I just hoped that nothing happened to Constantine while he was there… if he was there. My hope was that he went directly home and didn’t stop at his office.
• • •
And it continued to bug me through my workday.
“You seem distracted,” my partner observed.
I was.
Really.
“I’ve got a lot on my mind,” I informed Grady. “I try to get shit done, and it is clear that it’s not going to happen.”
I’d been working on filing case notes for the last two hours, and I’d gotten only about a quarter of it done in the same amount of time than I usually did all of my notes.
“You have moon eyes,” Grady said. “Who are you thinking about? That vampire?”
I shot him a look. “How did you hear about him?”
“The whole department is talking about him,” he said. “I overheard it being talked about over lunch.”
It being the near-rape of my person, and a vampire saving me. Oh, and killing the man that had done it. Yeah, that it.
Constantine had just snapped his neck like he was breaking a toothpick in half. Crack.
I sighed.
“These bitches really can’t find anything else to talk about,” I grumbled.
“Your brother’s been on a freakin’ reign of terror, too,” Grady explained.
Grady had a crush on my brother, and Corbin was ignoring it.
However, I stayed out of my brothers’ love lives. If they wanted to fuck them up, who was I to say that they couldn’t?
Nash, however, was a lot better at relationships than Corbin was. Corbin was that man that tried to act all big, burly, and manly while also trying not to act like he was the bisexual man we all really knew he was. He flirted relentlessly with anything with legs, and it was obvious that people didn’t know what to think of him.
For some reason he thought that he had to be a certain person or no one would take him seriously as the chief of police for Austin, Texas. And he’d had this mindset for years now, denying what we all knew in our hearts that he was.
But that was another thing that I tried not to get into with him.
Not because I hadn’t wanted to, but because each time I’d tried to broach that subject, he’d nearly bitten my head off.
“Earth to Acadia.” Grady snapped his fingers at me.
I started, my heart rate speeding, and blew out a nervous breath.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I’m jumpy.”
“You have a good reason to be,” he admitted. “Why don’t you just go? Your brother never expected you to be here, anyway.”
That was true. When I’d shown up at work, he’d taken one look at me and ordered me to go home. But I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t sleep when I was there by myself. The memories of last night were on replay, and they weren’t the good memories of Con snapping the man’s neck, but of that man’s hot, fetid breath on my neck as he rubbed his nasty cock on the apex of my thighs.
I shuddered, this time taking my brother’s and Grady’s opinion. “I’m going home.”
Well, not my home anyway.
Constantine’s home.
I just had to figure out a way to get over a fence…
CHAPTER 8
It’s not every day you see a woman’s ass pressed up against the camera and you don’t have to pay for it.
-Constantine as he watches Acadia scale his fence
CONSTANTINE
My eyes snapped open as I had the feeling that someone was where they shouldn’t be.
Something wasn’t right.
An internal alarm went off in my head, and I rose silently from my bed, walking through the near darkness to the bedroom door and waited.
It didn’t take long.
A knock sounded, and I opened the door to find my human personal assistant, the man that did all my daytime errands and also kept an eye on my day-to-day life for me, standing there with his hand ready to knock.
“Sorry to interrupt your sleep,” Chen said. “But there’s a visitor on the northwest lawn entrance.”
“Who?” I asked.
He already knew who. Hell, he would’ve known who it was the moment the visitor crossed onto our territory six miles before the northwest entrance.
“A woman,” he answered. “And since she’s of the same description as the woman that you saved, I felt it prudent to allow her to get this far.”
A growl rose in my voice.
“A good decision on your part,” I said roughly. “Let her in.”
Chen nodded, then left without another word.
I went to the bathroom and used the facilities before using the toiletries that never seemed to run out to get rid of the stench of fear that still clung to my skin from a nightmare that I’d been having before being awoken by the intruder.
I’d just finished when another knock sounded.
“Sir,” Chen said through the door. “I was about to let her in when she left.”
“Where did she go?” I asked as I slipped into a pair of running shorts.
“To the graveyard.”
My eyes closed on their own volition, and I sighed.
“Curious woman,” I grumbled. “I’ll handle it, Chen. Thank you.”
Chen left without another word, and I walked out of the security of my bedroom, mentally locking and barring it as I left.
No matter how much I trusted Chen, I knew that he could still be used against me if another vampire spent enough time on him. Not that Chen would ever betray me on purpose, but that didn’t mean that my enemies wouldn’t try.
They’d done it before.
Pushing outside on the last rays of the setting sun, I walked across my perfectly manicured lawn—one that got mowed every single Wednesday at three—and headed to the northwest gate that would lead to the cemetery.
The same cemetery that held my wife, child, mother, father, sister, and multiple cousins. Grandparents. Great-grandparents.
The property I was living on had been in my late mother’s family for centuries, and I’d outlived them all.
The cemetery was special to me—something that was very personal and not something I wished to share with everyone.
I realized, though, as I crossed through the gate and saw the beginnings of the cemetery, that I was going to have to share it with her.
Especially the way she was bent down by my three-year-old daughter’s grave, staring at it with her heart in her eyes.
“Acadia,” I murmured softly.
Acadia’s head snapped in my direction, and her face showed no sign of chagrin at being caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to do.
“I’m sorry for entering your property without permission. I was on the way to your gate when something called me here,” she murmured quietly.
I likely wouldn’t have heard her at all had I not had such good hearing.
“Nola does that.”
“Nola?” she asked.
“Nola, my daughter.” I gestured to the grave with my head.
I felt it the moment she realized that the small grave belonged to my child.
The sorrow was written all over her face.
“I didn’t know,” she murmured softly.
I walked forward on silent feet, the pull of the grave calling to me.