Page 30 of Dance of Devils

“Need me to walk your dog or get you a taxi?” he snickers. “That’ll be another hundo.”

I peel off five more and hold them up between two fingers.

The chuckles fade.

“I’m looking for someone, and I think she lives over there.” I turn and nod my chin at the building. Then I dig out my phone, go to the Zakharova website, and zoom in on Brooklyn’s artist headshot. I hold the phone up for them to see. “Her.”

A couple of the guys shrug and shake their heads. But the leader, my new best buddy, slowly grins and nods.

“Oh, shit, yeah. Blondie?” He whistles. “Girl’shot.”

My jaw tightens.

Careful, I want to snarl at him for reasons I don’t quite understand.

“She lives there?”

“If you don’t like the answer, you still gonna pay me?”

“Sure, if it’s the truth.”

He nods. “Fair. No, man. I don’t think she lives there.”

Shit.

“But she does come around pretty often. Her friend—that Latina chick you were talking to? She lives there. I think Blondie just gets her mail delivered here. She shows up and leaves with envelopes, sometimes packages.”

Interesting.

Veryinteresting.

I thank him, pay him, and get back in the car with more questions rattling around my head than when I got here.

I know she doesn’t live where I dropped her off. On a hunch, I glanced at the files of her friends when I was still up in Magda’s office, and it wasVal’sapartment that she directed me to the other night.

She doesn’t live there. She doesn’t live here.

So wheredoesshe live? Why the fuck is it some big state secret? Why do Icare?

My jaw tightens.

I know why. It’s the same reason I can’t stop fixating on her, or her bruises.

…Or, rather, whogives herthose bruises, and how I can fucking destroy them.

Somehow, Brooklyn Ellis has managed to slip her way under my skin and is now the object of my full and undivided attention.

God help her.

7

BROOKLYN

I stay lateafter everyone else has gone home. Ostensibly, it’s because I’ve told my friends that I’ll clean up the feast we had right after rehearsal. Naomi and Lyra’s father-in-law, Vito Barone, swung by right as we were finishing for the night with thisgiganticspread of Italian and chicken parm sandwiches, along with an obscene quantity of cannoli.

“Even though they’re Sicilian,” he made sure to add with a wink.

I made a big show of telling everyone that this was my way of paying Lyra and Naomi back for the meal—by cleaning up and bringing the leftovers to the food pantry down the street.