“I haven’t heard any rumors of such a disappearance,” Janvier confirmed.
“Did your contact have any success in reconstructing her face?”
“Yes, I received the image during dinner. It has no life to it so we’ll have to be judicious in how we utilize it.” Janvier tapped a finger on the steering wheel, the streets shadowed and dark around them. “She had to be in a one-on-one relationship.”
“Why?”
“You saw at Giorgio’s how the cattle cling to one another. If the victim was part of a group, her housemates would have reported her missing even if her vampire didn’t.”
“Unless she told them she was leaving him, and he kidnapped her after allowing her—and them—to believe he’d let her go. You know how many times that happens in abusive mortal relationships. Any reason it should be different for immortals?”
Face grim, Janvier said, “No.”
Blowing out a breath at the bleak ugliness of it, she ran a hand through her hair, having left it down for tonight. However, since she didn’t want anyone running their fingers through it in the clubs—it was creepy how many people thought that was okay—she reached back and began to braid it tight to her skull. “The situation with Giorgio is bugging me. You don’t think our victim could’ve been part of his harem, do you?”
Janvier shook his head. “I made it a point to check him out—all his cattle are accounted for, even the ones nudged out of the nest after becoming too old.” Distaste colored his tone. “Giorgio’s use of women apparently stops short of murder.”
“Damn, he made such a good, smarmy suspect.” She tied off her braid and considered whether to swap her heeled red boots for the hunter boots she’d left in the car. She decided to stick with the heels since this was about blending into the clubs.
“And you, cher—did you sense any disturbing memory echoes in his house?”
“No, but it’s new. The only time I’ve had an overwhelming reaction to a place rather than a person was at Nazarach’s home.” A shiver rippled through her. “I do get a hint of it now and then with older homes, but nothing like the screams in his walls.”
Janvier ran his knuckles over her cheek, the caress chasing away the shiver and wrapping another set of chains around her heart. “Even with the Tower,” she said past the knot in her throat, “I don’t get anything. Could be because it’s continuously modernized.”
“Or perhaps,” Janvier said, “the reason is that it’s filled with so many different souls, rather than one who dominates everyone to cowering obeisance.”
Ashwini could see that; Raphael was ruthless, but he gathered strong men and women around him. Ellie, for one, had never backed down from anyone in her life, and Dmitri wasn’t exactly a cream puff. Then there was Janvier. He had the ability to bend, his temperament slow to anger, but he was also very much his own man. She knew that should it ever come down to it, Janvier would walk away from the Tower rather than go against his principles.
“As for Giorgio,” Janvier said, “I’m not convinced he isn’t hurting his cattle.” His hands tightened on the steering wheel before he seemed to consciously make himself loosen his grip. “I have people keeping an eye on the situation—there was just something too sickly sweet about it all.”
“Like an abused spouse who’s been charmed into forgiving and forgetting.” Ashwini’s stomach twisted. She knew too well what it was to want to believe in the promises of someone she loved. “The honeymoon phase, I call it. Before the next hit.”
Janvier shot her a hard, dangerous glance before returning his gaze to the road. “No one hurts you.”
She heard the protective rage and, below it, a kind of stunned shock. “No one has ever hit me,” she clarified. “Except, of course, during my work as a hunter.” Then, all was fair.
Janvier’s rigid shoulders didn’t relax. “You think I don’t know you well enough to see through that?”
Suddenly, the space between them didn’t exist, the intimacy as blinding as when he’d brushed the crumb off her lip. “I don’t talk about this.” Tried to not even think about it, though seeing Arvi the previous day had stirred the pain of it back up.
No, Ashwini, she told herself, be brutally honest. The reason you can’t find a way to tell Janvier everything is that it’ll break you if he looks at you with pity in his eyes.
The car ate up the road, a sleek piece of the night.
“When I was a boy,” Janvier said into the silence that had grown too heavy, too dark, “I used to work for a man who caught crawfish and supplied them to others. It was a way to earn a little money for my family, help my mother provide for my baby sisters.”
Ashwini turned in her seat, compelled by the intimate vein of memory, affection, and sadness in his tone. “How many sisters did you have?” It startled her to realize she didn’t know this about him when they’d spoken so many times, trusted one another so deeply.
“Two.” A smile that creased his cheeks. “Amelie arrived in time with a thunderclap one rainy day, Jöelle a year or so later in the midnight hours, both squalling and red-faced and tiny.” Having reached the fringe of the Vampire Quarter, he drove around to the small lot behind a blood café, after first unlocking the gate by pressing in a code on the keypad at the entrance.
He parked, switched off the engine, then turned toward her, one arm braced on the steering wheel. “My father died in a logging accident when Amelie and Jöelle were only two and three, so it was just the four of us until my mother married again seven years later.”