Archangel’s Shadows (Guild Hunter #7)(71)
Author: Nalini Singh

Arvi had flinched. “I was trying to save you.”

“I know.” Thanks to Saki, she also knew he’d filed a missing persons report on her, had hired countless private investigators in an effort to find her. Not only that, but he’d been personally talking to every bus driver and train conductor he could find, in the hope that someone might remember her. “Thank you for searching for me.” It had been her fear, and yet to know that he had, that he hadn’t simply written her off . . . it made her want to cry despite the confusion and anger inside her.

Arvi’s expression had been stark. “There was never any question.”

That was the only time the two of them had ever spoken of what he’d done by putting her in Banli House. “Yes,” she told Janvier now. “I saw Arvi.” Throat thick, she swallowed. “He’d looked for me,” she said simply, unable to face the tangled knot of emotions incited by the memory. “But he didn’t stand in my way when it came to the Guild, didn’t try to reassert guardianship.”

Safe from the threat of committal, Ashwini had narrowed her focus to her Guild studies, determined to forget the other part of her existed. Having learned the truth about Tanu and her mother by then—after confronting Arvi a month after her return—she’d seen her “gift” as a curse that had destroyed her family and she’d wanted no part of it. “I was nineteen before I accepted who I was, what I had inside me.” It was seeing Tanu behind a locked door one day that had done it; she’d vowed she’d never be so trapped . . . and realized she’d imprisoned herself.

Janvier’s smile was faint, his eyes dark. “So many years in so short a story. One day, you will tell me the rest of it.”

Ashwini shrugged. “I was luckier than a million others.”

“And the predators?” Janvier asked, tone quiet but shoulders tense. “You must’ve been a beautiful girl, tall and long limbed.”

“More like skinny and dirty.” Not that such things stopped the monsters. “I had a couple of close calls—ironically not from the strangers I was so vigilant about, but from two of the farm laborers I’d gotten to know over the summer.”

One man had cornered her in a disused drying shed she’d thought to use for sleep, while another had grabbed her in the fields when she’d made a mistake and been the last one to leave. “But I’d been a cornered animal once before,” she said to the vampire who had death in his eyes right now. “I still had that feral strength in me, along with the knives I’d bought with my first bits of money.”

Janvier’s expression didn’t soften. “These men didn’t wish to make trouble for you after you hurt them?”

“They may have, but I hopped a freight train to another farm state the same night in both cases. I knew I couldn’t win against them.” The helplessness had grated at her, but her survival instincts had won out over pride.

“I feel a compulsion to visit these areas.”

“No need. I went back when I was a fully trained hunter. Neither will bother another girl ever again.” At Janvier’s raised eyebrow, she said, “They’re not dead, just . . . out of commission in certain bodily functions.”

“Good.” A slow, dangerous smile, before Janvier bent his head to the papers again. “The spreadsheets stop seven months ago, so she didn’t do one for the last month Seth saw her alive.”

“She may finally have become totally dependent on the bastard who killed her.”

Eyes narrowing, Janvier passed her a ticket stub that had become stuck inside the financial documents. “Opera. Nothing Felicity could afford and the performance was in that final month.”

Ashwini took it, eyes on the bar code. “Good chance we can track this.”

Nodding, Janvier went back to the financial documents while she combed through the other pieces of paper.

“Her income goes down over the last five weeks of record keeping,” he said a few minutes later. “Far as I can see, that’s when she stopped doing her cleaning jobs.”

Ashwini turned over the stub for an art house movie. No bar code. No way to chase down a single patron from six and a half months ago. Setting it aside, she said, “The sugar daddy convinced her to quit, but was generous on his terms.” Paying for things but giving her no financial independence. “Seems like something an abuser would do.”

“Controlling her under a veneer of devotion.” Janvier’s jaw muscles moved. “He has done this before. It was too smooth an operation.”

“Yes.” The realization that Felicity hadn’t been the first, the other victims lost and forgotten, infuriated her. “Opera, art house flick, receipt for a designer dress—” She frowned, looked at the total. “Five grand, paid in cash.” It must’ve been a prop, meant to draw Felicity deeper into the spider’s web. Five thousand was loose change for an old, rich vampire.

“Either an old vampire uneasy with other methods of payment,” Janvier said, “or a young one showing off.”

“I’d go for old with how well orchestrated this was, how patient, but why limit it to vampires?” She raised an eyebrow. “Angels can be even more twisted.” Nazarach had taught her that. “Could be an angel is behind this and the vampire who bit her is simply the one who did the dirty work.”

“I’ll do some discreet digging, see if any angel is known for tastes that might have morphed into this kind of ugliness.” Opening a bank statement still in its envelope, as if it had come after Felicity last visited her apartment, he stopped. “She bought something at a store that’s unusually high end for a woman with as little income as Felicity. Maxed out her credit card . . . and that card was paid off in full a few weeks later.”

Ashwini glanced at the charge, saw the reference, and looked up at the billboard plastered on the wall of a building a block down. “A man’s watch,” she said, blood a roar in her ears. “She bought the bastard a gift.”

Janvier followed her gaze. “He’s cold, calculated. Banks can be worse than cops, so he made sure they wouldn’t come looking.”

“But a store like that,” she said on the wave of her rage, “will have surveillance.” Maybe, just maybe, the monster had been with Felicity when she bought the gift.

31

Four hours after his visit to the Quarter, Dmitri finished his call with Astaad’s second—who had the bad taste to be sleeping with Michaela, but was otherwise sane—and walked up to the roof. He and Raphael needed to discuss the upcoming meeting with the vampire leaders.