Embraced By Darkness (Riley Jenson Guardian 5)

"Speaking of which - have you eaten recently?"

He gave me the look. Meaning he hadn't. "Don't you start lecturing me, or I'll get the doctors to hold you here longer."

"Bitch." I pushed up into a sitting position, but the sudden movement made my head spin. So, obviously not fully over that whole blood-loss thing yet. "What happened to the vampire?"

"You shot him dead."

"So? Dead is not always dead with a vampire. Didn't Jack mention something about their consciousness taking longer to fade than their body?"

"Yep." He shifted his feet from the bed and reached down into the bag on the floor. I smelled the chocolates before he pulled them out. "I brought you these. Thought you'd appreciate something decent to eat."

"If you think offering me a chocolaty bribe will make me forgive you for dragging me into a hospital... you could be right." I accepted the purple box with a grin, and quickly opened them up. The rich, chocolaty scent drifted up, and I sucked it in with a happy sigh. Not hazelnut coffee, but damn near as good. I picked out a strawberry cream and a caramel, then offered the box to Rhoan. "So did Jack actually get anything out of the shooter before his consciousness left?"

"He was a gun for hire. His calls came in on his business phone and part payment had to be deposited into his account before he'd start tracking down the target."

"He doesn't have caller ID or anything on his phone?"

"Nope. Guaranteed anonymity is part of the deal."

I bit into the chocolate, felt the gooey strawberry filling spill into my mouth. Bliss itself. "Bank transfers aren't anonymous."

"No, But the money for this one came through an overseas account."

"Which are harder to track down?"

"They are when they're opened under false names."

While I had no doubt that the Directorate, with all their resources, would eventually pin down the actual owners, it would take time. And if there was someone wanting to get rid of me, we didn't exactly have a whole lot of time. "So how did he track me down?"

"Bug underneath your car." He picked out several chocolates then handed me back the box.

"Did he put it there?"

"Nope, He was just sent the receiver."

"So someone got close enough to bug my car." Which I suppose, considering I parked either in the street or in public parking lots most of the time, wasn't a hard thing to do. "But I can't think of one person that I've annoyed enough to go to the extreme of hiring a hit man."

"What about Blake? Or Patrin?"

I shook my head. "Granted, they're both angry that I didn't manage to save Adrienne, but they still want me to track down her killer. If they were going to do anything, they wouldn't do anything until after that happened."

And personally, I didn't think they'd do anything afterward. Patrin was a bully-boy like his father, but I'd proved that I could well and truly defend myself against him. And bully-boys tended to back away from situations they knew they couldn't win.

"I'm afraid I tend to agree with you."

The dry note in his voice had my eyebrows rising. "And you've changed your mind because...?"

"Because Patrin and I had a little chat after I saw you safely into the hospital." He shrugged, not looking in the least bit repentant. Not that I really expected him to. He'd been at the receiving end of as many of Patrin's taunts and blows as I had. "He swears he wouldn't waste a bullet on useless half-breeds like us, let alone pay someone else to waste said bullets."

That was the truth if ever I'd heard it. "What about Kye?"

He frowned. "What about him?"

"How many arms and legs did you break before you convinced him you weren't intending to harm his boss?"

"None. He saw the family resemblance, apparently, and refused to intervene." He hesitated. "I have to say, he's fast for a werewolf."

"He's in the protection business, so he'd have to be."