Gray snorted. “You and Rafe do, anyway.” Savitri had made her priorities—and her motivations—crystal clear.
“Next time, maybe at least try turning on the charm,” Dani advised. “It might work, even though you suck at it. You never know.”
“Hey.” Instead of putting it back on, Rafe slung his shirt over one shoulder and wagged a finger at her. “Gray has his strengths. We can’t all be smoldering sex bombs.”
She rolled her eyes in response, but her smile quickly faded. Her seemingly perpetual expression of flirtatious amusement vanished, replaced by pensive concentration. “One thing’s bothering me, though.”
That sent prickles of warning skittering up Gray’s spine. “What is it?”
“Her guard—I’ve seen him somewhere before.”
Fucking hell. “TechCorps?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Can’t place him yet, but I’ll figure it out.”
Maya remained silent, and Gray sidled closer to her as Rafe and Dani began to bicker and bargain over the VIP ring. She’d been bizarrely quiet during their interaction with Savitri, but he couldn’t tell if it was by design or because she’d had nothing to say.
“You okay?” he asked softly.
“Yeah.” She drew in a slow breath and held it for a few seconds before letting it out in a soft sigh. “Savitri makes me nervous. All that sexy vampire queen shit doesn’t fool me. I’m pretty sure she could figure out who I really am if I made her curious enough … and I’d be worth a lot to someone who trades in TechCorps secrets.”
Gray was more than pretty sure about that. “Luckily, she doesn’t seem to be hurting for credits.”
“No.” Maya’s lips quirked in an almost smile. “And Rafe and Dani are next-level good at keeping everyone’s attention on them.”
“Yep, I’ve gotten used to being invisible next to Rafe.” When she didn’t laugh at his joke, he touched her arm—lightly. Carefully. “Are you sure you’re all right? You seem…”
“Overwhelmed?” She twisted one of the half dozen rings she’d donned nervously around one finger, her gaze unfocused. “I should be. I haven’t had time to do my meditation exercises in days. But it’s not actually that bad? I just feel a little…” She choked on a laugh. “No. Not a little. I just feel. A lot.”
“Is that bad?”
“Probably.” She stole a quick glance at him but looked away before he could meet her eyes. “Nah, ignore me. It’s been a weird couple days, hasn’t it? Are you okay? I mean, you’re the one who had a friend come back from the dead.”
Gray almost stumbled.
He hadn’t thought about Mace at all during their outing—which wasn’t unusual. His Protectorate training had included harsh lessons on compartmentalization. It was a necessary part of life as a soldier, being able to temporarily quiet your racing thoughts. You couldn’t very well charge across a battlefield, with rounds zipping past your head and grenades exploding around you, if you couldn’t lock away basic things like fear and horror and self-preservation.
In truth, the Protectorate hadn’t had much to teach him that the streets hadn’t already taken care of. Gray had already mastered the art of shoving things into little boxes in his head by the time he’d joined up.
But he was always, always aware of it. And he hadn’t made a conscious choice not to think about Mace’s return.
How did he feel about it? The question was almost too huge to answer, and trying to break it down into smaller issues didn’t do a damn bit of good.
Mace was alive. And he had come after them, which meant someone at the TechCorps likely knew the rest of the Silver Devils weren’t dead, either. Worse, his friend was barely clinging to sanity.
Somehow, the fact that Mace had tried to stab Gray in the face was low on the list of things about this situation that were 100 percent fucked up.
Maya was still looking at him, so Gray shrugged, even though the muscles in his neck and shoulders were so tense the action literally hurt. “I’m worried about Mace, and about Knox. And about what this means.”
“That Richter thinks you’re alive.” Her low rasp couldn’t hide the way her voice hitched on his name. “He’s probably not sure. If he had proof, there’d be some trace of it in the official record. Doesn’t make him less dangerous, though. He didn’t have proof about Birgitte at first, either.”
Nothing made Richter less dangerous.
Gray opened his mouth to remind her of that fact, but the words wouldn’t come, and he wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t as though it were new information; if anything, Maya knew it better than the rest of them. The official TechCorps story that Birgitte had been transferred to some far-flung satellite office was a fucking joke.
No, the woman who had raised Maya had been murdered, and Gray wouldn’t have been surprised if someone told him that Richter had pulled the trigger himself. The man was a lot of things, but hypocrite didn’t number among his many flaws. He wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. Maybe the bastard even liked it.
Then again, bad memories were one thing—inescapable, perhaps, especially when the burden of your memory was as cumbersome as Maya’s. But they were still in the past, and that mattered. Gray didn’t want to be the one to shove merciless reality in her face for no damn good reason, to turn the specter of Richter into cold, murderous flesh.
Instead, he shrugged. “Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it. I’m glad Mace is alive, and he’s someplace now where we can look after him. Everything else is tangential.”
“Agreed.” She hesitated. “How do you think he found y’all?”
That much, Gray knew. “Mace is a good tracker. He’s patient, you know? Plus, he thinks just like Knox sometimes.”
“Takes a Devil to find a Devil?”
“Something like that.”
“We’ll take care of him,” Maya promised softly. “That’s what Nina does. And she’s a fucking rock star at it.”
“I have no doubts,” he assured her. Rafe and Dani were still arguing, though they’d moved past combativeness into laughter and now were working their way around again. “Come on, let’s hurry back. It’s gonna be one hell of a debriefing tonight.”
March 30th, 2077
Richter’s data courier has continued to cultivate Marjorie as a friend. No creature raised by Tobias Richter could be anything but broken inside. He taints everything he touches. I have no doubts he’s using the girl to spy on me.
I need to find a way to separate Marjorie from DC-025.
The Recovered Journal of Birgitte Skovgaard
TWELVE
Maya couldn’t get the music out of her head.
Hours after everyone else had gone to bed, she climbed toward the roof and stepped out onto the walkway that connected their building to the one the Silver Devils had purchased. Kudzu had climbed the side of the warehouse to twine around the metal bars of the waist-length railing, but Maya always kept a space clear right in the center of the catwalk.