Page 18 of Lucky or Knot
“Thanks. I wasn’t super eager to tell him I got—you know.”
“Rolled by a fairy in stripper heels?” Declan stood and headed for his desk. “Don’t blame you. And I know Jeremy has an ego,” he threw over his shoulder. “He’s good at his job, but believe me, I know. I don’t think I need to even involve him, anyway. I can log in from here. Come on over.”
He sat down and started tapping away on his laptop, and I came around behind him to look over his shoulder. A moment later, a tiled screen full of live camera feeds popped up, and he moved it over to the big monitor set up next to his laptop. Cassidy danced onstage in one of the feeds, and there was the semi-private champagne room, the door to Scott’s booth, a dozen other angles.
A moment later, the screen went to a shot of the parking lot, and then Declan had a drop-down menu open. My heart started pounding. I might be able to seehimon the screen, and it pissed me off beyond anything to realize my excitementstemmed as much from the idea of seeing his face as from the possibility of getting his car’s license plate.
“Try about midnight,” I said. “His credit card transaction went through at twelve-twenty, so he probably arrived around then.”
Declan chose the right time window and turned up the speed a bit, letting the footage run. And— “There!” I said, tapping the screen.
Even on the grainy black and white feed, my keen alpha eyes picked out his long hair and slim body. But it was the thud my heart gave against my ribs that tipped me off a second before I consciously recognized him.
Declan stopped it and ran it back, slowing it down to a normal speed. A dark-colored luxury coupe pulled in and parked near the back of the lot, the license plate way too far from the camera to be legible. After a moment, the fairy got out and walked to the building, glancing up toward the camera when he was halfway across the parking lot.
The sight of his face stopped my breath and dizzied me for a frozen instant. My vision blurred, and I had to catch myself as I swayed toward the monitor.
I clenched my fists and breathed through it.That’ll wear off, I think. Yeah. Not so much. When I found that little fucker, I really couldn’t be answerable for my actions.
“Shit,” Declan said, sounding startled. “Hang on.” He started running the recording back again.
“I don’t think we’ll be able to get the plate number from this angle, even if you replay it.” Keeping my voice somewhat even took a serious effort, and I knew I wouldn’t be fooling another alpha. He earned my extreme gratitude by not commenting. “Maybe you could try looking at the recording from this morning, see if it was daylight by the time he—”
“No, I will if you like, but it’s not necessary,” Declan said,and his tone had gone grim. He paused the video at the precise instant that the fairy tilted his face up, giving us both the best possible view. “I recognize him. I know exactly who this is. And you’re not going to like it any more than I do. Here, I’m just going to show you.”
All the hair rose on the back of my neck, right where my tiger’s hackles would’ve been. Would it have been too gods-damned much to ask that another high-heeled peep-toe pump wasn’t waiting to drop?
Of course it would. Because nothing could be simple.
I waited with my jaw clenched for whatever Declan wanted to show me. I already didn’t like it.
He minimized the camera feed and pulled up an internet browser, typing in a name that rang a bell. Arnold Cunningham. And when he clicked over to images, I realized why: the hard-jawed, harder-eyed guy in the photos had a finger in half the real estate pies in Vegas, and I’d seen him in the local news more than once, usually shaking hands at a ribbon cutting or standing next to a state representative. His last name appeared on so many of the construction signs in the city that I’d tuned it out like background noise and forgotten where I knew it from.
Also, I vaguely remembered that…
“Didn’t he have a stake in this place before you bought it back?” I asked. My arrival in Vegas had coincided with Declan taking over the Morrigan, which I was pretty sure his grandparents had originally built, way back when. The details of his family’s ups and downs hadn’t interested me enough for me to bother learning all of them, but I knew that much. “And I hear he’s a total prick.”
“He didn’t want to sell, and he got outmaneuvered.” Declan turned in his chair to look up at me. “He hates me for it. And he is a total prick. He’s an alpha were, did you know that?” I shook my head, and he quirked an eyebrow at me. “Right,most people outside of his immediate contacts don’t, because he doesn’t publicize it. You want to know why?”
“I want to know where the fuck you’re going with this,” I said bluntly, because I was starting to get some ideas of where he could be going. And I hated all of them. “Who is this asshole to the guy I was with last night?”
“I’m getting there. He’s an alpha, but he’s a coyote. And he resents it, and everyone who’s something a bit better, as it were.”
I nodded, because while I didn’t particularly care what people were, the smaller, less elegant predators definitely caught a lot of mockery and flack from the flashier species—like mine. Or even the werewolves. In a way, it was harder than being “prey.” Of course, tell that to a gerbil.
“He has a real chip on his shoulder about being the big man and the alpha in the room,” Declan went on. “And he’s an art collector. A wine snob. And so on and so forth. Makes a big fuss out of his taste and his possessions and having the very best of every single thing you can own. And compensates for being less-than among shifters by only associating with the right sort of rich people, and I,” Declan bared his teeth at me, “am far from the right sort, and I bought this place out from under him.”
A collector of the best and the most beautiful, obsessed with his status. That kind of man would have a certain type of taste in lovers, too, wouldn’t he?
My stomach had turned to lead, my hands and feet tingling with the urge to transform, to claw, my throat raw with a roar I had to suppress. Not that Declan would hold it against me, I didn’t think, but it’d be beyond rude.
“Yeah?” I said roughly. “All right. Give me the punchline.”
“I think you already know. Your fairy’s his—” Declan’s steady dark gaze had been fixed on me, and he stopped abruptly, his jaw tightening, as my reaction passed across my face. “Begyour pardon,” he rumbled. “Companion, let’s say. The last few times I’ve seen Cunningham somewhere, he’s been with him. I wasn’t introduced, but my assessment was that the fellow’s one of Cunningham’s ruinously expensiveobjets d’art. I’m sure you take my meaning.”
“Yes,” I managed, swallowing to get some moisture into my dry mouth. “I appreciate you trying to put a finer point on it, but yeah, I get it. Except that what the fuck—Christ, Declan, what the fuck happened last night? The fuck!”
I couldn’t stand still anymore. I’d explode. So I spun on my heel and paced, rubbing at my forehead where that headache had come roaring back like an angry tiger, a low growl I couldn’t control rolling out of my chest. The spacious, frigidly air-conditioned office felt like an oven with the walls closing in, constricting around my throat, broiling me alive.
