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And they had yet to touch tongues.

A situation he rectified a moment later. The moment it happened, the moment she parted sweet, shy lips to give him his way, it felt as though her whole body went
limp against him, as if in a faint, but her moan of delight was lusty and vibrant and shook him to the very seat of his pounding heart. The souls inside him lit up like tinder as he kissed her deep and well. What was Vincent and what was the great Ramses were suddenly being pulled apart, so that for the first time since their Blending each could experience the moment as himself. It was a raw, humbling sensation, and it was all the more antagonistic for it. As they came together again, it was with like purpose …

We must have her.

Vincent led the way this time, loosening his grip on Docia’s arms and putting his hands on her in other ways. Better ways. He caught the curve of her upper back and shoulders, fondling the shape of her through the pettable softness of her sweater. Within a few moments he was contemplating getting his hands on her ass when
her
hands suddenly made an appearance. He had no idea where they had been before that moment, but right then, as they smoothed their way up over the expanse of his chest, he felt the need to growl in response to the boiling sensation in his blood. Ramses was of like mind, it seemed, because the sound came to life, rumbling out of his chest and into her mouth. It must have sounded a bit daunting because she gasped a little and pulled back, taking the moment to suck in a few needed breaths.

She licked the sugar of their shared kisses off her lips, and he was instantly hard. Before that moment he’d been too stunned with feeling her on a spiritual level; raw lust had honestly not entered the picture. But now it was there, powerful and dominant, riding him with the violence of quolls in heat. Making him want to do the very same to her.

He jerked back from her, needing to breathe and clear his head, needing to get some sort of handle on the viru
lent, violent desire infecting him so thoroughly that he feared he wouldn’t have control over what he was going to do next.

For all the pleasure of the moment, it was a sensation he did not like. For all the burn of his arousal, his heart still ruled, and it began to speak to him firmly and seriously.

She is weak and injured and not capable of the vigor
we are seeking, the vigor we will need to satisfy us.

And then, a darker version of the same voice.

She is our queen. She belongs to another man. The
man we call our closest friend.

Treason. What he had done would be considered an act of treason, not to mention a stone cold deception.

“I … ,” he stammered.

No. He would not say he was sorry. He would not apologize for listening to his entwined souls, both of which had wanted her more than he had ever wanted a female before in any of his previous incarnations. He cursed aloud. He should be ashamed, yet he refused to be.

“I will not regret touching you,” he rasped.

Then he pulled away from her, his movements jerky and awkward because she had gone so limp and was suddenly left to recover her own footing and strength. Surprise and confusion were written all over her; she tried to speak, but like him, she was too overwhelmed by what she had just experienced to put many words together.

“You have much to do,” he said hoarsely. “You have enough complications to figure out without me adding to them.”

She had another man about to step from the Ether, and when he did she would immediately fall in love with him, as she had done time and time again over the ages.

And if she didn’t do so because of something he did, he would never forgive himself … and neither would Menes. And Menes’s jealousy knew no bounds when it was warranted.

Thousands of years of friendship or no, Menes would kill him. And Ram had no doubt that Menes would find a way to keep him dead.

Ram let go of her, no longer able to touch her as his conscience pricked him with nauseating reality. He turned sharply on his heel and left her.

This would be the end of it, he vowed to himself. He had dared to taste the forbidden. He would never do so again.

Leo had never had patience for the law and their slow-assed way of doing things. Not that all cops were useless. Take Jackson— he didn’t just write a paper report and push it off, eager to make it someone else’s problem and responsibility. There was a reason Jackson had a perfect record in traffic court and an equally good one in criminal court when it came to remembering the details of the arrests he made. The regulars on his beat called him “the Nightmare” because of it. They would know that when they saw that K-9 car or heard Chico barking his ass off in pursuit of them that they were going down in a bad way. It was their choice whether they’d have holes in them or not before all was said and done, whether they were caused by bullets or a dog’s teeth. Jackson had been fast-tracked for detective a long time ago, but that had been before Chico and the K-9 had come into his life. Becoming a detective had been put on hold because Jackson had found his passion in the K-9 unit. Leo knew Jackson could not bear the idea of leaving the field, leaving his partnership with Chico, to sit behind a desk and muddle through the more complex side of criminology.

But now Chico was dead, and Jackson had missed court for the first time in his career to sit by his sister’s
side as she struggled for her life. Docia meant everything to Jacks. She was all the family he had left, and vice versa, and it had been that way since their parents had died when Jacks was just turning eighteen. He had almost lost nine-year-old Docia to the system and had sworn never to let that happen or come close to happening again. He’d pulled it off, too. Not just pulled it off, but pulled it off famously. He had kept her housed, fed, and reasonably happy, all while going to school and the Academy.

But the truth was that Leo had had a lot to do with that. While Jacks was trying to make something of himself, Leo had been his … well, his marital partner, in a way. Leo had been in the service at the time, living off base and stationed at West Point. His apartment had been small, but it had been big enough for two men and one little girl. They’d made it work until Leo had gone off to join the Rangers and Jackson had come out the other side of the Academy.

And that was why Docia was the next best thing to a little sister in Leo’s life. And
that
was why he wasn’t about to let a bunch of cops natter around with their thumbs up their asses pretending to do something. All due respect to Jacks and all that, but the cops would have to follow rules and all that annoying shit. Leo … not so much. He was just glad that he had been in a professional lull when all of this had gone down. A week before Docia’s accident, he’d been on assignment in Fallujah assassinating some jack-hole who’d been in desperate need of assassination. The gigs of child porn they’d found on his computer alone had made him feel pretty damn good about it. It was a bit sickening to know that deviants, psychos, and serial killers knew no cultural barriers. Not to mention drug lords, corrupt officials, and arms dealers.

That list could go on ad infinitum. Ad nauseam.

But hey. Jackson could fight the bad in the world his way, and Leo would fight it his way. And in Leo’s reality, laws sometimes got in the way of doing the right thing.

Still, the evolution of his disdain for the legal process had been long and hard and nothing he was in the mood to think about. For all intents and purposes, his kid sister was out there and in the hands of some serious baddies. No one knew Docia the way he and Jackson did. No one. And frankly, he wasn’t going to put any stock in a bunch of jag-off cops who were rolling their eyes and going through the motions just to satisfy Jackson’s belief in the brotherhood.

He
was Jackson’s brother. In every way that mattered, and not just because they wore the same color uniform, for fuck’s sake. They’d had each other’s backs since high school … hell, they’d raised a child together!

Leo jammed the last bullet into his clip, then rolled his thumb over it to make sure it was in properly, all second nature and nothing about it distracting him from the thoughts burning through his brain. He wasn’t hurt that Jackson was putting faith in others or anything like that. They had agreed a long time ago to disagree on the way things should and could get done most effectively. Jacks was a boy scout through and through, and that wasn’t going to change. He didn’t expect it to. Didn’t often encourage it to.

Leo smacked the clip into the butt of his Desert Eagle, clicked it in, and then checked the sight. Along the spine of the gold-plated .44, he could see the three pumpkins he’d put on the fence in the distance. Sure, it was shiny and flashy and mostly a toy for armchair shooters or collectors, but damn, it was a fine gun. He had another, a Mark XIX with the ten-inch barrel in gunmetal gray strategically hidden in his house, his preference being to keep the Mark XIX with the six-inch barrel in the hol
ster on his hip. The six-inch pulled faster and was less awkward in a clinch.

But, yeah, the gold had its uses, too.

“Whoa! Holy shit, Alvarez, where’d you get that thing?”

Leo ignored Ray Ray and squeezed the trigger. Rapidly. Three times.

One pumpkin after the other exploded, raining bits of rind and seed everywhere, reminiscent of the way a head full of brains might act on the other end of the armor-piercing hollow points. He turned and pointed the gun at Ray Ray, trying not to smile when the scrawny little crackhead squeaked and held his hand up in defense … as if that would do anything.

“Jesus Christ!” he yelped, drawing his knees in together like a four-year-old trying not to pee himself while waiting for the bathroom.

“Ray Ray,” Leo said smoothly in greeting, lowering the gun with a smile. “You’re late.”

“I—I—I—,”Ray Ray stammered.

“I could swear I said time was of the essence.”

“But I—”

Leo leaned in and narrowed his eyes. “You’re not about to give me some lame-ass excuse, are you? You know how I hate lame-ass excuses.”

Ray Ray swallowed noisily, deciding silence was the better part of valor. It was probably one of the smartest things he had ever done. Not that Ray Ray was entirely stupid. Back when he’d gone just by Ray, he’d actually had a pretty good job and a very pretty family and a pretty decent life. Then one day he’d gotten the idea in his head to try a little crack to take the edge off his stress.

Fast-forward three years and now Ray Ray lived for his next smoke. The job, the pretty house, and the pretty family were gone. He was the poster boy for what drugs
could do to Joe Average. But Leo had no sympathy for him. He believed men wrote their own destinies in life. They didn’t deserve all this bleeding heart bullshit from all the little saviors running around trying to rescue them. In his opinion, they were lost causes until they were ready to rescue themselves.

“Ray Ray … ,” he said, smiling and sounding magnanimously forgiving as he threw an arm around the other man’s shoulders. “I’ll forgive you for keeping me waiting if you”— he tapped the man on the chest with the barrel of the Eagle— “can give me just a little bit of information.”

“Well, I— I’ll try … ,” Ray Ray stammered.

“Great! Now, a few days ago someone threw a girl off a bridge.”

“The Bridge Girl!”

“Yes. The Bridge Girl.” Leo rolled his eyes. It really was a lame moniker. The Saugerties news team needed a more creative mind at the helm. “Can you tell me why someone would want to throw a girl off a bridge?”

“Well … I don’t know all the particulars,” he hedged.

“I’ll settle for rumors,” Leo said, sounding highly put-upon. “Just give me what you’ve got. And before you say it … because with the mood I’m in it’ll just piss me off … I won’t give you money for information so you can go off and buy more of that poison you like to shovel into your lungs. I’ll do you one better. The next time someone is in the mood to beat your scrawny ass, I’ll take care of them for you. Okay?”

Ray Ray’s face lit up. Clearly someone was always in the mood to beat his scrawny ass. Leo had suspected as much. Invariably, if you danced in the world of drugs, you crossed someone the wrong way. There was always someone somewhere ready to do violence against a junkie for whatever reason. And Leo had no problem removing that someone from the equation.

“Cuz there’s this guy. He wants to kill me,” Ray Ray said eagerly. “I swear, I didn’t do
anything
! He thinks I stole something of his and sold it for drug money. But I didn’t!”

“Sure, Ray Ray. Give me some good intel and I’ll straighten it all out for you.”

Ray Ray hesitated.
Interesting.
He was obviously highly motivated, what with death threats hanging over his head and the smell of discharged gunpowder oozing from the Eagle just about right under his nose. So why would he hesitate?

“Ray … ,” Leo encouraged with a warning tone, like a mother scolding a wayward child.

“It’s just that … these guys are bad, bad news,” Ray explained. “Even a guy like you ought to think twice before mixing it up with them.”