Next?
Annabella sat up during the third soldier’s interrogation, after which Custo called a temporary halt. Adam was right—her color did look much better, though she kept her lips pressed tightly together, her body tense, startling easily. Still wouldn’t eat.
She was debating in her head whether to call Venroy and tell him she wasn’t going to the party, or to save herself the discomfort and blow it off altogether. She was leaning toward the latter, a very bad sign. She’d already discarded the impulse to call her mom.
A little more than twenty-four hours, and they’d come full circle. She was preparing to give up her dance. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t Annabella.
“What time is the party?” Custo asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” she answered. “I’m not going anyway.”
Custo had been undecided until that moment, even though Abigail-the-psychic had said they should attend, per Zoe’s report. He didn’t like the idea of taking Annabella out in public again. Segue wasn’t safe either, but at least they had the home-field advantage. The defeat in her eyes, however, was as perilous as the wolf itself. She had to live her life, revel in her accomplishment with dance, or the wolf’s offer would become that much more tempting, her desire for Shadow that much more acute.
“We’re going,” he said.
“Custo,” Adam said, “I don’t know that…”…going to the party is the best course of action at this time.
“No, Adam,” Custo said. Making allowances for her fear would only sap her energy and have her doubting herself more.
Adam shot him a look. You said it yourself. She’s been through enough today.
Custo deliberately hardened his tone. “She doesn’t have the luxury of wallowing in her self-pity. She needs to go to the damn party. She needs to find her spine again. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?”
Annabella raised fear-stricken eyes. Custo watched her fear transmute to recrimination and anger, but she didn’t say anything. He touched her mind: Her thoughts were full of murder, but not for the wolf. She wanted to scratch Custo’s eyes out.
Good. There was fire in her yet, though there was little chance he was ever going to get to touch her again. To move inside her. If that sacrifice weren’t angelic, he didn’t know what the hell was.
“Besides,” Custo said, “the wolf wants to take you away from the life you’ve fought so hard to build. It would be one more victory for him if you didn’t attend the reception. As one of the lead dancers, the reception would be in your honor, yes?”
He saw the delicate muscles of her jaw contract as she clenched her teeth, but she nodded, yes.
Her gaze darkened, and Custo knew that she was thinking about what he’d said. He felt the right decision form in her mind.
“Then we go,” Custo confirmed. “We don’t have to stay long.”
“I don’t have anything to wear,” she said, voice thick, “and I’m not going home for my dress. I’m never going back to that place again.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Adam said. “Custo, do you want my tux?”
After Peter’s murder, Annabella was definitely going to need a new place to live.
“Custo?”
The tux. “The shoulders will be a bit tight, but it’ll do,” Custo answered by rote. It was an old joke between them, and a lame effort at lifting the mood.
It got a weak smile out of Adam at least, and a clap on the shoulder. Annabella turned sullenly away and climbed back on the bed. Adam brought over a laptop for her to pass the time during the soldier interviews. She downloaded a movie, Dawn of the Dead, so the sound of soft screams filled the room while Custo worked.
A more effective “screw you” he couldn’t imagine. Very well played.
Twenty-four interrogations later, Custo was beyond perplexed. He’d asked questions from every angle, but a more straight-up, true-blue batch of men he’d never seen.
He was stumped, and he was man enough to admit it. He had to have missed something somewhere, but he’d have to think it through before taking another approach. And it was getting late.
A garment bag hanging on the bathroom door presumably held their clothes for the evening. A glance at his watch told him they’d better hurry if they were going to make the party.
Custo showered quickly, stripping off the now unnecessary bandage, while Annabella put on her makeup at the sink.
When he got out, Annabella used the open shower door to shield herself while she dressed, though he knew she had no problems whatsoever with modesty, notwithstanding the fact that he’d seen all of her lovely body just that morning. But okay, he could take it.
Adam’s tux, classic in cut, was indeed a little tight across the shoulders, a fact Custo would point out at the first opportunity, but it looked good.
Annabella stepped out, devastating in a cobalt blue sheath, her skin a glowing contrast to the deep color and her rich hair, styled in a loose twist. Her eyes were luminous, her painted mouth set both to bitch and pout. When she turned to exit the room, she revealed a backless V that stopped at the last dimple of her spine, her supple, smooth body exposed, the cloth hugging at her waist and hips.
Custo’s fingers itched to skim down her skin, to shed the fabric from her shoulders, to loose her hair, and graze the column of her neck with his mouth. That he couldn’t made him deeply regret pissing her off quite so much.
It promised to be a hell of a night.
A slash of Wolf’s claw shredded the bedsheets. Rage and want consumed him, blurring his vision until the hard lines of the room doubled, colors and edges shifting around him as his legs stumbled for purchase on the too-soft mattress. Pungent scents layered the room. Woman. Angel. Blood. And numerous other mortals, all masculine, but difficult to distinguish individually.
The sources of those thick, driving smells were gone now. The woman, too.
Shadow had offered him back to the world too late, too reluctantly, with too little substance to catch her and press his advantage. A little sooner and he could have compelled her acceptance, when she was too frightened and weak to fight.
Thus his own shadows betrayed him, but they had ever been variable, inconstant, like the shifting boughs of Twilight.
Wolf shook out his pelt. He had his form now. And the woman might not choose to use his name, but she could not take it back.
What he needed was to set a trap. Not a cage like those on the lower levels of this massive structure, housing the life-charged corpses humankind called wraiths.
No, he needed a human trap fitted to a human heart.
And the banshee mother had taught him how.
Chapter Fifteen
ANNABELLA got another round of applause when she entered the reception. She smiled and bowed, this time with only a slight inclination of her head. She was seriously done with bowing. It was way overrated.
The reception was held at the extravagant Upper East Side penthouse of one of the ballet company’s patrons. A champagne affair for the start of the season. The hosts boasted the kind of wealth her family had never dreamed of knowing, and they weren’t subtle about it. An enormous, colorful blown-glass dewdrop of a chandelier warmed an entrance hallway several times larger than Annabella’s studio apartment.
Talk about crossing over into a different world.
Custo’s hand was warm at the small of her back, as if he were her date or something. She’d be damned, however, before she’d lean against him and get another of his remarks about her lack of spine. A nightmarish snakelike shadow had slid all over her today; the man could do with a little sensitivity.