Chapter 5 Chapter Five

Levi

Consciousness returned in stages.

First, I became aware of the floor. It was hard, cold, dusty and thoroughly undignified. Then I was alerted that my back was complaining from the discomfort of having spent several hours propped against the wall at an awkward, hunched angle.

I sat up and groaned as my head throbbed with a dull, steady thrum. I found my phone was still in my hand, though I was sure I had dropped it at some point. However when I patted down my pockets, something very important was missing. I checked my coat twice.

The ruby and opal money clip, and the three grand in cash folded in it was definitely not there.

I didn’t care about the money, but the clip itself was a family heirloom. A gift from my father.

I sat with that for a moment.

The hallway was dim, the only light coming from a single bulb further down the corridor. My head, despite the throbbing headache, was clearer than it had been.

Whatever those shifter goons had injected was metabolizing, but slower than I had expected. My abilities were still muffled but no longer completely absent. I could feel them at the edges, just like I could feel the sensation returning to the edges of my numb limbs. Another few hours and I’d be functional.

I remembered the apartment. The books. The cheap laptop. The coffee mug on a crate. A neatly made bed. The owner of that apartment had clearly robbed me and then dragged me out in the hallway like yesterday’s trash.

I stood, slowly, one hand on the wall until I was certain my legs were going to cooperate. They did, with some reluctance. I straightened my jacket, ran a hand through my hair, and looked at the door in front of me.

The frame was splintered where I’d broken through it.

Someone had braced it shut from the inside. I could hear, faintly, the sound of breathing on the other side. Slow and even. Still asleep.

I knocked.

Nothing.

I knocked again, harder.

A thud from inside, like something falling, followed by a muffled swear word. Then silence. Then shuffling. Then the scrape of furniture being dragged across a floor.

The door opened part way.

She was not what I expected.

I wasn’t sure what I had expected — the apartment had given me an impression, and the impression was of someone young and slightly chaotic. That much was accurate.

What I hadn’t anticipated was her irritation, which was considerable and entirely undisguised. Her dark hair was half out of whatever it had been tied in, listing dramatically to one side. She had clearly slept in yesterday’s clothes.

There was a smear of something dark under one eye — makeup, probably — that she hadn’t noticed or didn’t care about.

She was holding a fire hydrant wrench.

She looked at me the way a person looks at something they’ve found on the bottom of their shoe.

“You’re awake,” she said flatly.

“Observant,” I snapped.

Her eyes narrowed. The wrench didn’t move.

Up close, without the fog of the drug, I could read her better. She was in her late twenties at most, probably younger. Under the smudged makeup and the terminal bedhead she had soft feminine features and large, watchful eyes. She didn’t act like a regular civilian. She’d clocked my posture, my hands, and the distance between us in the first second without appearing to. She was still holding the door at an angle that kept it between us without being obvious about it. And she had the wrench at the ready.

“You have something of mine,” I said coldly. “I want it back.”

“You broke my door,” she said.

“You went through my pockets.”

“You broke my door first.”

I glared at her. She stared back, completely unmoved, a smear of yesterday’s mascara under one eye, a wrench in her hand, and an expression that suggested she had absolutely nowhere to be and no reason to make this easy for me.

“I want my money clip back,” I repeated.

Something shifted in her expression. Fractional. Gone before I could name it.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“Yes you do.”

She held my gaze for a long moment, clearly weighing her options. Then, with unhurried movements, she set the wrench against the door frame, reached into her shirt, and retrieved the clip from somewhere in the vicinity of her left breast.

She held it out.

I took it. The metal was warm from sleeping in close contact with her skin.

I pushed that thought aside.

I opened the clip and counted out a thousand dollars, which was more than a reasonable estimate of what a door frame in this building would cost to repair or replace. I held the cash out to her.

She looked at it. Then at me.

“We’re square,” I said.

She took the money with the brisk efficiency of someone closing a transaction, and I kept the clip. She watched me put it back in my inside jacket pocket and something flickered in her expression — curiosity, quickly suppressed.

“Sentimental value?” she asked.

“None of your business.”

She almost smiled. Just the edge of it, there and gone, like she’d caught herself.

I held her gaze for one more moment — long enough to make a point, not long enough to make it a confrontation — and then I turned and walked toward the staircase.

I didn’t look back. I could feel her eyes on me all the way to the top of the stairs.

The clip was back where it belonged. The door was paid for.

I looked at my phone. Sixteen missed calls from Grael. I dialed his number.

“Boss, where the hell—”

“Just come get me,” I snapped, and sent him my location.