Tapping her long fingernails on the table, Bridget nodded. “Against my better judgment, yes, I did. But he’s paying double your usual fee,” she said. “And before you ask why, it’s going to cost me a fortune in Ubers to get rid of the flowers he sent me. I’m donating them to the hospital. He had no right to send them to me, especially when the delivery person refused to take them back. He wouldn’t even tell me who paid for the damn flowers.”
“If you don’t know who sent the flowers, how do you know they were from Carmine?”
Ant asked the question, Viktor wanted to know the answer to as well, although flowers turning up at the same time as the case file was far too close in timeline to be a coincidence.
“Carmine sent me the same flowers the day after our disastrous dinner date.” Bridget sighed. “The man has no imagination. Each bouquet is made up of four pale pink roses, four bright yellow roses, and four white rose buds, with exactly four stems of greenery keeping the colors separate. There has to be at least ten vases of that flower combination waiting for me back at the office.”
Folding her arms across her chest, Bridget added, “Carmine is well known for not giving up.” Her glare was directed at him, Viktor realized. “We don’t need his drama or his lies. So, tell me, vampire, how did we go from me sending Ant off to lunch with you, with a bunch of normal everyday cases to be solved, and you two now working for Carmine? I know darn well there was no application for services from him in the pile of papers I gave Ant yesterday.”
Viktor shrugged. “I might have played a small part in what happened yesterday. I had a run-in with one of Tony’s henchmen while Ant was still at the office. At least, I believed the man was working with the Manzanos still, but it turned out he’d changed his allegiance and was looking for me and Ant because Carmine had a proposition for us. My first instinct was that I didn’t want your brother anywhere near Carmine, especially when I learned he had met him before, but…” Viktor winced. “I was also curious and wanted to know why Carmine was looking for us in the first place.”
“I should’ve bloody known.” Bridget took a long swig of her coffee.
“Hey, this isn’t all about me,” Viktor protested. “Yes, I wanted to know what Carmine was up to, and what sort of proposition he had for my mate. I know him, too, remember, and I know if Carmine wants something badly enough, he’ll find a way to make it happen. I fully intended to tell him to take his proposition, whatever it was, and shove it up his ass, politely of course because we were in a restaurant and I have Ant’s reputation to consider, and I did tell Carmine no. It was Ant who turned around and said we’d do the job anyway. What was I supposed to do about that?”
“You can all stop treating me as though I’m a child for a start,” Ant said, swiping the file Bridget had delivered and standing up. “I’ll be in my office, reading the information provided, making my own decisions. Before I go, though, I would suggest both of you consider one more thing that no one has mentioned.
“What if Carmine’s sole purpose in all of this was to separate me from the two people who love me most? Causing them to doubt my abilities. Perhaps even driving a wedge between me and those same two people who claim to care about me, yet who can’t respect the decisions I make. The educated, instinctual decisions I make, for reasons that make perfect sense to me. Could that be possible?” Striding out of the room, Able beside him, Ant disappeared down the hallway.
Bridget whistled softly. “I’ve known Ant to be stubborn before, but this is unusual even for him. I think you and I are in big trouble, brother-in-law.”
“You know what’s even worse.” Viktor tapped the side of his coffee mug, hating the unease that was festering in his gut. “There’s a damn good chance Ant’s hypothesis is right. As soonas he said it, it made sense to me. Carmine knows both of us, and he knew before he even set the meeting up that you and I would be against Ant working with him.”
“For good reason,” Bridget shot back. “The man’s a professional liar – a viper in an expensive suit.”
“If Carmine manages to isolate Ant from the two of us, there’s no telling what plans he might have for our extremely talented and socially awkward loved one. It means we’ve got to be a bit more careful.” Viktor shook his head at his sister-in-law. “I haven’t heard anything about the death of Carol Doukas at all. What can you tell me?”
Chapter Nine
“You know, Able, the world would be far easier to navigate if absolutely every person on this planet were forced to tell the truth from the moment they turned five.” Ant sighed as he sat in his big chair in his office, Able lying at his feet, his head on Ant’s boots.
All Ant was looking forward to at breakfast had been a peaceful, quiet time in the sunshine with his mate. The type of scenario completely shattered by Bridget’s arrival with that damn folder. The same folder Ant was tapping, although he realized it was a futile action. That wasn’t going to tell him what was in it.
There was so much chaos in his mind – so much emotion - Ant was struggling to find his center. Closing his eyes, Ant sent out his senses, looking for anything, anybody, any spirit, any connection, anything at all, that would just give him a nudge in the right direction. Unfortunately, because his house was so well warded, there wasn’t a spirit to be found when he needed one.
Which meant Ant was back to relying on his gut instinct and facts. One thing was absolute. It didn’t sit right with him to ignore the murder of Carol Doukas. Okay, if the killer had already been found…but Ant didn’t know that for sure. He pondered the folder. Bridget said that there had to be evidence tying the man to the murder, but what could that be?
In Ant’s previous dealings with the police, he never asked about evidence, or what the police already knew before he did a scene reading or sat in on an interview. He never wanted any details or assumptions by others to influence what he saw in a vision.
Ant has always been meticulous in recording what it was he saw in a scene. He never discussed how a scene made him feel or any of his personal reactions to what he’d seen. Emotions weren’tfacts. Ant liked to think that was why he had the solid reputation he had…Although that didn’t mean anything to Captain Bains.
That line of thinking wasn’t helpful to Ant’s state of mind, either.I need facts.Carmine had said that Mike had worked on his sister’s case and implied he hadn’t put any effort into it. Ant looked down, flicking the folder open, and glancing through it, skim reading the half a dozen pages that were there. Expecting Carmine’s notes, he was surprised to see it was actually a police case file.
It wasn’t much. There was a medical examiner’s report. They declared there was no trace evidence on the woman’s body relating to another person. There was also no evidence of any form of injury that might have actually caused her death. She had been found three months after she had likely died. The medical examiner did confirm that.
How old was she?Checking the cover page of the file, Carol was listed as twenty-five years old. Looking up, Ant stared out of the window. Twenty-five was a young age to die of natural causes – not impossible, but not likely.
Could she have been subject to a magical potion or spell?Ant considered the possibility. If that had happened, then it was likely any trace of a magical method used would’ve dissipated after three months, although a skilled potion tracker could’ve probably found something.
Ant checked the file again. There was no mention of the medical examiner having asked for any magical form of testing.Why? Did Carmine refuse permission for that to be done?That was always a possibility. In the absence of that testing, the medical examiner’s office confirmed that Carol Doukas likely died of a heart attack, although there was no other evidence in the autopsy to suggest previous heart problems.
“I don’t know why the ME does that,” Ant muttered. “It’s obvious that a person’s heart will stop if they’re dead. I honestly think they put that in sometimes when they don’t actually know the cause of death at all.”
That definitely seemed to be the problem in Carol’s case. She was fully clothed when found. She clearly showed signs of decomposition, but there was no evidence of blunt force trauma, of any stabbings or wounds caused by a gun, or anything else. Her neck and voice box were intact. It was as if she was just walking along and dropped dead, which was another possibility. In Viktor’s words, “unlikely,” but it was possible.
Of course, there’s the little issue of what she was doing in the park in the first place, Ant thought. He knew he’d have to do a scene reading to get any ideas about that. Flicking a glance at the door, Ant frowned. He could sense through the bond he had with Viktor that his mate and Bridget were talking.
Their distrust of him hurt. Ant had no way of avoiding that. It wasn’t a feeling that he had very often, and he didn’t like it. People had been mean to him in the past. They took one look at his short stature and apparently innocent face and bluntly ignored his facts or brushed off his ideas, especially when he had been younger. But Ant had persisted, proved his worth, built his reputation on facts and his attention to detail, so those incidents didn’t happen as often anymore.
