Page 71 of Villains Never Die

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Someone had graffitied the front of my building from the ground to the second-story windows, the sleek glass tainted with white paint that hadn’t dried yet.

Looking over the doors to the lobby was the eerie face of an owl, enormous eyes slitted in the white of its facial feathers.

Masked man.The spirits whispered as Rook and I climbed out of the car and let it idle along the street. A small crowd had gathered across the road, and one man snapped a photo with his phone.

“What’s with the bird?” Rook asked.

“I don’t know. I’m more worried about that.” I swiped my pointed finger from left to right across the building.

To all the sevens. Large and small, dozens of them scattered over the windows, stark against the darkened building.

“‘One evil with seven faces,’” he quoted the killer’s message.

“He’s escalating,” I muttered. “He’s not watching anymore. He wants me to know he’s here. He’s marking me.”

Trepidation twisted down my spine, then boiled into anger. Magic hummed at my fingertips, responding to a threat I couldn’t see.

A car door slammed behind me and Rook and I turned at the same time. Gray stepped from his vehicle and rushed over to observe the spectacle.

“When did this happen?” I demanded. “How did this happen?”

“Shit,” he cursed, staring up at the graffiti. “What the fuck is that? This is the first I’m hearing about it.”

“Then where were you? Where was security?” Someone somewhere fucked up and allowed this to happen.

“There was an explosion on the other side of the building,” he said. “Everyone had to evacuate, and security spent the last two hours trying to figure out what caused it.”

“He was trying to create a distraction,” Rook said, “and it worked.”

Gray turned slightly toward Rook, his gaze traveling up and down his body as he assessed him and realized who he was.

I cleared my throat. “This is Rook. Rook, meet Gray.”

A grin that was wholly inappropriate for the situation we stood in the middle of brightened Gray’s face. He extended a hand and shook Rook’s. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

“Focus,” I grumbled. “Was there any damage from the explosion?”

“A dumpster,” he said, “and one of the guard’s trucks blew up. Nothing major, and no one was hurt.”

“But it bought him time for this.” I stared up into the bird’s hollow eyes and an involuntary chill wracked my body.

Rook lifted his hand toward my shoulder and then thought the better of it, letting it fall to his side as more of my men gathered on the sidewalk. “Let’s just get inside.”

Inside, where I could warm up and maybe fold myself into Rook’s embrace to chase off the chill that wasn’t entirely fromthe weather. No, I refused to be rattled by this killer. Let the arsehole leave his messages. I would make myself the last person he wanted to fuck with.

“Hire someone to clean it up,” I told Gray. “Take photos of it first. I want to examine them in the morning, so meet me in my office at eight.”

Gray would make sure it all went smoothly now, but even as Rook and I rode the lift to the penthouse, I could not shake the tension that had gathered in every molecule of my body.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I lay on my side, face-to-face with Rook, one of my legs sandwiched between the powerful muscles of his thighs. We’d been silent a long time, lying there soaking up each other’s body heat.

“Are you afraid?” he asked, breaking the silence as he brushed a strand of hair off my temple. As soon as we’d made it upstairs, I’d allowed myself to become as rattled as I felt, safe behind the walls of my penthouse with Rook. My clothes were in a careless heap near the bedroom door and my hair had escaped its careful style and spread loose and disheveled over my pillow.

“No.”