Jada looked at her. “What kind of music?”
“Not good. It’s pretty awful, frankly. I couldn’t hear anything for the past few days, but once the Unseelie-flesh high wore off, it was there. Not all of them. The small ones give off a kind of innocuous hum, but the larger ones give me a serious migraine. Did you see Alina gouge something into the pavement?”
Jada said nothing.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Mac said.
“I did it,” Jada said coldly. “My action.”
“I’m not saying you didn’t. I’m saying there were extenuating circumstances. Just trying to unskew your self-perception.”
“My perception is not skewed.”
“You have responsibility dysmorphia syndrome.”
“You should talk.”
“You were a child. And that old bitch was an adult. And she abused you. It wasn’t your fault.”
“I don’t need absolution.”
“My point exactly.”
“Why are you on my water tower again?” she said icily.
“Best view in the city.”
There was that. Jada crouched on the edge and looked down. “I didn’t see her gouge anything into the pavement.”
“Then she may have lived,” Mac said slowly.
“No. Absolutely not. Rowena never would have let me leave until she was dead. She always made me stay until the last.” She looked at Mac. “Alina’s not alive. Don’t let someone play you.”
Then she stood and turned for the ladder.
“If you see someone who looks like her in the streets, do me a favor and leave her alone,” Mac said. “Until I sort this out.”
Jada stood motionless a moment, not liking anything about what Mac had just told her. Alina was dead. And if there was something out there masquerading as her, it would only bring trouble. “Do me a favor,” she said coolly.
“Anything.”
“Stay the fuck off my water tower in the future.”
As she slid up into the slipstream, she heard Mac say, “When I look at you, Jada, I don’t see a woman who killed my sister. I see a woman who got hurt that night in the alley every bit as badly as Alina did.”
Jada shoved herself up into the beauty of the slipstream and vanished into the morning.
—
“Breakfast?” Ryodan said when Jada entered his office.
“Why is everyone trying to feed me this morning?”
“Who else tried to feed you?”
“We’re not friends,” Jada said. “Don’t pretend we are.”
“Who shit in your coffee this morning?”
“And you don’t say things like that. You’re Ryodan.”
“I know who I am.”
“What is with everyone this morning?” she said, exasperated.
“How would I know. You haven’t told me who everyone is.”
“Don’t talk to me. Just finish the tattoo.”
“After you eat.” He took a silver lid off a tray and shoved a platter toward her.
She stared at it. “Eggs,” she murmured. She hadn’t seen them in such a long time.
And bacon and sausage and potatoes. Oh, my.
“Try the yogurt. It has something extra in it,” he said.
“Poison?”
“A protein mix.”
She gave him a cool look and shook her head.
“Food is energy. Energy is a weapon. It would be illogical to refuse it.”
Jada dropped into a chair across the desk from him and picked up the fork. He had a valid point. Besides, eggs. Bacon. Yogurt. There was even an orange. The aroma of it all was incredible.
She ate quickly, efficiently, shoveling it down in silence, barely chewing. He was finishing her tattoo today. She was vibrating with energy, afraid he might change his mind for some reason. When she’d polished off the last crumb, she shoved the platter out of the way, yanked her shirt over her head, unbuttoned the top two buttons of her jeans and looked at him expectantly.
He didn’t move.
“What?” she demanded.
“Turn around,” he said. “I’m working on your back, not your front.” His silver eyes were ice.
She turned around backward in the chair, hooking her ankles around the rear legs, resting her arms on the slatted back.
“Relax,” he murmured as he settled into a chair behind her.
“I’m not tense,” she said coolly.
He ran his fingers along the two tight ridges of muscle along her spine. “This is your idea of supple. It’s a bloody rock. It’ll hurt more if you don’t relax.”
Closing her eyes, she willed herself smooth, long, lithe. “Pain doesn’t compute.”
“It should. It’s a warning your body needs to recognize.”
After a few minutes of his hands at the base of her spine, she felt that peculiar languor spreading through her body and snapped, “Stop doing that.”
“You keep tensing.”
“I do not.”
He traced his fingers along her spine again, delineating the hard ridges. “You want to have this argument.”
“You’re tattooing my skin, not my muscles.” She breathed easy and slow, relaxed again. It was merely her eagerness to see the ink done, nothing more.
“You’re wrong about that.”