I snarled, causing Crude to give up and flee, pissing me off even further.
I most certainly did not want to see anyone. Not right now, and I was fairly sure ever.
Chen was… different.
He wasn’t the same man that I’d brought under my wing when he was a stupid seventeen-year-old kid. He was a man that was harder. More annoyed by everything.
I literally turned him into a man that wasn’t him, and I wasn’t sure if Chen—before when he’d been him—would want to be this man. Would he want to live a life where he was constantly having to be watched in fear that he’d kill someone?
And then there was the whole police involvement.
Luckily we’d gotten to Chen’s body before his body had been processed. Meaning they didn’t have one hundred percent proof that Chen was the one that died that night with the girl.
“You better go before the cop gets pissy and starts forcing his way in here. Then he sees your fuckin’ room and has a cow and demands to know what the fuck happened.”
I rolled my eyes at Pavlov.
I’d seen more of him and Abraham in the last week than I’d seen of them in the last two years.
Not that I minded. It was just hard to do without killing each other.
“Were you able to get a hold of the girl?”
I wasn’t saying her name for obvious reasons—reasons I still wasn’t willing to admit—and Pavlov knew it.
“Yes,” he answered. “When I offered to try to wipe her brain, she told me I could shove my offers up my ass and sit on them.”
My mouth quirked.
“Got it,” I grumbled, trying to hide my happiness at knowing she didn’t want to forget about me. “Take me to our leader.”
Pavlov laughed his ass off for about two-point-five seconds while he walked to the door.
We all knew who the real leader was: me.
It most certainly wasn’t the police chief of Austin, Texas.
The minute Pavlov reached the door and opened it, he pasted on a neutral expression and led the way.
That was something new, though.
He and Abraham had decided—without me in attendance—that I was going to have twenty-four-seven, around-the-clock surveillance. I was going to be watched, protected, and annoyed at least while I was gone from my home.
At my home, however, it was my safe place. I was allowed to be on my own due to the increased security I’d put into it over the years.
In my office, which was wall-to-wall ceilings of glass, I was not to be alone.
Under no circumstances, according to my friends and confidants.
Honestly, I was tired of it. It’d only been going on for a day and a half, and here I was trying to figure out ways to escape them.
Though, it wouldn’t matter.
The way our teleporting abilities worked was that we locked onto faces and not places. If the two men wanted to find me, they’d find me. Then rip me a new asshole for leaving them.
I wasn’t the only crazy Viking. Those two were worse than me!
Though it’d been many years, and we’d changed our original names from what they’d been so long ago, the blood still ran strong through us.
And that blood that ran through me, ran through them as well. I’d learned long ago not to underestimate their power, either.
“Hello, Corbin,” I called civilly as I walked through the glass opening of my office.
Corbin looked up.
He looked extremely tired, and well past the point of needing to see the backside of his eyelids.
“Hello,” he answered. “I’m just going to get to it quickly. Do you have any idea where the body of Chen Chong is?”
I blinked.
“You’ve lost the body of my assistant?” I asked, feigning anger, even though what I wanted to do was laugh at the poor man.
He was just doing his job, though, and I couldn’t fault him for that.
“I have not lost it. It was stolen. There’s no other way into the morgue except one single way, which was guarded. I know it was taken. I even have my suspicions on who took it. Hence the reason I am standing in your office right now instead of sleeping in my goddamned bed where I belong.”
Seriously. Did I mention that I really liked this guy?
What would he do if I fucked his sister? Would he try to kill me? Frame me for a murder that I didn’t commit?
I viciously snapped my thoughts into order. There would be no fucking his sister. Not now, and not ever.
She was off limits.
Off limits. Off limits. Off limits.
Maybe if I kept repeating it to myself over and over again, I would finally get it through my thick fucking skull.
“Well, there is a possibility that he rose from the dead,” I lied through my teeth. “He was mine. I fed off of him at least once a week for over fifteen years. He’s also imbibed on my blood once a week since then due to a lung condition.”
The lung condition being cancer.
A cancer that’d been fast-acting. He’d almost died on me twice. Had I not given him my blood, he would’ve died.
“That’s possible?”
Surely not.
I nearly laughed at the cop’s silent thoughts. Normally I only got impressions on what people were thinking, but the man had practically shouted it in my head, so there was no way that I couldn’t hear it.
“Yes,” I lied. “Did you have anyone injured?”
Corbin’s mouth worked as he clenched and unclenched his teeth.
“No,” he said stiffly. “Though we do have video feed. A guard fell asleep while on duty. All my video shows is a man entering, and a man leaving with a body bag over his shoulder.”
Pavlov was getting sloppy. He should’ve seen the cameras, and if not seen them, then at least heard them.
“What did this man look like?” I asked carefully.
Corbin took a seat, then crossed one leg over the opposite knee. “Tall. Skinny. Like a bean pole. Had a mask on so I couldn’t see the rest.”
So not Pavlov. Good. I would hate for him to hear this. He’d be so embarrassed that he’d been caught.
“You’re sure it’s not another body bag?” I hesitated.
Corbin sighed, then ran both hands roughly down his face.
“Fuck.”
I casually leaned against the wall, then crossed my arms over my chest and waited patiently for him to get himself together enough to be able to speak in coherent sentences.
“The girl’s body is missing, too.”
Interesting.
“The one that was killed with Chen?” I asked, knowing that was her before he even offered me confirmation.
I had someone in this city that was killing my people, and I knew that what happened to Chen wasn’t the end of it.
Likely he’d gone into that morgue to try to get Chen, but I’d beaten him to the punch, so he’d gotten the girl that had been with Chen instead.
Little did the man that killed Chen and the girl know that the woman had no relationship with me or mine at all. I’d found her on the side of the road, drank from her, and then instructed Chen to take her home.
Apparently since the girl was with Chen, he thought that she was worth more to me than what she was.
Which had a sudden, disastrous thought occurring to me.
“Your sister.”
Corbin’s head tilted.
“What about her?” he asked shortly.