“What kind of story?”
“She said she saw Lily go into the ladies’ room and followed her. They haven’t had much opportunity to talk lately, you know, so I suppose… but Lily wasn’t there.” Julia’s lips pursed. “Beth swears Lily could not have left without her seeing, but that’s nonsense.”
It had to be. Didn’t it?
Rule stood stock still for a moment. Lily wasn’t far. He knew that. But he hadn’t been able to find her, and the world wasn’t as sane and orderly as it appeared. The realms were shifting.
And three weeks ago, Lily had pissed off a goddess.
“I’ll find her.” He turned away, moving quickly, propelled by an urgency he knew was foolish.
The last place she’d been seen was the ladies’ room, so that’s where he headed. The restrooms lay off the hall that connected the private dining rooms to the public part of the restaurant. A knot of unhappy women had collected outside the ladies’ room. He picked up snatches of conversation.
“… anyone sent for the manager?”
“Is there another one?”
“Plenty of stalls, no need to lock the door.”
“… some kind of sadist, if you ask me!”
Someone had locked the door to the ladies’ room. Rule’s mouth went dry. He eased his way through the women, using his size, his smile, and, after a moment, their recognition to part them. “Excuse me, ladies. Pardon me. No, I’m not the manager, but if you’ll step aside…”
“Shannon,” one of them whispered to another, “You dummy! That’s the Nokolai prince!”
That silenced them for a moment. “I think I can fix this if you’ll… thank you,” he said as the last one moved away. An odd, faint odor hung in the air near the door. He bent closer to sniff, but he couldn’t identify it.
Lily was on the other side. He felt her nearness as a slow stir beneath his breastbone. Heart hammering, he rapped on the door. Hollow core.
“That won’t work!” one of the women snapped. “You think we haven’t tried knocking?”
The knob turned, but the door didn’t budge. Bolted on the other side, he judged.
“We tried opening it, too,” the woman said sarcastically.
Rule put his fist through the door.
Wood splintered. Someone shrieked. He reached through the hole he’d made and found the bolt. His blood made it slippery, but he gripped it hard and yanked. He shoved the door open.
Lily lay on her back by the sinks. She wasn’t moving.
TWO
“AND why,” Rule asked with strained patience, “Did you send the EMTs away?”
Lily sat in the middle of the restroom floor in a puddle of muddy green chiffon, petting the white tiles. In the hall by the door, a uniformed officer kept out the curious and the concerned while his partner took statements.
Rule sat on the floor, too—over against the wall, well away from Lily so he wouldn’t mess up the traces left by her attacker.
She frowned at the floor as if someone had written an unwelcome message there in invisible ink. “They wanted to take me to the hospital.”
He stared at the heart of his heart, the one woman in the world for him… the pigheaded, my-way-or-the-highway idiot who’d refused medical treatment. “Imagine that. What were they thinking?”
Her lips twitched. At last she looked away from the fascinating floor. “I’ll go later. My sore head is evidence of a sort, but I really am okay. Unlike you, I didn’t lose any blood—”
“You opened your wound.”
“But it barely bled, and I’m already stuffed full of antibiotics. My sister checked me out.”
“Yes, and said you probably had a concussion—”
“A slight concussion.”
“—and should go to the emergency room and let them run tests.”
“Which would confirm that my head hurts, after which they’d tell me to rest. I’m resting.”
“You’re conducting a bloody be-damned investigation!”
“I don’t have much time before the S.O.C. crew gets here.”
“You’re speaking acronym again.”
She rolled her eyes. “Scene-of-crime crew. I wanted to check things out before they show up. Or Karonski.” She frowned at the floor one last time, and then held out her hand. “I’ve learned all I can. Help me up?”
He rose swiftly, crossed to her, and took her hand. With one gentle tug she was on her feet and in his arms. He nuzzled her hair. Her scent reached inside him, easing him away from anger.
Which left the fear standing alone. He drew a shaky breath. “Dammit, Lily. Your face is the color of sweaty gym socks.”
“I’m so glad you told me that.” But she leaned into him, letting him have the warmth and weight of her—the prickle of arousal and the comfort of connection. He knew she drew strength from the contact, too. She’d come that far in accepting the mate bond. She no longer denied them this out of fear her needs would swallow her.
But she wouldn’t live with him. That, Rule promised himself, would change. After this attack, even Lily couldn’t continue to insist on warping both of their lives to conform to some notion of autonomy.
“The uniform is staring at us,” she muttered.
“Mmm.” The uniform, as she put it, was not happy about having a lupus on the scene. The man’s first impulse had been to arrest Rule on general principles. Dissuaded from that, he’d wanted to remove Rule from the crime scene.
Reasonable enough, from a cop’s point of view, Rule supposed. But he wasn’t leaving Lily. Eventually the officer had accepted that, though it was a toss-up whether it was Lily’s newly minted federal badge, her past status as a homicide cop, or Rule’s simple refusal to leave that had prevailed.
He rubbed his cheek against her hair, trying to breathe her in. And paused. “You smell funny.”
“Hey.” She leaned away. “No more cracks about sweaty socks.”
“Not that kind of funny.” Rule bent, sniffing down her shoulder and along the sling that held her left arm, where the scent was strongest.
“Could you try to be a little less weird?”
“Picture me wagging my tail, and this will seem more natural.” He inhaled deeply, trying to sort the odd scent from all the others. “I can’t place it,” he said, straightening. “Not in this form.”
“Maybe you’re smelling whatever left the traces I felt on the floor.”
Lily was a touch sensitive, perhaps the rarest of the Gifts, and an unusually strong one. She couldn’t be affected by magic, but she could feel it, even the slight traces left by the passage of supernatural beings. His eyebrows lifted. “What did you feel?”
“It was odd. Sort of… orange.”
“Which tells me little.”
“Doesn’t tell me much, either.” She shook her head. “Magic feels like a texture, not a color, yet this… I can’t explain it. I’ve never felt anything like it before.”
She looked troubled, but Rule felt relief. “It didn’t feel like that damned staff, then.”
Before she could respond, they were interrupted.
“Sorry, ma’am, you can’t go in there.”
That was the officer by the door. A familiar feminine voice replied with a stream of Chinese, followed by another familiar voice—Julia Yu. “I told you they wouldn’t let you in. If they won’t let her own mother in, they won’t make an exception for her grandmother.”
Lily sighed and pulled away. “Grandmother, don’t curse the man for doing his duty.”
“I curse who I curse. You will come out now.”
The old woman standing on the other side of the burly officer was less than five feet tall. Her dress was red, ankle-length, and Oriental style. Black hair striped with silver was drawn up in a knot secured with twin enameled picks, and the ring on one finger held a cabochon ruby. Despite her years, she had a spine like a sapling, supple and erect, and the hauteur of a queen.