“Oh.” I look to Eve, and her blue eyes confirm Sin’s words. “And our shifter?”
“The labs won’t come back for another few hours,” she says with a frown. “The magical analysis unit has never been one to rush. Not even for a case like this. But the design matches the others, as do the visual qualities—which alone are quite unusual.”
“It must be him.” Sin rises and walks over to the far corner of the room to a photo of a dead woman lying in a heap. She wears only a pair of lace panties, her neck broken and her head twisted at an unnatural angle. Jabbing the wall over her back, he snarls, “These marks, along with the ink…they prove it.”
Joining him, I frown as I examine the broken lines of skin along the woman’s back. “They’re not standard whip marks, and today’s victim had these same triangular-shaped injuries.”
“That is because they are not from a ‘standard’ whip.” His tone turns harsh and rough. “May I?” he asks as he holds out his hand for the commander’s tablet.
She passes him the device, and he pulls up another photo. It looks a little like a thin, metal bar, but every two inches, there are other, odd protrusions almost shaped like triangles.
“What is that?” Sin rotates the image, and my stomach clenches. “Is that the letter T? In…cursive?”
“Yes. He calls himself Thorn. Part incubus, part something much, much stronger. He feeds off of fear, and he marks all of his victims so they can never forget they belong to him.” Sin rubs his shoulder, then drops the tablet back on the commander’s desk. “How long do we have?”
Eve frowns. “Unsure.”
“Do not give me that bullshit!” Rounding the desk, Sin gets right in her face. “They never deviate from their pattern. Not in over a thousand years. The men are taken every four days. A week to train them. Then, nine women, one every third night! How. Many. Missing. Women?”
With each word, the edge to Sin’s voice gets harder and harder, and I’m afraid he’s about to grab the commander and shake her. I rush over to him and try to take his arm. “Stand down, Agent. Now!”
I don’t think he hears me, but the commander lets out a screech that sends me to my knees with my hands over my ears.
Disoriented, I only catch a glimpse of pure white feathers, then the scent of blood, before Sin wraps his arm around my waist and helps me back to one of the guest chairs.
Blood wells along the edge of his jaw, and a handful of pinfeathers float through the air. Commander Eve’s eyes are wild, but the rest of her? Shit. She’s totally put together. Except for her long blond hair, which looks like she just touched one of those static balls at the county fair.
Gathering her tresses and securing them with a rubber band, she looks anywhere but at Sinclair. “Agent Dawes, I’m sorry you had to see that.”
“You’re...sorry?” My gaze pings between the two of them. Sin presses a handkerchief to the wound, his expression shuttered, yet the commander looks almost...exhilarated. “You just injured one of your own agents!”
“I lost control. And for that, I apologize to both of you,” she says.
Shaking my head, I can’t believe what I just witnessed. “Not good enough. Sure, he was being a complete dick, but—“
Sin growls, “I was justified in my actions.”
“The hell you were,” I say. “Is this how you deal with all of your problems? Combat? Because I don’t want any fucking part of it.”
I spin on my heel and make it halfway to the door before Eve’s words stop me cold.
“We don’t know the timeline because the first man to be taken broke the pattern. James Temple escaped, long enough to get to you, Agent Dawes. Long enough to beg you to kill him.”
Six
Zoe
“Temple...” I brace my hand on the door, Commander Eve’s words echoing on a loop in my head.
Sin appears at my side. “Zoe? Agent Dawes? Sit down. You look...ill.”
He offers me his hand, but I bat it away. I don’t care how close I am to passing out or losing my breakfast, I won’t do either of those things in front of a man who thinks it’s cool to be called Sin.
He lowers his voice to a whisper, “If we are to work together, you will someday need to trust me.”
I huff, but let him guide me back to the chair. My mouth is dry, and the headache doing a tap dance inside my skull shifts into double-time. I force my shoulders back and meet the commander’s gaze. “Tell me what you know about Temple’s...death.”
“Very little,” she says, her expression unreadable. “But his body bore the same mark as the other men taken over the past eighteen months.“ Tapping her tablet, she brings the image up on the wall behind her. Unlike the women’s tattoo, which shows a female faery in chains, wings unfurled, head bowed, this tattoo is of a man carrying a whip. His wings are larger, and his face is hidden behind a black mask.
“Temple didn’t have any tattoos,” I say. When Sin arches a brow at me, I shake my head. “Get your mind out of the gutter. The man was afraid of needles. I had to go to the precinct’s blood drive with him and recite old case notes just so he could donate a pint of O neg.”
“This was on his forearm,” Eve says, then flips to a photo of Temple’s body in the morgue, naked from the waist up.
My stomach lurches, and I clench my fingers around the arms of the chair. Don’t lose it. Not now. You’re a cop. Act like one.
But seeing those same distinct whip marks across his chest—marks that couldn’t have been made more than a day or two before he died—threatens to destroy my control. The photo flips to one of his back, and I swallow hard, tasting bile. “He...was tortured.”
“Yes, Agent Dawes. As were all the other men across the country. Branded and whipped repeatedly,” she says.
“To keep them in line.” Sin’s voice carries an edge of fury, and when I steal a quick glance at him, his irises are once more rimmed with red. “Thorn has a woman he works with. A Fae named Regina. His queen, of sorts. She wipes the victims’ minds clean, then Thorn takes control of their thoughts, their bodies…until they go insane.”
“Regina?” The unfamiliar name shocks me enough to stave off my impending vomit-fest, and I sit up a little straighter. “And how do you know about these people?”
“They are not people,” he snarls, then softens his tone. “Grayson, as much as I would prefer to never speak of this again, it is my story to tell. May we have the room?”
The commander looks as surprised as I am at Sin’s conciliatory tone and the use of her first name. “Fine. I could use some flight time. You have an hour.” She slides the tablet across her desk towards Sin. “Everything you need to know is in the case file. The Bureau’s full resources are at your disposal, Sinclair. This reign of terror has to end. Here.”
“It will,” he says with a nod. “Or it will end me.”
Sin
Telling Zoe about my past on the first day of our partnership? This is a mistake. But the dead man—James Temple—he was a San Francisco police detective, and apparently, Zoe’s former partner.