Chapter 4 Chapter Four

Kadia

Kit didn’t walk me home after all.

Forty minutes before closing he took a call, and whatever was on the other end of it wiped the easy smile right off his face. He was out the door before I could ask questions, one hand raised in a half-apology that wasn’t really an apology at all.

I watched the door swing shut behind him and went back to wiping down the counter.

Fine. I didn’t need an escort for three blocks.

I locked up at two-fifteen, said goodnight to Jaelen who was still doing paperwork in the back office, and walked home alone. The streets were quiet, the kind of quiet that felt normal enough on the surface. I scanned my surroundings anyway. It was an old habit. The kind you don’t unlearn just because you’ve decided you’re done with the life that built it.

My first clue that something was off was the unlocked front door. I was the only tenant in the building. Jaelen had bought the old brick tenement, but she hadn’t gotten around to renovating it yet. I locked the main door on my way out, as much to keep the authorities out as the vagrants.

I eased my way up the stairs carefully, listening for any noises that didn’t belong in a vacant building in the predawn hours.

The building was silent.

The next thing I noticed was the blood on the second floor landing.

Just a smear, low on the wall near the stairwell, easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it. But I was always looking. I stopped and crouched down. Fresh. Not a lot of it — a transfer, like someone had leaned against the wall while moving through.

Someone had come up these stairs in the last hour or so.

I straightened and kept moving, slower now, one hand drifting toward a weapon I no longer carried.

My apartment door stopped me cold.

The frame was splintered, the wood around the latch cracked outward like something had simply decided the lock wasn’t worth the patience. It wasn’t kicked in. It was a single point of pressure, deliberate and precise.

Someone strong. Someone who knew exactly how much force to use.

I stood in the hallway and ran through my options. I could call Kit, except Kit was somewhere in the city dealing with whatever had pulled him out of the bar. I could call the police, except the police would cause trouble for Jaelen.

Or I could deal with it myself.

I pushed the door open slowly and reached inside for the wrench I always kept near the door.

The front room was empty. The kitchen was empty. I moved through both quickly, checking angles the way my father had drilled into me before I was old enough to understand why.

Clear. Clear.

The bedroom door was pulled closed, but not latched.

I pushed it open with my foot, wrench up.

There was a man on my bed.

He was on his back, one arm hanging off the side, phone on the floor where it had fallen. He was tall, dark-haired, with expensive classic clothes that were at odds with the state he was in. There was a cut above his eye that had bled down the side of his face and dried there. He looked about thirty but something about him suggested that number wasn’t the whole truth. His face in sleep was still sharp, almost severe, the kind of face that probably didn’t give much away even when it was conscious.

But he was kind of cute, too. He had thick slashing brows and long thick eyelashes. And lips that looked like they could be pouty, under the right provocation.

I shook those thoughts away and forced myself to run a full assessment the way I’d been taught.

No supernatural trace. None at all. Which meant human, or something close to it.

The cut on his face was still seeping slightly, which meant he hadn’t been here long. It was a minor cut. It might leave a scar but it wasn’t life threatening.

The expensive clothes and the quality of his watch suggested he wasn’t some random street casualty. But then again, junkies and drunks came from all walks of life.

He didn’t smell like alcohol. He smelled like winter. Crisp, fresh, a little evergreen.

I couldn’t reason why he would walk down an entire hallway of empty, open rooms, just to break into the only inhabited apartment in the building, and put himself to bed.

I checked his pulse. Strong, slow and steady, which was irritating. I checked his pupils with my phone torch. Even. I checked him quickly for weapons, found a money clip and nothing else, apart from his phone, which had fallen on the floor. I grabbed it and straightened up.

He wasn’t dying. He wasn’t an immediate threat. He was just an unconscious stranger bleeding on my pillow at two-thirty in the morning and I had work at nine.

I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him off the bed.

He hit the floor with a thud.

He was heavier than he looked. I got him as far as the hallway outside my apartment door and left him there with his back against the wall, arms folded in his lap so he looked marginally less like a crime scene. I set his phone in his lax hands.

As for the money clip? He owed me for a broken door. I slipped the wad of cash into my bra without counting it.

Then I went back inside, shoved my dresser in front of the broken door, and went to bed.