Pretty Little Lion by Suleikha Snyder
4
Grace Maria Leung was the smartest person in any given room. She’d never had cause to doubt that. This wasn’t arrogance on her part, just a statement of fact. Smart. Responsible. Controlled. Always on the ball. Third Shift’s in-house medic and all-around science wonk. She had a list of academic and professional achievements a mile wide. And a list of frustrations just as long. At the top of it, in perpetuity, was Finian Conlan. Clever. Impetuous. Never serious if he could help it. He was the only vampire on the American team, and that was plenty as far as everyone was concerned.
She watched him stalk across the office like it was a runway at Fashion Week, his black leather duster unfurling behind him like a cape. One would think he did it for effect, but no, that was just Finn on the average Friday. On any day that ended in y, really. They were both on the clock. Third Shift required that at least three operatives be at HQ at any given time, and with Elijah out on a mission, Jackson off doing whatever it was that rich white men did on the weekends, and their booed-up members enjoying some well-deserved time with their partners, that left Joaquin, Grace, and Finn to mind the store. Which really meant Joaquin and Grace were minding the store while Finn provided atmosphere and entertainment.
Looking at him, it was hard to believe he’d nearly bled out all over her hands less than a month ago. Vampire physiology was a marvel unto itself, and intellectually Grace knew that he’d healed easily after feeding, but there was no residual emotional trauma whatsoever. Like he’d recovered from a paper cut or a hangnail. It was remarkable. It was infuriating. Because she had yet to recover from that night. From everything that had happened.
She’s rarely seen Finn so listless, so pale. For an undead man, he’s the most vibrant, alive person she’s ever met. She and Nate help him over the threshold of his apartment at HQ. “Like I’m your bride?” he quips, his voice more thin and reedy than it is flirtatious.
It takes a lot to eclipse flirtation in Finian Conlan’s world. The wounds from the avian shifter’s claws dug deep. Nate’s new to all of this. He hasn’t experienced this side of Finn. Never watched him fight. Never watched him falter. Never known anything but the rogue. So the human lawyer is just as pale, shaken even, as they wrangle Finn into his room and strip off his clothes. Grace is used to being the adult in the room, the one who keeps a cool head and a steady hand. But this is something else. This is something bigger. No…she’s wrong. It’s smaller. Compressed and tight. Wrapped around the three of them. A rope. A net. A spell.
“Stay,” Finn murmurs, his eyes bluer and brighter than normal. As if dancing close to death gave him an electric charge, turned up his wattage. “Don’t leave,” he pleads as they press him down onto the mattress, tuck him beneath his garishly obvious silk sheets. “Don’t leave me,” he says again. And his hands echo the order. Skating up her arms, gently circling.
She shouldn’t listen. She should go. They’ve worked together for years without taking this step, and there’s no reason to change that up now. Right? Making it a question is the mistake. Because then there’s a counterargument. Isn’t this step inevitable? Finian Conlan has fucked half the Eastern Seaboard—why should she be exempt?
Nate moves before she does. The civilian. The outsider. He checks the healing wounds under the bandages she applied in the med bay. Far better than the field dressing on the floor in Brooklyn. Nate’s touch is professional, impersonal, chaste. All up until he leans in and kisses Finn full on the mouth. Maybe it’s leftover adrenaline from their adventures at the warehouse. Maybe it’s an impulse he’s been repressing for days. It doesn’t matter, because he gives in wholly and unashamedly. And Grace…what kind of person is she if she doesn’t do the same?
So she kisses. And she strokes. And she succumbs. Climbing into bed on the other side of her infuriating partner, her closest friend.
The friend who sauntered up now like he’d never been inside her, never made her come. “What’s on tap for tonight, Gracie? Anything exciting?”
She was used to neutrality, to not giving a single one of her inner thoughts away. Her default mode was “inscrutable.” So her reply was just as casual as his question. “No emergencies as of yet. Joaquin’s running through everything the Spider’s picking up at the Manhattan Grand.” She nodded toward Joaquin’s desk, where they were parked in front of multiple huge monitors and surrounded by bags of Oreos and licorice. The hacker thrived on this sort of thing. On amassing knowledge, on sifting through data like a forty-niner panning for gold.
Finian hooked his coat on the divider of his cubicle—despite the fact that there were coatracks aplenty at various locations on the office floor—and pushed up the sleeves of his brick-red pullover. “Let me guess: a lot of sexts, entirely too many dick pics, and some marginally useful intel.”
“That’s your phone,” Grace said dryly as she minimized her email window and her folder full of expense reports—the truly thrilling side of black ops. Much like in medicine, the paperwork almost always outweighed the heroics.
“Nonsense,” Finn scoffed at her, wickedly overactive eyebrows doing their level best. “There’s no such thing as too many dick pics on my phone.”
She didn’t want to laugh. Laughing only encouraged him. But a snort slipped out along with her eye roll. He flopped down in a rolling chair, grinning widely as he wheeled from side to side just inches from her personal bubble. He was like a house cat sometimes. A bratty tom. She half expected him to walk across her keyboard. And she half expected him to ignore her entirely. As mercurial with his attentions as the weather. She was the steady one. The person who everyone at Third Shift counted on. The doctor whose patients looked to her for miracles. Smart, responsible, and controlled…but who the hell was looking out for her?
“You know better than to ask that, baby,”she could just imagine her mother saying. “Nobody looks out for Black women but other Black women.” And yet the rest of the American population still insisted Black women were going to save them all. When they hadn’t bothered to elect the one who ran for president in 2020 to do that very thing. Funny how that worked. Funny how, even on a small scale, Grace was expected to be strong and superhuman…more so than even the actual supernaturals around her. She could do it. Sure. It was a survival mechanism. Especially in this day and age. But that didn’t mean she always wanted to.
“Gracie?” She heard the frown in Finn’s voice before she glanced up and saw it. “You all right, love?”
Now that was a loaded question. Did he really want the answer? She’d caught him looking at his phone more than once over the past several weeks. Hoping for texts or missed calls from Nate. For some sign that the city’s most eligible legal eagle would fly back to this particular roost. Nate he worried about. The unknown quantity. But Grace…? She was a fixed point. A sure thing. His partner in all things…now including sex. He knew he could stroll into HQ and flirt and tease and she’d be here.
“Have you ever not gotten your way?” she wondered before she could think better of it, before she could rephrase. Fuck. In for a penny, in for a pound. “Have you ever been rejected? Or do you just annoy everyone into submission?”
Her cocky asshole vampire shocked her then. Without even meaning to. Because he stilled. His gaze dimmed. And then he looked down. Away. His pale throat worked as he swallowed. All of it added up to an answer even before he finally spoke. “You planning to reject me? Is that what this is?”
God, no.Because if she was Finian’s fixed point, he was hers. Her constant and her constant pain in the ass. She adored him. Couldn’t imagine her life without him. Even when he was a total shit. “Could I reject you?” she countered rather than confess that right now with their teammate just a few feet away. “Is that a thing that even happens? You charm every single person you meet.”
“Not true,” he huffed automatically. “I kill some of them.” She didn’t even need to quell him with a sharp word or a withering look. He immediately barreled on with a more sincere response, his voice dropping to a velvet-soft burr. “I have lost, Gracie. Again and again. My family. My friends. My lovers.” He shook his head, eyes far away, probably seeing decades she hadn’t even been born for. “When you’ve lived as long as I have, you don’t get to keep them all. Everyone leaves while you stay on.”
Her heart twisted. Her stomach turned. And guilt for her petty resentments flooded her chest. What felt permanent and sure to her… It was just a blink in the life of a man who could potentially live for centuries. He’d almost died last month, but odds were that he would outlive her. Finn only took her for granted because he’d learned to take everyone for granted. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I’ve never considered how rough that must be.”
“I didn’t tell you for pity, love.” Finn bumped her knee with his. “I told you so you know that my past doesn’t matter. It can’t. So everything important to me is here. It’s now. It’s you and Nathaniel and this place. Third Shift. I hold tight to what I have, because I know it’ll eventually slip through my fingers.”
“And then we’ll be your past, too, won’t we?” Grace was seeing him with new eyes. Naked in a different way than he’d been when they’d had sex with Nate. There were sides to Finian Conlan she was still uncovering. Even after four years working and laughing and fighting together. “We’ll cease to matter, too.”
“No,” he said swiftly. He took her hands from the desk, where they’d been poised over the keyboard in a pretense of typing, and closed them both between his. “This is where it stops, Grace of my heart. You’re my present. You’re my future. I’m not looking further than that.”
Oh. Tingles traveled from where their fingers met to her arms and her shoulders. Down and up the line of her spine. The intensity of Finn’s words, his stare, his gentle touch, was hot enough to sear off her clothes.
“I was giving you space,” he murmured. “Because Nate wants space. But you don’t, do you? You’re not pushing me away.”
“I couldn’t if I tried,” she admitted with a laugh, maneuvering her chair so they were knee to knee and forehead to forehead. Leaning in to each other. “And I wouldn’t try.”
He didn’t do anything so unprofessional as kiss her in the middle of the office—though she wouldn’t have put it past him. Instead, he just stayed with her there for a moment, letting her breathe in the wintergreen and smoke scent of him as he stroked her palms, her wrists, and the backs of her hands. “I don’t have dick pics on my mobile,” he confessed after a while, pressing his mouth to her knuckles. “But I do have pictures of you. Hundreds. Like a proper stalker.”
Only from Finn would and could that be a compliment. As well as a comfort. He cared. He wasn’t immune to people, to time, to her. Grace Maria Leung was the smartest person in any given room…and she still had so much to learn.
* * *
Manhattan after midnight was a perfect hunting ground. Eerily silent, hauntingly still in some places…and yet still somehow in motion everywhere else. The neon in the signs. The taxis and livery cabs on Eighth Avenue. The drones in the air. The rats scurrying amid the trash bags piled on the curb. Tavi felt more comfortable with the rodents than with the humans he’d left upstairs at the Grand. He reveled in the cold November air on his face, welcome after the overstuffed air of that VIP suite, which had reeked of liquor and marijuana and sweat. He’d have to go back. His presence would be missed eventually. But for now, he was free. Free to hunt, free to feed, free to be.
His phone buzzed in his jacket pocket. More messages from Sasha Nichols, no doubt. The pendejo had decided it was safer to taunt him via text than in person, claiming bragging rights about the all-too-coveted product being manufactured in Connecticut and its safe delivery to Mirko. Congratulations. Give the man a prize. Those were accolades Tavi didn’t need. His place in the organization was secure by virtue of what he was. Vampire, night-stalker, predator. A creature following a lone human west down a dark street. Across Ninth and then Tenth, with the West Side Highway beckoning just beyond.
Tavi wouldn’t kill this one. That was wasteful. That was wrong. He preferred to end the lives that deserved it. All this white man in his midfifties had done was be convenient. Warm and full of blood. Lean and clad in an MTA worker’s uniform, he fought when Tavi swooped in on him…but only until the bite. Then he relaxed in the thrall of it. In the circle of Tavi’s arms and against the wall of one of the fancy car dealerships that lined this stretch of Eleventh Avenue.
There were blood bags. Animals. Alternatives. But nothing came close to the true feeding. To the hot, gushing fluid filling his mouth and flooding his veins. The heartbeat echoing in his chest, in his ears. Life. That thing that had been so far out of his reach for almost two centuries now. It was close, beautifully close, in these moments. Tavi didn’t hunt for cruelty’s sake. To feel powerful or vicious. He did it to remember what he’d once been and would never be again.
Minutes later, the man continued on his path toward the Hudson, no worse for wear. Perhaps a little dizzy, a little bruised. He would wonder how he hurt his neck. But he’d survive. And so would Tavi Estrada, thanks to the loan of a little blood. Had a drone recorded the encounter? Probably. Did he care? No. There were dozens of known vampires in New York City now. And he hadn’t left his quarry dead. A Sanctuary City had bigger problems than a postmidnight snack. The usual crop of rapists and murderers. ICE agents and Supernatural Regulation Bureau stooges still trying to do their dirty work. The rich thugs like Mirko and his ilk who always seemed to escape prosecution. The task force that monitored the surveillance feeds was overworked and underpaid and wouldn’t look twice at what looked like a quick fuck.
Tavi whistled as he turned back east. La Lupe’s “Con El Diablo en el Cuerpo.” With the devil in the body. The spring in his step and the swing in his hips was no affectation, and he was almost amused when he finally looked at his phone and spotted three new texts from the pathetic wannabe bear shifter.
Couldn’t take the heat Estrada?
Coward.
Mirko’s whore is gone 2. Have u seen her? R u with her?
Beyond absurd. He and Meghna were civil when they spoke, which was rarely. They took care to avoid one another, as if innately understanding that the only two people of color in Mirko Aston’s inner circle couldn’t be seen as allies, as potential coconspirators. He suspected she’d gone off with that strapping hired security guard she’d been flirting with right under Mirko’s nose. But he wasn’t about to share that speculation with the likes of Nichols. What or who Ms. Saunders did was her own affair—pun fully intended. As long as it didn’t interfere with his agenda.
Tavi took his time heading back toward the hotel, walking around and around Times Square, skirting the police checkpoint at Forty-Second Street. The NYPD seemed to interpret “Sanctuary City” as keeping people in as much as keeping ICE and other government agencies out. In line. In fear. Who was the real thing that went bump in the night? Supernaturals like him? Or humans like them?
He was no stranger to political oppression. He’d fought for Cuban independence from Spain. He’d lived through World Wars I and II and been there in Havana when Castro overthrew Batista. To say nothing of the last seventy-five years. So many wars. So many dictators—and unlike many of his Cuban brethren, he hadn’t fled the rule of one just to roll over for another. Tavi wasn’t a member of the Resistance, he wasn’t an idealist or anyone’s savior, but he continued to fight in his own way. As time marched on. As the death toll rose. Not all at his hands or teeth either. Tavi was merciless, pitiless, but he didn’t prey on the innocent. On anyone who wasn’t capable of fighting back. The sip from the man earlier…? Just that. A sip. A snack. Something to keep him going. Something to remind him of what he was—not that he ever forgot.
“You could be more,” she says with scorn. “But you refuse. Why is that?”
“Shut up,” he tells her. “You know nothing of me. While you flit about playing judge, jury, and executioner. Who gave you that right?”
“This world,” she spits back, brown eyes blazing. “And it gave you that right, too. If only you’d see it.”
It’s the last thing either of them say for a while as they dance across the rooftop trading punches and kicks. Neither of them holding back. He will feel her boot to his kidneys into the next day. She licks the blood from her split lip and laughs. He uses his enhanced speed. She conjures flame and flings a ball at him that he barely manages to duck.
Only two people in his overlong existence had ever shaken his foundation, challenged his choices. He’d left them both behind. Conscience was a hindrance in his business, not a help. The few lines he’d drawn for himself were just that. Few. Tavi Estrada, vampire for hire. That was who he had to be. Anything else was idealism. And this wasn’t the world for that.
Tavi almost let that line of thought guide him north a few blocks to Hector’s. The beloved café was another one of his lines, another one of his small concessions. The music and the memories and sometimes even the mambo. But no, that was for his Saturday nights. So instead, he stopped his contemplative circuit in front of the Manhattan Grand Hotel and stared up along the edifice. So many floors. So many windows. All hiding the evil that worked within. The evil that he was a part of.
This was the choice he’d made. This was where he belonged now. There was no going back. There was only going forward. Even if that led him straight to hell.