A light drizzle fell, but it wasn’t the rain that made me cover my head with the hood of my black sweatshirt. I entered the diner and walked to the back, taking a seat in my usual booth. Betty wasn’t on duty, so no one asked if I needed anything.
No one fussed.
No one cared.
It made me miss my dad. My real one, not the immortals who’d made me into the monster I’d become. We’d never had the most conventional relationship, but he’d looked out for me. Maybe it was time to pay him a visit. Not to see him; he thought I was dead, so knocking on his door would give him a heart attack. Just to be near him and feel a fleeting sense of comfort. My dad was the umbilical cord that connected me to my past, to the girl I once was.
After my mom died, it was just my dad and me. He taught me how to think for myself. He couldn’t afford to buy me things, so instead he gave me advice. I had a good head on my shoulders until high school ended. Then I grew wild, stubborn, and a little resentful when I realized that affluent kids had more advantages in life than I ever would. Unfortunately, I turned that resentment on my father and began distancing myself from him. I didn’t let him know it, but I suppose it was one of those awful phases that kids go through, only mine happened a little later than most.
But before all that, I was just a little girl with big dreams. I had a white music box, and when you lifted the lid, a beautiful princess turned in a circle to a whimsical melody. I used to curl up in bed with it and imagine myself becoming her someday. There weren’t a lot of kids my age living in the trailer park, so I spent a lot of time alone. It wasn’t a deprived childhood by any means. I had a huge imagination, pretending that the trailer was really a secret castle and all the ladybugs were fairies in disguise. My father was the king and protected me from the evils of the world. But once his princess grew up, there was one evil he couldn’t save her from. He raised a strong daughter, and maybe that was what got me through living on the streets for the past few years. I imagined myself as a dark queen, vanquishing all the evils from the city.
Sitting in that diner and smelling the food around me wouldn’t have been a big deal had Viktor never come along and given me a glimpse of an alternate life. It wasn’t the absence of a plate that bothered me anymore, but I missed the companionship of having someone sitting across from me to fill the silence. The Keystone mansion not only offered me solitude, but moments of sanity where just a brief conversation in the courtyard made me feel like a real person—not some low-life rogue who was searching for my next meal and killing immortals so I could feel better about myself. Perhaps the fates were trying to tap me on the shoulder, and I needed to start thinking about doing something else with my life.
Get a job.
Save money.
Buy a house.
Kill the bastard who’d just entered my line of vision.
My breath caught when a man strode in—the jerkface I’d wrestled in the club bathroom. The one Darius referred to as Salvator, his right-hand man. I stared for a frozen moment, wondering if it was a hallucination. Cognito could feel like a small city sometimes, but his timing was impeccable.
He glanced up at the menu. “I’ll have the burger and onion rings to go.”
While he rattled off how he wanted his burger, I discreetly tucked my hair back and pulled my hood farther down. There weren’t many customers, so it was easy to spot his car out the window since it hadn’t been there when Blue had circled around the side parking lot to drop me off out front. I’d be willing to bet anything he hadn’t locked his doors. Most Breeds didn’t.
When he started fiddling with a napkin dispenser on the counter, I quietly got up with my bag and went out the side entrance. I stood by a red car, pretending to search for my keys, but I kept my focus inside the diner. As soon as he sat down on one of the stools, I sprinted across the parking lot to his car. The windows were nice and tinted, so I tested the back door, and like magic, it opened.
I needed to act fast, so I got in and wedged myself behind the driver’s seat, flattening my bag against the floorboard on the opposite side so it wouldn’t be noticeable. I was a chameleon against the black leather interior. The headrest was pulled up and would allow me access to the back of his neck. I withdrew a push dagger and gripped it in my left hand while holding a longer blade in my right.
It was a good thing I wasn’t wearing perfume, because after I’d spent ten minutes in the back of his car, he would have smelled me the moment he opened the door.
Heavy footsteps approached the car, and a sack rustled.
“Don’t see me, don’t see me,” I whispered, gripping my weapons, ready to spring into action.
The car rocked as Salvator sat down and slammed the door. He was munching on something and growling like some kind of starved raccoon.