It took the warrior a moment before he acknowledged with a tight nod. “Fair enough.”

He reached for a pen that lay on the counter, and jotted something down on an errant scrap of paper. He pushed the note toward Nova. “In case you change your mind and want to talk more. You can reach me anytime.”

She kept her arms at her sides, her eyes steady on the shrewd gaze that seemed more suspicious than he was letting on.

Finally, the warrior turned and walked out of the shop.

Nova stood unmoving as he stepped out the door and into the night. Then she waited some more, until she was certain he was gone and wouldn’t be coming back.

Only then did she reach out to retrieve the scrap that held his bold, efficient handwriting.

He’d written down a phone number and his name.

Mathias Rowan.

Nova stared at the note for a long moment.

Then she crushed the paper in her gloved fist, and dropped it into the trash bin under the counter. She had no intention of ever calling the number.

If she were lucky, she’d never run into the warrior again.

She glanced over at Ozzy, her voice quiet as she spoke. “Do you think he believed me?”

CHAPTER 3

She lied to him.

Mathias had known it even before he left the tattoo shop a couple of hours ago.

Hell, he’d known it almost as soon as the petite, pierced, walking, talking work of art had opened her tough little mouth.

Mathias’s Breed senses had lit up about a block from Ozzy’s studio, and the imprint of violence had only grown stronger the closer he got to the door.

Something bad had occurred inside that shop last night.

Something more volatile than a simple confrontation between Nova and the angry drunk later pulled out of the Thames by Gavin Sloane’s unit.

Whether it was the man’s actual murder or an event leading up to it, Mathias couldn’t be sure. His ability didn’t translate into such neat black-and-white terms. But after talking with Nova and her surly old boss at the tattoo shop, Mathias was certain the pair were hiding something.

He meant to have the truth.

To get it, he needed to talk to Nova again--preferably without the old man there to hover over her like a snarling guard dog. It was obvious the pair’s relationship went deeper than colleagues or friends, and based on the shop owner’s age alone, Mathias doubted a fiery twenty-something like Nova would be sharing the man’s bed.

No, it was a protective, familial kind of bond between them, not physical. Why that should stir even a small sense of satisfaction in him, he didn’t want to consider.

And there was more to the young woman than met the eye too.

A lot more, Mathias was certain.

She was young, but a hard one to rattle, hard to figure out. The myriad tattoos and piercings were more intriguing to him than off-putting, giving her an unusual beauty he found hard to ignore.

There was something about her--those layers of secrets in her eyes and on her skin--that made the investigator in him curious enough to know more, even if his tastes typically ran toward more conventional-looking females. The kind who were attractive enough to be on his arm or in his bed, but easy enough to forget once his work called him back to the only true passion he’d known.

As for Nova, first and foremost, she was a person of interest in his quest to learn more about the dead man.

If he found her to be a person of interest in any other sense, he wasn’t about to let that stand in the way of his duty.

The narrow, dark side alley where Mathias stood now shadowed him from view, but also gave him a clear visual path to Ozzy’s shop on the other side of the main street. He’d been watching the place all this time, waiting for the opportunity to find Nova alone.

The client she’d been working on when Mathias was in the shop had exited twenty minutes earlier. The last appointment of the night would have arrived five minutes ago, except the burly dock worker had experienced a sudden change of heart mere steps away from the door and fled without bothering to cancel.

Even though humans had more or less gotten used to the idea that they shared the planet with vampires, it was still amazing what the sight of sharp fangs and glowing amber eyes could do to even the most hardass members of their population.

Mathias smirked as he pushed away from the brick wall he’d been leaning against and stepped out onto the main street.

He should call his friend in JUSTIS to clue him in on what he’d encountered earlier that night.

At the very least, he should have alerted his fellow warriors to the situation.

Instead, he approached the tattoo shop with silent purpose, prepared to do whatever it took to make Nova talk to him, confide in him about what really happened between her and the man later found stabbed and floating in the river.

Mathias needed to earn her trust if he could.

Or pull the truth out of her some other way, if her trust proved elusive.

He walked in, glad to find her alone in the shop. She had her back to him as she replenished a handful of bottles and bandages at her station. No sign of Ozzy. His station was neatly closed up, his stool pushed under his work table.

“Be right with you,” Nova called over her colorful shoulder.

“Take your time. I’ll wait.”

She startled at the sound of his voice, but in the short moment it took for her to whirl around, she hit him with a forbidding frown. “What do you want now?”

A dozen answers sprang into his mind uninvited, none of which he was willing to speak. “I had a few more questions for you about the altercation that happened in here last night.”

Her frown deepened. “I didn’t say anything about an altercation.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. I didn’t.” Her English accent was cool with challenge, even if her gaze was cautious as he strode through the studio, over to her station. Mathias hadn’t noticed what color her light eyes were earlier; now he stared into baby blue irises ringed with indigo. She folded her arms over her breasts. “If that’s all you came to ask me, then I’m sorry you went to the trouble to come back.”

He met her flat look with an easy smile. “No trouble at all.” He took a seat on the client’s chair in front of her.

“You can’t sit there. You can’t stay.”

“Why not?”

Her chin hiked up a notch. “Because I’m working here. Because this is Ozzy’s shop, not the Order’s interrogation room.”

“We don’t have an interrogation room, actually. It’s rare we have to resort to that. Folks tend to confess long before we feel the need to haul them in for a formal interrogation.”

He was joking--pretty much. But she didn’t so much as smile. No, she was taking this all very seriously.

Deathly serious.

Mathias glanced around the empty shop. “Anyway, I don’t see Ozzy now. It appears it’s just you and me, Nova.”

“He’s here,” she said. “He’s upstairs in his apartment. And in case you didn’t hear him the first time, we don’t appreciate anyone coming in here asking questions about our work or our clients.”

“I heard him. I just wonder if Ozzy’s got something to hide.”

“He doesn’t,” she replied tightly.

“Do you?”

“No.”

Mathias had to give her credit. The lie slipped off her tongue without a hint of hesitation. No doubt about it, this was a woman who’d learned to keep her cards close. But had she learned it from a cold absence of conscience, or raw survival instinct?

Against all better judgment, Mathias wanted to know the answer to that--almost as much as he wanted to know why his nerve endings were tingling with the psychic aftershocks of violence.

The reading he was picking up seemed to be at its strongest right where he was sitting now.

In Nova’s client chair.

She stared at him as he ran his hands over the worn black vinyl arms. Her blue eyes revealed nothing, her stance so schooled and careful, he almost began to doubt his ability to sniff out the scene of a crime.

But no, the imprint was there.

Sharp, sudden, unmistakable.

“We need to talk, Nova.”

She didn’t so much as flinch. “I thought we already had.”

He grunted, unsure if he should be amused or infuriated by the female’s apparent disregard for her own self-preservation. He hadn’t tried to hide what he was. She had to know that provoking one of his kind was a bad idea.

Hell, if he wanted to, he could trance her and drag her off somewhere vastly more private than this, instead of letting her try her best to stonewall him and dodge his questions.

The idea held an unnatural appeal, especially when she stubbornly backed away, her arms still crossed as if to physically block him from pulling anything out of her. “I’ve got your phone number. If I have anything else to tell you, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

“I doubt that. I’ll bet you tore up that note the minute I was gone.”

She went silent, and he knew he probably hit the mark, or damn close to it.

Mathias studied her in that moment, soaking in the full picture of her now--all of the tattoos and metal on her smooth skin, the sharp cut of her hair and the bold color that saturated the silken strands. He had no clue what her natural color might be, but found himself both fascinated and determined to have that answer and a hundred more where this female was concerned.

As for her ink, each piece of art had been beautifully, painstakingly rendered. Ozzy, he supposed, having recognized an artistry that rivaled Nova’s in the old man’s work on his skittish client earlier that evening.

Most of the art was abstract, beautiful vignettes of flowers and imaginative design elements. Colorful flora and fauna wrapped her lean, muscular biceps, ink covering her from the tops of her shoulders to the backs of her hands, which were tucked beneath her crossed arms. On one of her forearms, a vine of small red roses climbed up the side of a medieval-looking wall in the vague shape of a tombstone, its rounded peak crowned with a circular window segmented by mullions and delicate tracery.

What did Nova’s tattoos mean to her?

He glanced now to the design that rode just below her collarbone. Across the pert swell of her small, firm breasts, a fierce phoenix emerged from a flourish of bright flames. Its wings unfolded across Nova’s chest, each feather so realistic Mathias could imagine the indomitable bird lifting up from her velvety skin to soar up to the sky, free and unstoppable.

And there was something else about the phoenix that snagged his attention now.

“What the--” Mathias had to look again to make certain of what he was seeing.

Nestled within the breast of the rising phoenix was a mark that was no tattoo at all. The small red crescent moon and teardrop symbol was unmistakable.

A birthmark only a rare class of female bore somewhere on her body. “You’re a Breedmate.”

Nova blinked, the first time he’d noticed her composure slip since he arrived. “Does it matter if I am?”

Hell yes, it mattered. To him, at least. He got up from the chair on a low curse. “You know what you are, and yet you choose to live among humans instead of the Breed?”

“That’s right.”

“It’s a risky choice. Especially when you choose to live here, among people like the drunk who came in here last night and tried to hurt you.”

“I never told you that.”

Mathias held her troubled stare. “You didn’t have to. I can sense something violent happened in this shop. Even if I couldn’t sense it, I’d know something more than what you described took place.” He moved closer to her, then. Swept some of her black-and-blue hair away from her eyes when she made no move to do so. “Looking out for people who need my help is my job, Nova. I’ve spent the better part of my life taking monsters off the street--Breed and human alike.”

She scoffed lightly and drew away from him, shoving her hands into the pockets of her black jeans. “A regular Galahad, is that it? White horse and a gleaming sword?”

He ignored her jab. She wasn’t the first woman to accuse him of having a hero complex. Usually the charge accompanied the angry tears of a neglected lover who didn’t want to believe him that his job, and the duty it demanded, came first. Above everything else.

With Nova, he knew her doubt in him was coming from someplace deeper. A place of real pain. A place of dark secrets that still had the power to haunt her.

“If you’re in trouble, Nova, I can help you. If you’ll let me.”

“I don’t need your help.” Her reply was swift, automatic. Defensive. “I do just fine looking out for myself.”

At that same moment, light footsteps sounded from a stairwell near the back of the shop. A red-haired boy came halfway down in bed-rumpled sweatpants and nothing else. His chest was scrawny, marred with old scars from abuse he must have suffered at a very young age.

“What’s goin’ on, Nova?” The kid’s sleepy expression tensed when he saw Mathias standing in the studio. “Who’s that?”

“It’s okay, Eddie,” Nova interjected quickly. Her voice was warm, all of her chill seeming to be reserved for Mathias. “He’s just a...client. And he’ll be leaving soon. Go on back to bed now. Everything’s all right.”

When the boy was gone, Mathias glanced at her. “Brother?”

“Close enough. Oz took him in last year when he found Eddie eating out of Dumpsters, living on the street by himself in the middle of winter. Now Eddie lives upstairs with Ozzy.”

“You live with them too?” Mathias asked.

She gave a faint shake of her head, the sharp cut of her dark, two-toned hair swishing against her delicate cheek. “I have my own place on the floor above them. Ozzy rented it out to me once I turned seventeen.”