Taming the Demon (13 page)

Chapter 13

N
atalie licked away the last gluey blob of hastily prepared instant oatmeal and rinsed the bowl, leaving it in the sink out of deference to Jimena’s need to load the dishwasher
just so.

“I’m so sorry,” the woman said, fumbling to line up fresh chives on the chopping board. “I don’t know what came over me last night. To have left this kitchen in such a state!”

“It’s not your job to make my breakfast, Jimena,” Natalie said, giving the woman’s wan appearance a frank assessment. “I’m spoiled, that’s all. And if you aren’t well, you should take the day. You have plenty of personal days built up, I happen to know—and plenty of nutritious, absolutely delicious preprepared meals in that freezer. Mr. Compton would want you to take care of yourself, you know that. And you deserve a break, after the meal you pulled off last night.”

Last night. Devin and his hands all over her and her body arching in responses completely out of her control—

Devin and his startling rejection of who she was because of who she’d been.

Devin and his wild eyes and his inexplicable pain and his need...

Devin, gone.

Jimena frowned at the chopping board, creating the neat, chunky garnishes for Compton’s late omelet. She opened her mouth, her brows drawn tightly together, and then shrugged ever so slightly, reaching for a single, perfect red chili.

“What?” Natalie asked her.

Jimena shook her head. She said, “It was a puzzling meal. I did my best with the request, but...for company...”

“They loved it,” Natalie said. “It was unusual. And he took all the credit for the theme of it.”

“Letting me off the hook, you mean?” Jimena shot her a dry glance, but looked quickly away. “I shouldn’t have said that. Whatever comes out of this kitchen is my responsibility. And...” She briskly gathered up the diced condiments, green and red and sharply enticing. “I have concern that the dishes might not have digested well together. But you heard of no one else who wasn’t well?”

“No one else?” For a moment Natalie floundered—and then she realized, “You?”

Jimena smiled, a little wryly. “Your young man left some pieces untouched. The others, too, if less so. I made myself dinner from them.”

Your young man.
Natalie hesitated—struck by how deeply those words hit, how absurd it was that it should matter. She said, “You think it was the—” and then saw the embarrassment on Jimena’s face and quickly shook her head. “No,” she said. “I haven’t heard anything.” Because with Devin there was no telling, was there? She added a quick, distracted smile as Jimena broke eggs into a bowl and reached for the whisk. “Take it easy today, okay? I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”

She left Jimena looking more relaxed as she headed upstairs, ducking only briefly into the guest hall bath to brush her teeth and check her appearance.

The mirror offered no reassurance at all. There she stood, a grim young woman, impeccably dressed and presented—and as wan as Jimena, if in spirit instead of body.

As if in teaching herself to make her own choices, she’d forgotten to allow herself to just
be.

Devin James...that grin of his, it knew how to grab the moment. His hands, his mouth...those knew how to grab the moment, too. They’d known how to grab
her.
From the inside out.

She turned out the light and headed briskly for the office. Damned briskly.

Compton had been working already—he would see this quiet day as a chance to work unimpeded, his workout accomplished early and his late breakfast break now imminent.

Natalie pulled out her notes from the day before, entered the pertinent items into his online scheduler and printed out crisp, updated copies.

Focus on the job at hand.
It kept away the creeping memories from those days of what she’d once been; it kept away her endless, nagging guilt that if she’d just
done
something,
said
something, even
screamed
something at just the right time, then the man in the alley would not have died at her feet.

She took a breath, shook out her hands and brought herself back to this day, this now. And on this day, she had thank-you calls to make and bills to pay and the next event to arrange, not to mention a skip tracer with whom to touch base.

She took the schedule pages into Compton’s private office, where she routinely handed them off directly. But the office stood empty, the windows still lightly veiled against the morning light. Caught off guard—she couldn’t remember a time she’d been in here alone—Natalie hesitated briefly and opted for efficiency, the few quick steps to lay the printouts neatly beside his keyboard.

The monitor flickered to life; she stepped back, averting her gaze—but not quickly enough to avoid absorbing the screen image, a security camera feed frozen on an inexplicable frame of smudged shadow and patchy gray.
A room.
At night. Here on the estate?
But why?
And so she glanced again, confirmed that impression, found tiny blurs of light here—and there—just pinpricks. But there was nothing recognizable—no face, no human form. So why? And where?

Not her business, that’s what. Just because she’d nudged the mouse didn’t give her license to pry. She stepped away from the desk and took her mind to her next task. Phone calls.

“Natalie.”

It wasn’t a voice filled with warm approval.

She hadn’t heard him coming—hadn’t seen him. For a moment, startled, she saw the same predatory gleam in his eye that so often overtook Devin. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “I left your schedule.” And realized, with dread that took her by surprise, that he would see that she’d knocked the computer out of sleep mode.

“In the future, Natalie, you may leave the schedule on the desk in our shared space,” he told her, no forgiveness in cold eyes.

“I understand,” she said, because it was the only thing to say. And then, because she didn’t dare look at the monitor but she knew it needed more time to sleep, she added, “Are you well, sir?”

He arched a brow. Silver hair styled crisply, features mature but not aging, every aspect of his appearance tended. “Completely well,” he said. “Did I give you occasion to ask?”

She felt the immediate impulse to defer...pushed back against it, but no less respectful. “Not at all. But I do know that Devin wasn’t feeling well yesterday after dinner, so I’ve been concerned.”

“Ah.” Compton relaxed, ever so slightly. “Perhaps he was unaccustomed to something in the meal. I don’t expect it was his usual quality of fare.”

“No,” Natalie murmured, wondering at that little dig. “I don’t expect that it was.”

“I have queries out for his replacement,” Compton said, because of course they’d discussed Devin’s departure first thing.

“I was still hoping—” But she stopped herself, because there was nothing to hope. Even if Devin wanted back, he had walked out on the job. Compton wouldn’t have him.

And she knew better than to think Devin would want it.

She didn’t dare glance over at the monitor, but surely it had been long enough for the screen saver to kick in. Surely it was safe, now, to go back to her own space.

Not that it should have mattered. Or that she should be second-guessing his lack of concern for the welfare of a guest at his table, given that guest’s sudden departure from employment.

But something inside her did. Something inside her took note.

And it was that part of her that Devin James had brought back to life.

* * *

Devin stared down the quiet Alley of Life—garden patches put to bed, litter neatly patrolled, graffiti painted away. He stared and took note, breathing deeply—grounding himself in its details. The wild road started in on him the moment he’d left her.

Devin twisted aside from it, clawed away from it, held every determined moment of himself from it.

Without Natalie, it came hard on him.

But she’d given him ideas; she’d given him tools. She’d given him things that Leo had never had.

So he centered himself in thoughts of Natalie—the high cut of her cheekbones, the slant of them; the unusual shape of her mouth, and the way the very corners curved upward, humor coming out even when she had no intention of smiling at all.

Soft hair in his fingers, soft flesh beneath his hands, soft noises in his ears.

That, he found, was a sweet, fierce pain that never failed to bring him back from the edge of the road.

And now he had something to do.

For now he had a beginning. He had, in the past several days since leaving the estate, discovered an architect who didn’t exist—for the man who’d ostensibly given Natalie his new office address not only no longer had the old office, he no longer worked in Albuquerque at all—and hadn’t done so for a number of months now. Still listed online, still in the phone book...but otherwise, no sign of him.

And Devin had put out word on the men he’d killed, looking to identify them in absentia...looking for a trail. Too generic, most of the men, but the one with the tattoos? He thought he’d get a ping on that one.

And Enrique. “Be careful,” he’d told the old man. “If you’re right that I was drugged the other night, that means Compton is definitely dirty—even if I can’t figure out how.”

But Enrique had only smiled, a mean expression. “This is my neighborhood,” he said. “You—you’re my people. This man should have stayed to being dirty among his own kind, if he didn’t want to be noticed.”

And so Enrique, too, did his looking.

But for all Devin’s questions and all his thinking and all his effort to separate what was happening within him from what he still had of himself, here was where he found himself time after time. Early morning, sharp afternoon, fading day...deep midnight.
One of the first Alley of Life spots,
Natalie had said, and for as garbled as he’d been, he’d understood her well enough—absorbed her well enough. The horror of her experience here—here where he stood, his mind’s eye even now seeing a man stagger out of the alley.

My brother.

Easy to imagine what it would have looked like, two men silhouetted in battle, the one wrenching free from a grievous wound to rise up high above the other, the blade suddenly in hand...the blade turned traitor to them both.

And so Leo had died, and Devin had lived, and now he stared down this alley buttressed by dried winter plume grasses, stakes marking the summer vegetable rows and honeysuckle vines winter-sere along the fence, neat patches of earth already prepared for the following spring. A thing of beauty...a thing of nurture. Here, in this place of death.

Ironic.

But what Devin felt most, amid the turmoil of what Natalie’s words had wrought in him—aware that once she
knew,
he could never expect her to look at him with that smile or take him with that mouth or make demands of him with those hands—had nothing to do with Natalie, or with Leo, or with Devin himself.

It had to do with what he’d been too wounded, too grieving and too new to the blade to notice, when he’d been here with Leo years earlier. It had to do with the angry thrum in the air, a spark of metal hackles—still resonating in the blade, these years later, if not with the intensity of what it had felt that night.
Intruder, other, warning
, hiss and spit—

And it had to do with what he’d felt in this blade only a few nights earlier. That same fury, that same territorial gnashing—that same insane fever of reaction, overlaid on a mean peyote haze that had left him with no defenses. Not against the blade, not against Natalie’s touch in his heart.

And maybe that was the beginning, after all. That reaction...that fury.

Years earlier, his brother had died for that insanity, that fury. Just over a week earlier, Devin had survived it—in the arms of the woman who had been there for both events.

The common threads. The alleys.

And Natalie.

So maybe Sawyer Compton had some questions to answer—but first, Devin thought, he’d have to talk to Natalie. First, he thought, she deserved the truth.

No matter what came of it.

* * *

Sawyer Compton found himself displeased.

Truly, the game was only worth playing so long as it was pleasing. Failing that, it was time to bring things to a close.

Options, options.

He stood before the vast window of the shared office—beside the drafting desk, there where he cut a striking figure in black slacks and black turtleneck—a working day, with his hair not quite as crisply styled as usual and the suggestion of a smudge on his hand.

Plans for the restaurant spread before him on the desk; the estate spread before him out the window. His future spread before him in his mind.

Nothing spontaneous about any of it. And he wanted Natalie off guard today, her mind deeply involved in work. Unprepared.

“Have you decided?” he asked, just as abruptly as he’d meant to—startling Natalie from her careful research. A new caterer, he believed. As if it truly mattered.

She lifted her head, tucking that wavy strand of sun-brushed hair into the darker mass of it. “About the bodyguard, you mean?”

She’d been avoiding the subject for days. She might not still hold hopes that Devin James would return, but she wasn’t ready to cede that position to anyone else, either. Compton had no difficulty reading it in the flush that came up across those exquisite cheekbones anytime the subject came up.

She might have had some questionable moments on the streets, but she’d never been cut out to lie.

Not from that first moment he’d first—and finally—met her, at the first Alley of Life dedication—lurking on the edges, a young woman too thin, too anxious, too jumpy. Dressed in thrift-store chic, everything worn but everything neat.

There hadn’t been much to see at that dedication. A short, grumpy alley, still resonating with the flavor of death—not that anyone else could taste it. The ground broken, what there was of it; the seeds planted. A perfectly placed arrangement of potted plants brought in to start things off right.

But it hadn’t been a coincidence that the dedication had been planned on Natalie’s morning off—from both school and work. Not coincidence that she was there at all. For if at first he’d kept track of her because of what she’d witnessed, he quickly grew to recognize her as a potential resource—and he’d known just how to guide her along.