Images flooded her mind as if she was living them herself: she saw the dark water of the Thames under a night sky, a large steel shipping container being unloaded onto a dock.
Someone spoke to her--to the man who would be dead before long--Russian words she couldn’t comprehend. More men stood nearby, speaking urgently, making some kind of deal, from what she could discern from their body language and gestures.
Then the sharp report of gunshots nearby.
Anxious shouts went up, and Nova’s line of vision swung around abruptly as the man whose gaze she was seeing through suddenly turned his head. Orin Doyle stood there, a pistol raised at forehead level in front of Nova’s eyes.
Doyle grinned, then fired.
Nova’s connection cut short as the man dropped to the ground, shot dead at point-blank range by someone he knew and trusted.
“What the hell?”
Sick from the power of her gift and what it showed her, she let go and moved to another of the bodies to repeat the process. Doyle killed him too, another shot ringing out elsewhere at the same time, dropping one of the Russians just before Nova’s connection to Doyle’s victim severed.
She moaned, unable to continue.
Using her ability always left her nauseated and weak. After so many years away from it, and after the grisly visions she’d just witnessed, it was all Nova could do to return all of the dead back to their coolers and close everything up.
She staggered into a vacant restroom down the hallway, her head pounding ferociously, stomach rebelling with each step.
She hit the first stall and retched into the toilet.
As she slumped against the cold metal wall, her mind spun with even more questions than when she’d first arrived at the morgue.
What were Doyle and the other men up to at that dock?
Why had he turned on his own?
And most troubling of all, how could Nova answer any of her questions without risking herself and everyone she cared for?
~ ~ ~
Fresh out of the shower, Mathias pivoted his head over his shoulder to get another look in the mirror at Nova’s handiwork on his back.
A sword, for fuck’s sake.
A gleaming, perfectly rendered, realistic-looking blade that extended tip-down along the length of his spine.
The kind of sword a knight would carry.
Mathias chuckled wryly to himself. She’d called him Galahad, after all. Apparently the joke was on him--literally.
Whatever her intent, he actually liked the tattoo.
He like her too, and that was a fact that had been eating him up ever since he’d returned to Order headquarters the night before.
His interest in her was a problem he didn’t want to acknowledge, but it was rather hard to deny the way she’d stirred his interest last night. Feeling her warmth leaning over him for two hours while she worked on him had been torture.
Her gloved hands all over his naked back, sure and steady, as she’d created a work of art on his skin had made him long to feel her touch in other places.
The subtle, fleeting graze of her lovely little breasts, so precariously contained within the zippered black leather vest she seemed to think passed for clothing, had given him a hard-on he had barely managed to rein in.
He’d wanted to kiss her, and no doubt would have, if she’d been anything but prickly and evasive with him. He might have done more than kiss her, had she not been the wiser of them and all but tossed him out on his ass and slammed the door behind him.
So, instead, he’d gone back to base with an uncharacteristically bad attitude and a need to be left alone to lick his damaged male pride and reassure himself that fiery, enigmatic Nova was a problem he damned well didn’t need.
He was still trying to convince himself of that today. Not a good potential, considering it was going on sundown and just the thought of her had his cock rising to attention all over again.