Panic flashed in the gunman’s eyes. He was caught and he knew it. There were two guns trained on him. No way in hell was he getting out of this with his job complete. He took the gun off the salesgirl and shoved her at me using brutal force. I caught the girl before she fell and held her as she cried into my shoulder, never letting my aim waver.

Then, with a speed neither Mercedes nor I had anticipated, the failed assassin pressed his own weapon to the underside of his chin and pulled the trigger, raining a mist of pink, red and gray all over a display of haute couture gowns and the women hiding beneath them.

Chapter Thirteen

Two hours later I was the proud owner of not one but nine wedding dresses.

The lace number I’d been wearing, the ruined gown worn by the young bride, and the half-dozen monstrous-looking dresses that now had assassin brain smeared on them. Plus one simple, elegant, tulle-and-blood-free gown with a strapless bodice and subtle beading that happened to be the right size for me.

Police connections and a hundred and fifty thousand dollar payout went a long way to getting forgiveness for a bloodbath at a bridal salon.

I was sitting in the passenger seat of Detective Tyler Nowakowski’s black Nissan SUV, still wearing the bloodstained lace wedding dress. Police lights flashed in front of the boutique, and uniformed officers were gathered together collecting witness statements while others kept the goggling eyes of locals and tourists from taking photos as the ambulance took the injured bride away and the coroner did the same with the assassin.

Tyler was talking to Mercedes, and they both kept turning to look at me as they spoke. Neither of them appeared particularly happy. Cedes was going to have to file paperwork and give a statement to Internal Affairs to justify shooting the dead man before he could shoot me, but every witness statement agreed he had been the one to kill himself.

Officially, we were calling it a kidnapping attempt gone wrong. As the bride-to-be of a world-famous billionaire, I was a target for those looking to make a quick buck on my ransom, and this guy hadn’t expected half the bridal party to be armed. As a licensed P.I., I was allowed to carry a weapon, so no one would question the SIG. It was registered and everything.

In the end, it would be a pain in the ass of paperwork and press, but none of us were going to get in trouble. I’d have liked to bypass the whole thing and call my wardens in to adjust everyone’s memory and make the whole situation disappear, but the shop manager had hidden in the office and called the cops the second the first shot was fired.

Smart woman, but her quick action meant the police showed up well before I could set a cover-up into motion.

Tyler patted Cedes on the shoulder, and she smiled at him. They’d recently partnered up at the precinct, which was an obvious step for their careers given how often they ended up working on bizarre cases together. At least if they were united, they didn’t have to pretend the paranormal shit wasn’t real. Both of them were under my protection, belonging to me by vampire law. I didn’t like being responsible for the safety of so many people, but I hadn’t been willing to wipe their memories after a winter bloodbath a thousand times worse than this one.

People had died, people they knew and cared about, and I couldn’t bring myself to brainwash their experience into nonexistence. Which meant, according to council law, they were my problem now.

The driver’s door opened and Tyler got in, handing me a blue-and-white Greek-stylized paper cup full of lukewarm coffee. It even smelled bitter. I accepted it, cupping it in my cold hands, and stared at the scene on the street with detachment.

“You sure know how to find trouble,” he said, arching a thick black eyebrow at me.

“You’re not the first person to tell me so, Detective.”

“Is this mess…” he pointed to the officers milling around on the sidewalk and the dozens of curious looky-loos, “…vampire related?” The way he said vampire almost made me chuckle. He’d known the truth for about two months and was still having trouble saying the word like it related to something real.

“No.”

“You’re sure? Mercedes said the guy was an assassin gunning for you.”

I nodded. “He was. That’s not the vampire M.O.”

“No?”

“No. If the vampires wanted me dead, I would just vanish. You’d never know. If they were really cool about it, you might not remember ever knowing me.”

Tyler looked away from the unfolding drama. “They can do that?”

“We can do a lot of things.” I smiled sadly into my lukewarm coffee and took a sip of the dark, bitter liquid. “You don’t really want to know about this, Tyler.”

“I do.”

“Not now.”

He frowned, wringing his hands on the steering wheel. “You’ve done your damnedest to give us the bare minimum, Secret, and I can only let it slide for so long. I see a guy get dismembered by something impervious to bullets, and then you make me say nothing when you let vampires set fire to the station.”

“I know.” I met his eyes, and our gazes held for a long moment. I’d lied to Tyler in the past—I was finished with that now. “I need you to be patient.”

“I have been patient.”

“More patient. Saintly patient.”

Tyler sighed and snatched the coffee out of my hand, taking a deep swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing. There was something refreshingly masculine about Tyler, like an old noir cop. I liked being around him now that he didn’t spend his time growling at me and thinking I was up to no good.

Now he knew I was up to no good, and he could like me again.

He handed the coffee back, and I accepted it, sipping from what was left.

“Everything I tell you gets me in trouble,” I told him. “Humans aren’t supposed to know. That’s the first and most important rule.”

“The first rule of Vamp Club is you don’t talk about Vamp Club?”

I howled with laughter, almost spewing coffee back into the cup. It was the first time I’d laughed in a while, and it felt good. Freeing.

“Something like that.”

“But you’ll give me something more than what you have?”

“Soon.”

“Okay.” He nodded, then looked over at me, his skin glowing green from the dashboard lights. “You’re going to make a beautiful bride.”

The dress almost seemed to glow in the green lights.

“Let’s just see if I can get to the altar in one piece first, shall we?”

“Deal.”

The scene on the street outside Kleinfeld was reserved compared to the melee in Lucas’s penthouse when I arrived a half hour later. Pack members milled around the main floor of the suite, going back and forth from the big staircase to the office. Some nodded acknowledgments, others moved along with their business like I weren’t there.

I’d barely stepped out of the elevator when my mouth came alive with the bursting vibrancy of lime and Desmond’s warm, muscular arms looped around me, pulling me into a tight embrace.

“I’m so sorry. I should have been there.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“I shouldn’t have let you out of my sight.”

Desmond’s official title in the pack, aside from being second-in-command, was as Queen’s Guard. Until now we’d ignored that part of his job description as a mere formality of the title, not a task he was required to perform. I was an assassin and a high-ranking member of the vampire council. I didn’t often need protection above and beyond what I could provide for myself.

Apparently things had changed.

“I’m fine,” I told him.

He held me away from him as if to assess the truth of my words by seeing me. For the first time since I’d arrived he seemed to notice the lace wedding dress I was still wearing and looked momentarily stunned, as though the dress had dealt him a physical blow.

“You look—”

“Bloody,” I suggested. “But for once, none of it is mine.” I wanted him to smile at the joke, to laugh at my terrible habit of getting my clothes stained with blood. Instead he continued to stare at the stupid dress.

I wrapped my arms around my waist as if I could hide the gown from him. “Stop it.”

“Sorry,” he muttered, finally focusing on my face. “I didn’t… I don’t know what I expected to feel. When I saw this.”

“It’s just a dress. A stupid dress that weighs a million pounds. It’s nothing profound or mystical or meaningful. Stop looking at me like that. Please.”

The sorrow in his eyes was almost too much to handle. “I’m sorry.”

I bit my lip. “It’s just a dress,” I repeated. He nodded and pulled me in for another hug, this one less snug than the first.

“Lucas will want to see you.”

I didn’t want Desmond to let me go, but he did.

Chapter Fourteen

Lucas was in the wide-open living room on the third floor of the penthouse pacing the length of the floor-to-ceiling windows along the far wall. The second I entered the room he vaulted over the couch and had me away from Desmond’s side and pulled into a dangerously tight hug.

“What happened?” he demanded.

I recounted the story of the Kleinfeld bloodbath so everyone in the room could hear it. I didn’t feel like reliving the details over and over again, so I wanted as many people to listen as I could. Morgan sat on the couch, expressionless, her arms crossed over her chest.

When my story was finished, she was the first to speak. “Sounds sloppy. Amateurish.”

“Sounds like someone has tried to kill me twice in a week in two places I’m never found. I hardly think that’s amateurish, Morgan. Sounds like someone is following me. Someone I haven’t noticed.”

“Then you’re not being very careful, are you?”

Lucas must have felt me tense in preparation to attack her because he hugged me to him again and spoke to Morgan from over my head. “Morgan, if you could be so kind, would you go to the store and get Secret a change of clothes, please?”