He walked to the back room with Callahan and a few other men. Mathias knocked on the door at the same time he started to open it. “Nova, I’ve made arrangements for you and Eddie at--”
She was gone.
The back room was vacant. The rear door letting out onto the alleyway behind the shop was partially ajar, admitting a thin draft of night air inside.
Nova had left, taking Eddie with her. The reality of it raked over Mathias with cold claws.
Fuck. She was out there on her own right now, while Ozzy’s killer was still very much at large.
She had to be aware of that danger. And yet she’d chosen that risk over staying another minute under Mathias’s watch.
“Damn it, Nova.” He turned to the three warriors behind him, an odd chill blooming behind his sternum. “She won’t be coming back.”
“Where do you think she went?” Callahan asked.
Mathias lifted his shoulder. “I don’t know. She could be anywhere in the city.”
“If she’s on foot, she can’t be far,” Deacon said.
Thane nodded, his black brows knit together over dark eyes. “You want us to go after her, Commander?”
“No,” Mathias said after a moment, the word heavy on his tongue.
Every particle of his being pounded with the need to bring her back to him. But if he sent warriors after her now, it would only make her run farther.
Nova was a smart woman and a proven survivor. He had to trust she’d find a way to keep herself and Eddie safe.
The best thing he could do for her was make damned sure the Breed bastard who killed Ozzy wasn’t permitted to breathe for much longer tonight.
Sloane stood behind Deacon and Callahan at the door. The JUSTIS officer shot Mathias a disapproving look. “You’ve got a body lying in a lake of blood out there, a missing woman and kid, and no one here to explain what happened tonight except you, my friend. I think you’d better tell us what’s going on.”
He had filled them all in briefly when he’d called them to the shop, alerting them to the murder and the fact that the killer had been looking for a woman who worked there. It hadn’t seemed the best time to mention that he’d been at the scene when the assault took place, let alone that he’d been in an upstairs apartment making love to the very woman the attacker had come in to find.
Although Sloane had demanded the answers, Mathias spoke to his team. “I met Nova here at the shop two nights ago, during our search for the tattoo artist who’d left the unfinished work on the last guy fished out of the Thames.”
“A lucky break,” Deacon remarked. “We searched a dozen shops and came up empty.”
“Yeah, well,” Mathias hedged. “As soon as I got near Ozzy’s shop, I sensed something was off. I could tell there’d been an altercation here, a pretty bad one. It made me curious, so I stopped in, asked a few questions.”
“What did you find out?” Thane asked.
“That our dead scarab had, indeed, been in the shop. He came in the night before, and Nova was the one who did the tattoo.”
“But she didn’t finish it,” Callahan said.
“No. The guy was drunk, belligerent. There were words exchanged, then threats. Things turned ugly, and Ozzy killed him to protect Nova. They dumped the body in the river.”
“Jesus Christ,” Sloane muttered.
Mathias went on, holding his old friend’s rightfully indignant look. Sloane wasn’t going to like anything else he would hear now either. “I realized there were things she wasn’t telling me. I suspected some kind of connection between her and the man who came into the shop...and I was right. She knew him. She didn’t know the others in the morgue, but she was scared enough to go there and find out what she could about them.”
Now, Sloane’s hissed curse was even more profane. “You lied to me earlier today, Rowan. You acted like you had no goddamned idea who woman in the morgue video was. Yet all along you knew.”
“I knew,” he admitted soberly. “I’m telling you now, lying to my friends--to my teammates--goes against everything I am. But when it comes to this woman, when it comes to Nova...”
“You care for her,” Thane said.
Mathias nodded. He glanced to Sloane. “When you told me she had been at the morgue to see the other dead men, I didn’t know how deeply she might be involved in any of this. I didn’t know if she had been part of the other killings too. I didn’t know if she’d been lying to me about what she knew. I only knew I had to give her the chance to tell me first. So, as soon as the sun set, I came here to talk with her.”