Pretty Little Lion by Suleikha Snyder

24

Tavi took a car service back to the Financial District, lest he suffer another sneak attack while patronizing the MTA. But once he’d been back in Mirko’s company for a few hours, he began to consider that being rendered unconscious was vastly preferable. The man was odious on the average day, but still on a tear about Sasha’s untimely demise and Meghna’s betrayal, he was insufferable. The island, Tavi reminded himself as Mirko stormed around his suite at the Cipriani throwing barware and expletives with equal fervor. This is all to get to the island.

He’d stuffed his true agenda so far down that he barely remembered it sometimes. It was easy, too, to play the villain. To be the kind of predator who didn’t care who he hurt as long as he ended up on top. That was his reputation in the criminal community. Among the terrorists he’d made comrades of. Octavio Estrada, the vampire who could get you anything you needed whenever you wanted it. At the cost of anything he’d ever needed or wanted himself.

Tavi gripped the untouched tumbler of whiskey in his hand like a lifeline as Mirko flopped back down in his seat on the edge of his ugly brown suede couch. “This is a shit show!” Aston declared, brows knitting together with displeasure. “Three organizations have dropped out of the auction. My investors are displeased.”

His investors. No, his boss, he meant. Because someone pulled Mirko’s strings, even if he wanted to pretend he was a king. Someone who wanted the shape-shifter serum badly enough to orchestrate this entire game. Roman Hollister. This was the closest Tavi had ever been to confirming Hollister’s involvement, his true aims. Finian and Third Shift had almost ruined his chances. So noble. So heroic. So utterly clueless.

Tavi wanted to hate them for his brief stint in their midst, but he couldn’t. He actually admired Finian for his initiative. The young twentysomething he’d once known, so easily swayed from religion to sin, had a cause now. As single-minded and narrow as it was, it was nothing to be ashamed of. They wanted to save the world. It wasn’t their fault that the world was beyond saving. That all you could really do was rescue a small number of people bobbing in the muck. Not that he was any kind of hero. He’d damned far more people than he’d saved.

Tavi leaned back in his chair, feigning ease he didn’t remotely feel. “Are enough of your competitors confirmed? That’s all that really matters.”

Aston’s petulant pout brightened. “Yes. Yes, the room is guaranteed to be packed.”

Good.Not just for Mirko’s aims but for his. “You should move it up,” he suggested. Tate and Richter’s idea, really, but he was loath to give them credit even in his own mind. “To keep everyone on their toes. Change it to tomorrow. If the venue is ready, then why wait? Those who are serious about the product will show. Those who aren’t? They weren’t worth your time anyway.”

He’d been saying similar things for two hundred years. Most of them to arrogant men who thought their version of control was revolution. Aston and his ilk weren’t new. They were just arrogant. Hungry. Greedy. Qualities people associated with Tavi as well. Because of how he chose to spend his time. Where he chose to commit his loyalties. Maybe they weren’t wrong. Maybe Finian was right to be disappointed in him because he reveled in this role.

“Do it,” he urged Mirko. “Move up the auction. Show them your might.”

The arms dealer seemed to like that idea. He scrambled for his phone, fingers flying across the screen. Tavi didn’t dare count it a win. Not until a good ten minutes later when Mirko declared that he’d indeed moved the auction up to tomorrow and anyone “worth a damn” would be there. Good. But also bad. Tavi poured himself some more liquor from the bar set up beneath the hotel suite’s windows. “What happens to the serum after the auction?” he prompted slyly. “We both know you won’t let a single one of those people walk out of the room with it.”

“It will go where it belongs,” Mirko brayed like a jackass. “That is all anyone outside this room needs know.”

So everything, everyone, had only one destination. Roman Hollister’s island. The mysterious fucking island that Tavi had been trying to land an invite to for ages. He was trapped between elation and frustration. To be so close to one’s goal yet so far away…it was more torment than even a vampire of his age could comprehend. But he’d promised. He’d sworn. It had given him a purpose that he couldn’t abandon now.

Tavi was an excellent vampire. He’d killed and fed and triumphed in his immortality. He was not a good person. So be it. That was the price he paid. “I want to go,” he said, taking that calculated risk. Because if not now, then when? “Take me with you, Mirko. I’ve seen you through this far. Let me see it through the rest of the way.”

Aston sprawled back in his seat. Eyes bright with victory, with pride. He had no idea that a viper sat in his midst. Such was the arrogance of these kinds of men. “Yes,” he said. “I will put you on the next flight manifest. You, as tainted as you are, should see what we have accomplished. What we will accomplish.”

A backhanded compliment. Tavi had smiled through millions of such comments. And he did so again. Him and his tainted blood, his tainted skin. Fuck you, you fucking pendejo, he thought as he kept grinning. “That’s all I want,” he said. “I want to be witness to the future you’ve dreamed, Mirko.”

He wanted to be witness. He wanted to tear it apart. But the latter was his secret, no one else’s. Not his filthy, beautiful Finian’s. Not that noble warrior Grace’s. Let them continue to think what they would of him.

“Good!” Mirko crowed with laughter. His florid face, so flushed with liquor, showed his ease and his arrogance. “They can’t stop the tide, Estrada. They can try, but they will fail.”

Men like this had run the world for thousands of years. They thought themselves immortal. But they weren’t. Not even the oldest, most powerful supernatural creature was immortal. Death came for everyone in the end. He’d seen empires rise and fall. Dictatorships wither. It didn’t matter who was in the White House. Who maneuvered behind the scenes. Death was the one thing none of these megalomaniacs could escape.

“Why are you trying to stop me, Octavio? Our goals are fundamentally the same.” She perches on the top of the crumbling wall, half over, half close.

He could reach her. One supernatural leap is all it would take. He can’t say what keeps him from dragging her down by the ankle. “No, querida. You’re a crusader for justice. I am a realist. So our goals will never be the same.”

“Bullshit.” She laughs. “And that’s why you’ll never catch up to me. No matter how hard you try.”

Bullshit. If he had to kill a thousand people to get to her, he would. Tavi was so fucking tired of idealism. All he wanted was certainties. An auction tomorrow. A flight after that. Access. Answers. Her. Finian thought there was more to him than that. Some deep core of emotion that had made them fall in love more than fifty years ago. No. No, there was nothing deeper to be found than what Tavi displayed. He was undead. Not of the living. This was what they so conveniently forgot. He’d removed himself from the human equation. He was beyond their petty squabbles and pettier ideals.

“Liar.” She laughs against his ear. “You’re not stone, Octavio. Not impervious.”

Carajo. No. He shoved her voice back into the far reaches of his gut. He’d been so good, such an expert, at pushing both her and Finian aside. At locking them away in boxes. That she was rearing her head now meant he was dangerously close to unraveling. Tavi sat forward, breathing deeply of stale apartment air that he didn’t need to stay alive. Fuck, he hated this. When he let the mask drop. When he remembered. When he had those pricks of conscience, as small as they were. It was much easier to be cool and removed, to play at being the age-old creature with no mortal cares. He did that like he used to breathe. Without thinking. Without contemplating how exactly it moved him forward.

“And where are you moving forward to?”He could hear two voices asking him that simultaneously. One deploying a thick Irish brogue, the other a musical Bengali lilt that held just a dash of tartness. Like the sweet limes that grew in her homeland.

The ominous crinkle of tarp brought him forth from his dangerous ruminations. Two of Mirko’s thugs, the ones he’d nicknamed Bobo and Tonto, had brought in a length of black plastic and spread it across the sitting room floor. Nothing good ever came of somebody laying down a tarp. The Cipriani’s management was not going to be pleased with whatever came next.

“You want to bear witness, Estrada?” Mirko asked gleefully. “You can begin now.”

A third henchman whom Tavi couldn’t have identified if his undead life depended on it wrangled Dr. Gary Schoenlein into the room, tossing the unfortunate man onto the plastic like he was nothing more substantial than a sack of garbage. Carajo, he thought again, for far less pleasant reasons than before. The scientist had delivered the serum but failed in so many other ways when his clinic had been breached. He had to pay. Such was the way of things. That did not mean that Tavi wanted to see it.

He killed out of necessity. For sustenance. For his goals. He didn’t revel in it. It didn’t give him an erection. It didn’t make him feel powerful. These little petty tyrants like Mirko Aston…this was how they made themselves important. By making underlings cower on a tarp, weeping for their lives.

“Please,” Schoenlein begged. “Please, Mirko, I swear I’ll do better. I’ll be more vigilant.”

For all the good it would do him. He’d handed over his research along with the product. He was expendable. The scientist who’d synthesized a variation of the miraculous serum that could transform mere humans into hybrid shape-shifters probably deserved a better death than this. Something that recognized the leaps he’d made, the risks he’d taken, in copying military secrets for private gain. He didn’t receive it. He died like a traitor, like a prisoner of war. Shot in the back of the head, execution-style, as Tavi watched and didn’t flinch. Tonto and Bobo, for all that he called them fools, were efficient. They left no blood spatter on the walls. And the tarp took care of everything else. Except for Aston’s laughter. That splashed the walls and the ceiling, even more garish than streaks of gore.

Octavio Estrada had to be impervious. He had to be made of stone.

Because to be anything else was nothing short of self-destruction.

* * *

Joaquin tried to get everyone on the stateside team together for a “Third Shift family dinner” every few months. They hadn’t hosted one since losing Mack and welcoming JP to the fold. There just hadn’t been a right moment, a time when almost everybody was on premises at HQ. So when the announcement popped up on his wrist comm, Elijah wasn’t surprised. He was, however, slightly miffed at the timing. Now? Really?

Yes, really,Joaquin texted back within moments. Call it a team-building exercise. You and Jack love those, right, Bossman?

Jackson, much to his private dismay, had yet to earn the title of “Bossman” or anything else remotely respectful. And certainly nothing as personal as “Teacha.” “You think I’m going to call a white man ‘jefe’?” Joaquin had scoffed during one of their movie nights. “Dream on.”

Jack still showed up to each and every dinner. Not necessarily because hope sprang eternal but because Joaquin’s chivo guisado and mangú were beautiful enough to make angels weep. With a scant two hours until mealtime and entirely too much on his mind, Elijah had no hope of competing. He wasn’t going to impress Meghna with his cooking skills today, though Mum had made sure he’d learned everything right alongside his sisters. “Up for dinner?” he murmured, gently elbowing her.

She’d been glued to her multiple phones and her tablet since the photos of her ex had arrived, growing grimmer and grimmer by the moment. He didn’t know what to say to her to make it better. And maybe there was nothing he could say. Maybe being surrounded by 3S operatives was the best possible conversation.

“Food?” she said absently. “What’s food?”

Blasphemy.Though it occurred to him that they’d barely eaten between now and Aston’s party. Not unless you counted eating dick and eating pussy. And man could not live on that alone. So that was how they found themselves taking the lift two floors down to Joaquin’s place, armed with two bottles of wine and some sort of appetizer out of Chrissy Teigen’s Cravings that Meghna had whipped up in a pinch out of the paltry contents of his cabinets.

They were met with a party. Gracie and Finn and the lawyer whom Elijah suspected he was going to see much more often. Danny and Yulia, his wife, had surfaced from their honeymoon period. Jack was nursing a drink in the corner and pretending he wasn’t enjoying himself. And of course Joaquin was handing out brimming glasses of pisco sour. It was a Peruvian cocktail, not Dominican, but Joaquin insisted they “didn’t discriminate when it came to good booze.”

That was far from the only debate of the gathering. Especially when Elijah dared show up empty-handed save for alcohol. “Excuse me. Active missions,” he pointed out huffily. “Did Gracie bring something? Why am I the only one on the hook?”

“I brought the entertainment,” Grace said dryly, tilting her head at Finn. “I don’t cook if I can help it.”

“Can’t boil water?” Meghna asked sympathetically, only to be met with a firm shake of the other woman’s head.

“I didn’t say I can’t cook. I said I don’t cook,” corrected Grace, gesturing with her beer. “Not for this bunch of cretins. You start cooking for a boys’ club, next thing you know you’re doing their laundry, and Elijah may think I’m Wendy Darling, but I’m certainly not Snow White. I don’t need to see Sleepy, Happy, Dopey, and Groucho’s dirty drawers.”

“Just mine,” Finn added helpfully. “Except I don’t wear drawers.”

“We know, you go commando,” Elijah groaned at the same time that Nate said, “Objection, Your Honor, that’s a lie.”

Pandemonium broke out at that. Complete with Nate offering to introduce “Exhibit A: black silk boxers” into evidence and Joaquin protesting, “Not on my dinner table, you don’t!” When Elijah looked over at Meghna, she was alight with laughter. Near to wheezing. Her glass of pisco was already empty. Her eyes…her eyes were full. Yeah. Dinner with Third Shift was telling her everything he wanted her to know. You’re welcome here. You’re safe here. You belong.

Everything Third Shift had whispered to him so many years ago.

“You’re different, Teacha. Since you came back from the desert.” Naomi swings his nephew up onto her hip, careful to shake her braids away from her son’s curious grip.

He sets down a forkful of his mum’s curry goat. He hopes this isn’t a prelude to some lecture about PTSD, which the Apex doctors assured him he most certainly did not have. He’s been doing all right, all things considered. Better than a lot of men who came back. “Different how?” he huffs.

“You visit more, for one!” Ciara shouts from the kitchen. The best ears in the family, the best hunter. “We actually remember your face now.”

It’s not much of a compliment. His visits while he was in the service were so rare as to be nonexistent. Now that he and Jack are busy getting Third Shift off the ground, he’s got maybe five minutes more spare time than he used to.

Naomi ignores their youngest sister, dark eyes narrowed in contemplation. Of all of them, she’s the most like Mum. A fierce protector of her kids. A taker of no bullshit. A person who sees straight through him. “I think you’re almost ready,” she says as little Winston grabs a braid with a crow of victory.

Knowing her, he already has a general idea. He shouldn’t even ask. It’s the same thing Mum’s been after him about for years. A wife, little ones, a pride of his own. He waits while she rescues her hair from the baby’s chubby fists before he can stuff it in his mouth and choke on the beads. Not that she can’t multitask. “Ready for what?” he prompts once Win’s been safely deposited in his playpen.

“To become who you were meant to be.”

“A husband and father?” he suggests dryly, going back to his food before it gets cold.

Naomi gives him a look that makes him feel like a toddler being put in his place. Right next to Winston on the floor. “No,” she says with a mix of amusement and patience. “A leader.”

A leader. Elijah didn’t feel like one most days. But right now? With his team roaring with laughter and camaraderie around him? With Meghna barefoot on Joaquin’s couch? He felt like he was a part of something bigger than just himself. This was why they did what they did. The fight was never going to be over, but this was what they were battling for. Friendship. Family. Love.

He reached out to Meghna, slipping his arm around her shoulders. And when she nestled into him, still giggling, he almost felt like happiness was possible. Like everything they wanted was in reach.

Did that make him a bloody fool? Probably. Did he care? Not one fucking bit.