup of coffee I’dever seen. He didn’t look like his night had been a whole lot better than mine.
“C’mon, Scott,” I complained. I wasn’t whining. Tigers didn’t whine. “Jeremy has a soft spot for you. He’ll show you the footage if you ask him nicely.”
“No can do,” Scott said, and chugged from his cup. He wiped a drop off his chin onto his sleeve. Yeah. Rough night. “Jeremy doesn’t make exceptions to his policy, and anyway, he’d know I was asking on your behalf. You shouldn’t have talked to him first.”
It wasn’t Scott’s fault, so I did my best not to growl at him as I told him not to expect me that night and headed out to try my last play.
Bothering the owner of the club I worked in with a petty, personal issue that involved me breaking the law had been my very last choice. But since Scott wouldn’t help me, that left Declan MacKenna as the only person who could go over Jeremy’s head.
Before going to the Morrigan to hunt Declan down, I went home, showered thoroughly, and dressed in clean dark jeans and a blue button-down, making myself look almost like the accountant my parents thought I’d become. In fact, if I hadn’t been lying to them, I’d have been in this very office five days a week, wearing clothes similar to this, fitting right in.
But the staid, gray-and-navy reception area of the Morrigan casino’s business office couldn’t have been more different from my usual little hedonistic corner of Declan MacKenna’s Vegas empire, and I had to force myself not to fidget self-consciously as I waited.
