Strangers of the Night

  Vadim had offered her a job. The first time around he’d found her and Phoenix at age sixteen, living on the streets. He’d offered them shelter and training then. This time he’d simply asked her if she’d like to work for him. She could keep her life here if she wanted. She didn’t have to give up her other activities, as he’d called them, but for the first time in a long time, Persephone thought she might like to. The grifting was getting old. The petty thievery less profitable. And the sex work...she thought again of Werner, and how even though their arrangement had been meant to be only business, in the end she’d hurt him, anyway.

  Also, there was Kane.

  It wouldn’t be long before he figured out she didn’t make her living in any honest way, if he hadn’t already. Once he did, even if he didn’t arrest her, there’d be no way for her to keep living here. Not seeing him every day and knowing that he thought she was a criminal...well, she totally was a criminal, Persephone reminded herself as she gave Interflix the go-ahead to keep playing episodes of a ’90s sitcom she’d never seen the first time around.

  Thinking of Kane now made her shift and squirm a little on the couch. It had been over a week since she’d tried to seduce him and been summarily turned away without so much as an inch of him inside her. She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about his mouth on her, though. How his tongue had lapped, slow and steady, pushing her closer and closer to the edge.

  Damn, she needed him. She wanted him, anyway, and for Persephone that had to count as the same thing. Didn’t it? Leaning back against the couch, the mindless TV show blaring in the background, she closed her eyes. Her hands drifted over her body. Her fingers slipped beneath the waistband of her jeans, the fit tight and not giving her much room to maneuver. She was already slick and hot, and she let out a small sigh of pleasure as she found her clit.

  * * *

  Kane is above her, his gaze intense. He moves his hands over her body, finding all the places that make her respond. When he dips his mouth to taste her flesh, Persephone arches into the embrace. His lips find her nipples, one and then the other, tugging each until they stand up in tight points that ache to be caressed further.

  Lower, lower, he moves, tongue tracing wet patterns on her skin as he pauses for a moment to nibble her hip. She laughs at the tickle and his hot breath puffs out on skin dampened by his mouth. When he moves between her legs, she lets out a long, low moan of pleasure that he echoes, and his hum against her pushes her higher.

  Higher.

  * * *

  With a gasp, Persephone paused in her self-love, listening for the sound of the knock she was sure she’d just heard. Shit, it was someone at the door. Quickly she pulled her hand out of her jeans and got off the couch, running her fingers through her hair and trying to shake off the swell of arousal still surging through her. She absolutely did not want to answer the door to find Mrs. Cohen in 3B needed her toilet unclogged while she looked like she’d been happily getting herself off to fantasies of Kane.

  Mrs. Cohen was not on the other side of the door.

  It was Phoenix.

  “You’re being an asshole,” Persephone said through gritted teeth even as she kept walking.

  Her brother laughed, which only made her angrier. “Keep moving.”

  “You didn’t even let me pack a bag!” Or grab her book full of cash, and that was the real shame. But every time she thought about stopping, she took another step.

  That was Phoenix’s talent. Persephone could make other people see what she wanted them to see, but her brother could make them do things he wanted them to do. As with her talent, it was limited. He couldn’t command an army, for example, but then, he didn’t really have to. Not when he could focus his will on one person who was helpless not to resist.

  “You’re being—”

  “An asshole. You said so. Come on. I have a car.”

  Persephone chortled. “Oh, yeah? Where did you get a car?”

  “I made a woman give it to me,” her brother said with a cat-eating-the-cream grin that Persephone refused to admit she’d missed. Once in the passenger seat, she made sure to buckle up. Phoenix was a terrible driver. They both were. No parents to teach them. She didn’t even have her license. He probably didn’t, either, but he wouldn’t care. There wasn’t much to worry about if you got pulled over when you could tell the cop to simply walk away and let you go.

  “Where are we going?” Persephone asked. “If you tell me to rob a bank, I’m going to punch you in the junk.”

  “I’ll stop you.”

  “I’ll do it so fast you won’t have time,” she countered. “And I notice you didn’t say we weren’t going to rob a bank.”

  Phoenix shot her an amused look as he put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking spot without bothering to look. “We’re not going to rob a bank. We’re going to save Leila.”

  Persephone groaned. “Phoenix, no. Why? What on earth do you want to do that for?”

  “Because she’s our friend, and I think she’s in danger!”

  For a moment she considered not telling him that Vadim had approached her about taking a job. She wasn’t in the habit of keeping secrets from her brother, not exactly, even though there’d been plenty of times when she hadn’t told him the entire truth. He always sensed it, though, and all he had to do was tell her to give up the story, and she would.

  “Vadim came to see me. He said he had a job for me.”

  Phoenix didn’t look surprised. “Yeah. Me too.”

  “Then why are we doing some kind of, what, secret mission? Leila said she was fine. Vadim approached both of us... Holy shit, Phoenix! Look out!” Persephone screamed hoarsely as her brother nearly got in a head-on collision with a delivery truck because their car was lumbering down the wrong side of a one-way street.

  With a laugh just short of maniacal, Phoenix swerved to avoid the truck, which let out a long, angry bleat of its horn. He took the corner too fast. Persephone closed her eyes.

  “This is not how I want to die, Phoenix!”

  Another laugh. “Oh, come on. It’s going to fine.”

  She risked a peek, relieved to see that he was at least going down the street the right way now. They drove in relative silence for the next half an hour, with Phoenix changing the radio station every few minutes and singing along, badly, with all the songs. No conversation beyond that. Frankly, Persephone didn’t have anything to say.

  When they pulled up in front of a truly disgusting-looking roadside motel that looked like something out of a horror movie, she finally found her voice. “No. Oh my god, I’m getting hives just thinking about the bedbug bites.”

  “We’re not living here. We’re just staying here to meet someone on the inside.”

  “The inside of what?” Persephone twisted in her seat. “Damn it, Phoenix, since when did you turn into, what, an international spy? What the hell is going on? Who are we meeting here?”

  “Her name is Samantha. She’s got information I want about the Crew.”

  “And how did you figure this out?”

  “Met her on Connex,” he said easily with a wave of his hand before he turned off the ignition and gave her a smug grin. “She tries to beat me at WordPals, but she hasn’t yet.”

  “What makes you think she’s going to give you some kind of secret information about the Crew so that you can bust in and ‘save’—” Persephone used air quotes “—Leila?”

  “I didn’t tell her that’s what I wanted.” Without waiting for her, Phoenix got out of the car.

  Of course, Persephone followed, because he was manipulating her like a marionette. It showed when she stumbled on the cracked piece of concrete that kept cars from driving straight through the window of the craptastic motel. She didn’t fall, but she did let out a muttered curse that had him laughing at her as she managed to keep h
er feet. He was already holding open the door to the room, ushering her inside, then shutting and locking the door behind them.

  It wasn’t any better in there than it looked from the outside. Sagging double beds covered in plaid bedspreads that didn’t quite match. Faded watercolors on the stucco walls. Through an open door she could see a white-tiled bathroom from which the faintest stink of air freshener wafted.

  “Does she think she’s meeting you here to fuck?” Persephone asked, since her brother hadn’t answered.

  He gave her a glance over his shoulder as he went to the window on the far side of the room to twitch the curtains and peek out. “I don’t think so. It’s not like that.”

  “So why, then, would she come and help you?”

  Phoenix shrugged. “She thinks I can help her find someone who’s missing.”

  “Why on earth would she think that?” Persephone put her hands on her hips. “That’s not your skill.”

  “No, but I can connect with you. And with the rest of them, if I try,” he said.

  The rest of them. The other kids from Collins Creek. Persephone knew her brother could sense her general location, even when they were far apart, but this was the first she’d heard that he could do that with anyone else.

  “He’s our brother,” Phoenix said at her look.

  Persephone’s mouth opened, gaping. Her eyebrows rose. “But we don’t have—”

  “He was younger. He’d just been tested when they raided. But same mother, same father.”

  “That doesn’t make him our brother,” Persephone said after a moment.

  Phoenix shrugged, expression neutral. She studied him. In childhood, it had been the two of them. For so long after that, they’d been everything to each other, the only other person they could trust. She loved her brother more than anything in the world, but she didn’t always like him.

  “When is Samantha getting here?”

  “I said I’d call when I got here. You hungry?” He leaned to pull a sheaf of what looked like takeout menus from the drawer in the nightstand. “You got the app on your phone that lets you call for delivery?”

  “Yeah.” She was hungry as well as disgruntled, and she knew that a well-fed Phoenix would be easier to deal with. “What are you in the mood for?”

  “Chinese.” He settled further onto the pillows with his own phone, tapping out some messages.

  Persephone took care of the food order and checked out the bathroom, grimacing at the condition of it. She’d rather be dirty. She washed her hands, though. Catching sight of herself in the mirror, she took a few minutes to swipe away the smears of mascara that had crept down her cheeks. Her hair needed a trim. With a sigh, she leaned on the sink and closed her eyes, wondering what the hell Phoenix had gotten them both into.

  “You want to hate me,” her brother said quietly from the doorway. “But I know you can’t. I know you want to help Leila.”

  “If you see her and she tells you to your face that she’s all right, will you lay off this ridiculous idea that she’s been kidnapped or something?” She looked at him in the mirror, then turned to face him. “Will you?”

  Phoenix shrugged. “If it feels like she’s telling the truth, yes. If I ask her to be honest and she tells me that she’s really happy there with them, yes. I’ll lay off.”

  There was more to this than his concern for Leila. Persephone knew it, because she knew the way her brother operated. She also knew she wasn’t going to be able to figure it out right away.

  The food arrived and Phoenix made the guy leave it without being paid, something that annoyed Persephone even though she’d done her share of cheating people out of food before. Still, they both fell on the fried rice and lo mein with the same appetite and polished off the order within minutes. Then they turned on the television, and despite her disgust with the room and the situation overall, Persephone found herself drifting to sleep.

  “Who is he?” Phoenix’s voice curled out of the darkness toward her, across the space between the beds.

  Persephone yawned. “Who is who?”

  “There’s someone. I can feel him in there. He’s taking up space in your head.”

  She didn’t answer right away. He could make her tell him the way he’d made her give him the bank account information, the way he’d made her get in the car. For a second she thought about forcing him to make her, but then, what difference did it make? No matter how annoying he was or how angry she got at him, Phoenix would always be her brother. The only family she really had.

  “His name’s Kane.”

  Phoenix snorted soft laughter. “What the hell kind of name is Kane?”

  “What kind of name is Phoenix?” she asked flatly. “Or Persephone?”

  “The man and woman who genetically produced us were messed-up people,” her brother said.

  The description of the people who had indeed created them but had never been parents made her laugh. “Maybe his parents were messed up, too.”

  “Is he a mess?”

  “No,” she said quietly after a few seconds had passed in silence. “I don’t think he is. I mean, everyone has their damage, right, but no. I don’t think Kane’s messed up the way we are.”

  “Nobody’s messed up the way we are,” Phoenix told her. “Not in this whole world.”

  Chapter 9

  Kane had found Persephone’s apartment empty, which wouldn’t have been alarming except that her door had swung open at his knock. Unlocked. A chair had been knocked over at the kitchen table. Her laptop was open, the screen dark but coming to life when he tapped the keypad. Aside from that, nothing else seemed out of place, but that was more than enough for him.

  Someone had taken her. He knew it in his gut, and he knew it was somehow related to the stranger. With a quick call to the department and his partner to tell them he’d be working on following up some leads and wouldn’t be in, Kane started figuring out how to find Persephone.

  First, the obvious choice. Her laptop screen had gone dark again, but a quick tap of the keys brought up her screen. She did not have it lock protected, something that was going to make his job so much easier, even though it surprised him. It shouldn’t have. In his experience more people didn’t password protect their laptops than did. He gave her files a quick glance, not bothering to read any of them, not even the ones with super bland and therefore intriguing titles, like Accounting Receipts.

  He found what he was looking for after a minute or so. The Find My Phone app was, as he’d hoped, connected to her phone, and also not password protected. All it took was a quick few taps of the keys to bring it up and he was looking at a map with her phone’s location pinpointed with a small blue peg. She wasn’t moving, there was that, but what she was doing in the Sentinel Motel was going to be his next task to figure out.

  It was possible she was meeting someone, he thought. A lover? A client, more likely, Kane thought with a grim press of his lips together, thinking of how he’d seen her coming out of that downtown hotel dressed for something more than a midafternoon business meeting.

  Grabbing her laptop, he slipped it into the soft fabric case patterned in skulls and roses that she’d left on the table. He’d need to get on the internet to access her location again, but that wouldn’t be a problem. It would take him over an hour and forty minutes to get to the Sentinel, and if he found after assessing the situation that she didn’t need his help, he’d discreetly leave without her ever knowing he’d turned into a creeper. But if she did need help, he thought grimly, whoever was hurting her better hope they knew how to run, because he was going hunt them down and make sure they paid for bringing her harm.

  * * *

  Slowly, slowly, he runs his fingertips up her arms. Then down. Tickling touches across the slope of her belly between her hip bones. Over her thighs. Pausing, he touches
the backs of her knees as he pushes her legs up, opening her to his view. She is caught in his gaze, muscles tight and trembling, waiting for his touch.

  He teases her.

  Long minutes pass beneath this exquisite torment while she writhes and moans; his name on her lips is like candy. Sweetness. Magic.

  The softness of his hot breath on her slick flesh makes her wriggle and cry out again. Body straining. She wants to thread her fingers through his hair and push him against her but satisfies herself with twisting her grip into the crisp white sheets.

  That first touch of his tongue against her is so good, so fucking good, that all she can do is whimper. Arch. Roll her hips up to get more of him, get herself against him harder, get his tongue to press on her clit and lick and lick and lick...

  Pleasure controls her. No words. Nothing but this aching and brilliant desire flooding every inch while she shudders and says his name over and over and over again.

  * * *

  “Kane.” Persephone woke with a start, her body flooding with embarrassed heat when she sat up and saw Phoenix giving her a bemused look.

  Her brother gestured with the TV remote. “You didn’t tell me you had a boyfriend.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend. He lives in my building. That’s all.” She got out of bed and went to the bathroom. She desperately wanted a glass of cold water, but the tap gave her only lukewarm and she wasn’t sure she trusted drinking it, anyway. She settled for wetting a cleanish-looking washcloth and putting it on the back of her neck as she studied her face in the mirror. Through the door, she called out, “How long was I asleep?”

  “Only about twenty minutes. You weren’t snoring.”

  “I wasn’t worried about snoring.” She rolled her eyes. She was more worried she’d been moaning or something really embarrassing.

  A knock at the door had her turning. She was expecting the mysterious Samantha, but when her brother opened the door, she saw a familiar face. Framed in the doorway, Kane looked taller and broader than she remembered him being, or perhaps that was because he looked so menacing. His head swung back and forth, gaze sweeping the room and taking in Phoenix, the pair of rumpled beds.