I considered it, tipping my head off of Adam briefly before letting the air from my lungs on a soft sigh. "No, rumor says he can blow people up without bombs. He's one scary SOB. But my point was, his people are left without a leader while he's gone. They have no one to report to if they have any problems and they're Unseelie, the Darkest Fae. They wouldn’t ask for help, ever."
"That I can believe, I wouldn’t tell anyone else that you think the Horde King prances, or wears lipstick."
Somewhere, some place, someone was dying and I could feel it. "We have to figure this out, comb through these and find out what is connecting these victims. A place they go, or hell I don’t know a dating site maybe?"
Ryder laughed and the sound vibrated through me making my body respond in ways it shouldn’t have been able to after almost being blown up twice in two days. His face changed from hard lines to smooth and almost playful and I wondered what he would look like if he was making love to me…
His eyes flashed with heat as the thought occurred inside my head making me lose my train of thought, which was probably for the best. I needed to dig up more info on the details of the contract, ones that wouldn’t be common knowledge via Google. I was beginning to think he could tell when my thoughts tilted towards the gutter—and I was damn good at shielding my mind from everyone, but him.
Yet his eyes were damning, ancient ones that if you looked too long in them you could get lost inside their dangerous depths and never find your way out again. I shivered in Adam's arms. It didn’t go unnoticed by him or Ryder who awarded me a roguish grin.
"If your cold Syn, I can grab you another blanket," Adam said against my ear.
"If she's cold, I can take her to bed," Ryder injected smoothly, his smile still in place.
"I'm fine," I snapped too sharply which caused Ryder to widen his grin to a radiant smile. I melted further against Adam as if he could protect me from Ryder. It was futile. I don’t think anything could save me from the Dark Prince now.
Sixteen
We poured through the files for hours and found nothing. It was horrifying to find out that these murders had been happening for a little over a year. Alden had known about them and kept me out of the loop on purpose. Everyone was locking down, even Alden. Ryder was on the same page as the Paladins and wouldn’t let us out of his house in case we had made the hit list.
As if, I had a huge reputation for being damn good at killing those who needed it. I'd been great at puzzles—when they weren't missing most of their pieces that is. This one had so many missing that it was hard to tell which pieces fit and where they should be placed. I had grabbed several file folders and retreated to my room to look over them with as little distraction as possible—or one big distraction.
"Coming down to go swimming?" Larissa asked with a bright smile on her strawberry red lips.
I looked up from the pile of folders and shook my head. "Too much work to do, go have fun with your boy toy—which we still need to talk about Larissa."
She dropped her smile as she folded her arms across her white knitted bikini top. "You had Adrian Syn. You loved him enough to chance hurting the coven. Why should you get to be the only person to be happy?"
I rolled my eyes, "Adrian is dead, so if you have a point to make do it. I don't want to talk about him right now besides, you have no idea how much shit Adrian and I took from the Guild about our relationship."
"You got a chance to be happy with Adrian. We deserve to be happy too. Yes, this might be a huge mistake, I get that, but it's mine to make Syn and mine alone. If you could get over Adrian maybe you could see that others pine over you, hell Rex was in love with you and you didn’t even know the poor guy existed! Get over Adrian already, we buried him in the cold ground years ago. You need to go dig up your heart because I'm pretty fucking sure you buried it in that box with him." She spun around on her heels and left the room in quick angry steps.
I exhaled. Maybe she was right, maybe I was the Ice Queen, frozen in time since the moment I fought to gain Adrian's soul and lost it like I had my parents. He'd been everything, if I faltered he'd held me up, but it was so much more than that.
Like Adam, he was one of the people I could run to when I had to get away from everything. He would hold me through the tears, even though he had been through hell too. He would sing to me and he'd taught me to dance in the rain when I thought I couldn’t even smile anymore. When we'd grown closer and became teenagers everything had changed.
We'd gone from friends to lovers at seventeen and told each other how we'd get married and have beautiful babies, but I'd lost him to my pride, cockiness that seems to be part and parcel of practicing the Dark Arts, which we'd both been introduced to by Alden since we'd been the top of our class. Everything had gone downhill from there.
Larissa was right. I was stuck living in the past. Carrying around the scars of things I couldn’t fix. Couldn’t overcome.
"She was harsh," Ryder said from the doorway that led to the connecting rooms.