—
I showered, brushed my teeth and my hair, then pulled my hair into a ponytail and then a topknot.
When I emerged from the bathroom, Ethan was gone, as were his watch and cuff links from the nightstand. He’d dressed and gone downstairs, without even time for a good-bye.
It was quite a beginning to Valentine’s Day.
Since I was inevitably a vampire tonight, I walked down the hallway to the small, second-floor kitchen and snagged a bottle of blood and a bagel studded with raisins and topped with crunch streusel. I ate at the counter, reading through the announcements pinned to a small bulletin board along one wall. This news was surprisingly chipper: pearl earring found, owner wanted; small TV for sale; video games for trade.
I finished the blood, but managed only a few bites of the bagel. I was still discomfited by what had gone on last night, and my appetite hadn’t come back. I also wasn’t exactly eager to get started with the night, so I stood in the kitchen for a few more minutes, just in case my hunger fired back up.
It didn’t. I was actually too stressed to eat.
I tossed the rest of the bagel, wiped my hands, and made for the stairs. I needed positive news and action. I needed progress, because I was beginning to feel like a drug dog that hadn’t sniffed out a dirty suitcase in a while.
I walked to Ethan’s office to check in before I left, but his door was closed.
Normally, I’d have knocked in warning and gone in. But there seemed a pretty good chance he was on the phone with people significantly above my pay grade and my interruption wouldn’t be welcome.
Before I had time to wonder if I should eavesdrop, Jonah emerged from the cafeteria at the other end of the hall, a glossy red apple in hand.
Excellent timing, I thought. I walked toward him, gesturing back toward Ethan’s office. “What’s going on in there?”
“I don’t know. I assume Ethan’s talking to the GP. Why?”
I shook my head. “Just being nosy.”
Jonah crunched on the apple. “You’re dating him. Don’t you two pillow talk? Can’t you seduce all the secrets out of him?”
“Who am I, Mata Hari?”
“You’re Mata Hari enough to manage to snag the Master of the House.” He lifted his eyebrows teasingly, then took a final bite of the apple before chunking the core into a small, decorative wastebasket on the other side of the hallway. He nailed the shot, which made sense, considering Grey House’s athletic bent.
“You are hilarious, you know that?”
“I do,” he said. “But seriously. Isn’t there some kind of boyfriend-girlfriend privilege you can use to find out what’s going on?”
“If there was, logically, it would mean he could tell me, but I couldn’t tell you.”
“Then my idea was poor,” he said, crossing his arms. I could see the amusement in his expression slide right into concern. He might joke around, but he, too, was worried about the closed-door meeting.
I glanced around the hallway, ensuring we were alone. “Times like this make us perfect candidates for the RG, you know. We’re suspicious by nature.”
“And vampires are conniving by nature,” he said. “Especially Masters. Or they wouldn’t be Masters. Hey, isn’t it Valentine’s Day? Don’t you two have big plans?”
“We did,” I agreed. “At least until the city went boom.”
“And the GP went bust,” Jonah grimly responded.
Without ado, the door opened.
Ethan stood on the other side, gazing at Jonah and me like a schoolteacher who’d just caught two naughty children in the act of disobeying orders. Predictably, he shot up an eyebrow and gave me a visual dressing-down.
“Sentinel.”
“Liege,” I said properly, with a little head-bob for good measure. “We were just discussing business.”
“Interrogation techniques,” Jonah added. “Methods for extracting information from unwilling subjects.”
Ethan looked dubious about the explanation. “There’s no need for torture,” he said, pulling the door open farther.
Nick Breckenridge, tall, with cropped dark hair, blue eyes, and the body of a rock climber, stood in the middle of Ethan’s office, Scott beside him.
Nick wore a button-down shirt and jeans, with a tweed blazer over it. He carried a small reporter’s notebook in one hand. The look was more professorial than I’d usually seen him, but he managed to pull it off. He looked like a very popular professor—the Indiana Jones of the journalism set.
“Nick,” I said, walking in at Ethan’s subtle nod. “Long time no see.”
“Merit,” he said, giving me an efficient once-over. It was journalistic inquiry, I knew, not interest, that made him check me out. We’d had our ups and downs, and although I assumed from the “Ponytail Avenger” story that we’d recovered from the blackmail incident, we definitely weren’t bosom buddies.