“Why not?”
Her chin hiked up a notch. “Because I’m working here. Because this is Ozzy’s shop, not the Order’s interrogation room.”
“We don’t have an interrogation room, actually. It’s rare we have to resort to that. Folks tend to confess long before we feel the need to haul them in for a formal interrogation.”
He was joking--pretty much. But she didn’t so much as smile. No, she was taking this all very seriously.
Deathly serious.
Mathias glanced around the empty shop. “Anyway, I don’t see Ozzy now. It appears it’s just you and me, Nova.”
“He’s here,” she said. “He’s upstairs in his apartment. And in case you didn’t hear him the first time, we don’t appreciate anyone coming in here asking questions about our work or our clients.”
“I heard him. I just wonder if Ozzy’s got something to hide.”
“He doesn’t,” she replied tightly.
“Do you?”
“No.”
Mathias had to give her credit. The lie slipped off her tongue without a hint of hesitation. No doubt about it, this was a woman who’d learned to keep her cards close. But had she learned it from a cold absence of conscience, or raw survival instinct?
Against all better judgment, Mathias wanted to know the answer to that--almost as much as he wanted to know why his nerve endings were tingling with the psychic aftershocks of violence.
The reading he was picking up seemed to be at its strongest right where he was sitting now.
In Nova’s client chair.
She stared at him as he ran his hands over the worn black vinyl arms. Her blue eyes revealed nothing, her stance so schooled and careful, he almost began to doubt his ability to sniff out the scene of a crime.
But no, the imprint was there.
Sharp, sudden, unmistakable.
“We need to talk, Nova.”
She didn’t so much as flinch. “I thought we already had.”
He grunted, unsure if he should be amused or infuriated by the female’s apparent disregard for her own self-preservation. He hadn’t tried to hide what he was. She had to know that provoking one of his kind was a bad idea.
Hell, if he wanted to, he could trance her and drag her off somewhere vastly more private than this, instead of letting her try her best to stonewall him and dodge his questions.
The idea held an unnatural appeal, especially when she stubbornly backed away, her arms still crossed as if to physically block him from pulling anything out of her. “I’ve got your phone number. If I have anything else to tell you, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
“I doubt that. I’ll bet you tore up that note the minute I was gone.”
She went silent, and he knew he probably hit the mark, or damn close to it.
Mathias studied her in that moment, soaking in the full picture of her now--all of the tattoos and metal on her smooth skin, the sharp cut of her hair and the bold color that saturated the silken strands. He had no clue what her natural color might be, but found himself both fascinated and determined to have that answer and a hundred more where this female was concerned.
As for her ink, each piece of art had been beautifully, painstakingly rendered. Ozzy, he supposed, having recognized an artistry that rivaled Nova’s in the old man’s work on his skittish client earlier that evening.
Most of the art was abstract, beautiful vignettes of flowers and imaginative design elements. Colorful flora and fauna wrapped her lean, muscular biceps, ink covering her from the tops of her shoulders to the backs of her hands, which were tucked beneath her crossed arms. On one of her forearms, a vine of small red roses climbed up the side of a medieval-looking wall in the vague shape of a tombstone, its rounded peak crowned with a circular window segmented by mullions and delicate tracery.
What did Nova’s tattoos mean to her?
He glanced now to the design that rode just below her collarbone. Across the pert swell of her small, firm breasts, a fierce phoenix emerged from a flourish of bright flames. Its wings unfolded across Nova’s chest, each feather so realistic Mathias could imagine the indomitable bird lifting up from her velvety skin to soar up to the sky, free and unstoppable.