Page 23

She still wasn’t finished.

“Ms. James,” she muttered under her breath. “Who, incidentally, youinsiston calling your wife, even though such a designation would mean life imprisonment or worse for her, and a near-certaindeathsentence for yourself.”

At Nick’s silence, she scoffed at him openly.

She seemed to take his silent glare as tacit agreement.

The truth was, her words made him so fucking angry, he didn’t trust himself to speak.

He knew they were a threat.

He definitelyheardthem as a threat.

Moreover, he knew he wouldn’t have any choice but to cave to that threat, at least for the time being, even knowing he could trust a single word she said. He also knew St. Maarten would utterly deny it, if he accused her openly of making that threat.

She would keep playing this game and he’d keep getting angrier and angrier and it wouldn’t win him a fucking thing. He’d wasted too much time arguing with this self-absorbed, manipulative narcissist as it was.

She wasn’t going to admit to anything.

She would never feel bad or guilty for what she’d done.

She’d convinced herself she’d saved all of them from themselves.

She probably thought she’d even saved Forrest Walker, despite just standing there while the H.R.A. decapitated his girlfriend and his friend right in front of him. She probably thought Walker owed her a thank you, too, after she stood by and let them haul him off to an extrajudicial prison where he’d likely been tortured and starved for weeks.

Onlyfor weeks, if he was lucky, or for years or possibly until he was dead if he wasn’t.

Nick had heard stories about those holding cells. He’d been told by Brick and others in the White Death about the sick, nightmarish shit the H.R.A. was prone to wreak on non-humans, seers as well as vampires. To them, Walker wasn’t a person at all.

But pointing any of that out to Lara St. Maarten was a complete waste of time.

Nick had let himself forget what she was.

He’d let himself forget she’d never stop wielding the stick of her mere race over him.

She believed it. She one hundred percentbelievedshe was superior, so why would she ever care to see things from Nick’s point of view?

“Where is she?” Nick asked finally.

It was the only thing left to ask.

CHAPTER6

THE QUEEN HAS SPOKEN

He controlledhis voice with an effort when he asked Lara about his wife.

Even so, the Archangel C.E.O. didn’t answer his question, not at first.

She very deliberately stared out the long windows of her penthouse apartment instead, her expression that of a long-suffering mother tired of dealing with her disobedient child.

“Where is she?” he asked again, his voice unmoving.

St. Maarten looked down at him finally, from the slight rise in her main living room.

It was more like a receiving room than a true living room, of course.

Nick had always viewed the set up as a modern-day throne room, one designed that way very deliberately, with its sunken living room overlooking huge windows with a breathtaking view of Central Park. The apartment’s front door and foyer led directly into that lower part of the room, leaving any guests standing roughly four feet below the raised ring around the back.