He had absolutely no contempt for this hot shrink-who-wasn’t-his-shrink whatsoever. Probably because he’d never been able to resist a woman telling him what’s what. Because it had been too long, and he’d missed someone talking to him like she saw him. Sure, she didn’t like what she was seeing, but he didn’t much like himself either. And his dick did not give a good goddamn that he was facing twenty-five to life. It only cared that he was facing someone beautiful. It only wanted to listen to that growl coming from deep inside him. He hadn’t understood the growl before, but he heard it clearly now. Saying “take” and “have” and “mine.” Imprinting. Quack, quack. His beast and his brain and his body all plotting together, because it beat the alternative: remembering why he was actually here.
Of course, his brain had to go and ruin it as the lawyers walked out and he got yanked out of his chair by the guard. You really think she’s going to do more than talk to you? Knowing what you’ve done? Knowing what you are? You’re a killer, Joe. A thousand times over. And maybe he wasn’t all that sorry for all the things he’d done, but it was a lot to ask of anybody else. Especially a woman like the doc. Somebody with a brain and a heart and morals. Murder didn’t tend to curl a lady’s toes, did it? And shifters weren’t exactly prime dating material. Fuck. He was one deluded motherfucker, wasn’t he? She’s not for you, buddy. She’s never going to be for you.
He could just imagine what Kenny would have to say about that. “Joey, since when do you have troubling getting laid? Shit, if you can’t get pussy, where’s the hope for the rest of us?”
“You watch your mouth, kid,” he’d say back. “There’s more to women than pussy. Don’t disrespect ’em that way.” Kenny Castelli, the closest thing he ever had to a brother, who fucking hero-worshipped him and probably died because of it. Joe was always great at giving him advice that he’d never actually taken himself…and that Kenny didn’t take either. And now here they were. A dead man and a dead man walking.
The trip back to his cell—if it could be called that when he was being shoved most of the way—stripped the rest of the swagger right out of him. Every ounce of attitude he’d displayed for Feinberg, Taylor, and the doc just faded away. He couldn’t afford to forget why he was here, a “guest” of Kings County. He’d taken human lives without an ounce of regret. Too many lives. And he wasn’t supposed to add one more spectacular body to the count.
Chapter 2
Her knees should’ve been wobbling when they collected their things and left the correctional facility. Her guts should’ve been in a twist. But she walked out onto Atlantic Avenue on steady legs, with a serious craving for chicken and dumplings from the soul-food place just up the block. That it still existed despite rising rents and weekly ICE and Supernatural Regulation Bureau raids was one of the world’s small miracles.
“Damn, Neha! You’ve got balls!” Dustin gave a low whistle of admiration and shook his head. “Glad we brought you in on this.”
“Ovaries,” she corrected. “I believe the term you’re looking for is ‘ovaries of steel.’”
He laughed while Nate suppressed a smile, his eyes serious. “You did good today, Neha. Keep it up.”
“Don’t worry; I will.” She was pretty confident—you didn’t get through law school without at least a little bit of a high opinion of yourself—but the validation still felt good.
Papa and Ma had wanted her to go into something “safe” and high-paying, expecting her JD to land her a legal-eagle husband and not a stack of alleged criminals to defend. Now, one of their biggest nightmares was that she would pick up a man in Kings County Criminal Court. To be fair, they also thought that if she opted to hang her shingle out as a therapist, she’d be bound to fall in love with a patient. They watched a lot of Indian soap operas on satellite—their respite from a far-more-bonkers reality.
Joe Peluso was a character they could never dream up. The basics were easy to check off. He was forty-two years old, Italian-American, with a blue-collar upbringing in Queens. What they could access of his military service record was spotless. He’d had tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan and never faced disciplinary action of any kind. He seemed like the typical white American male who liked beer and guns and his country. But there were so many unanswered questions. From what little she knew about shape-shifters, they were born, not made…and yet there was no indication that Joe’s family were anything other than human. When had he been turned and by who? Why hadn’t he killed Vasiliev’s men in his supernatural form? Why hadn’t he taken on that form during almost a year in a jail? She would have to dig for the truth…and the challenge made goose bumps break out on her skin even though it was a perfect autumn in Brooklyn. What had turned this guy into a murderer? What could they use to reduce his sentence or, miracle of miracles, put him back on the street?
Yeah. Okay. Maybe they should have had a few moral qualms about setting a killer loose. But he hadn’t exactly gone after six Girl Scouts. He hadn’t committed carnage, letting his beast run wild all over New York. She was going to sleep at night by reminding herself that a few dead sex traffickers were no great loss to society.
It was depressing to put it into words, but from a purely PR standpoint, they were infinitely lucky that a decent percentage of the country still believed Nazis were bad. That Joe Peluso had kind of done a public service by taking out guys who sported Wolfsangel and swastika tattoos and sold young girls into sexual servitude. There was, of course, still a percentage who thought Joe’s victims were “very fine people.” Very fine people who had cats and helped old white ladies across the street when they weren’t stuffing teenagers into shipping containers and yelling slurs at anyone brown. God bless America.
Theoretically, you weren’t supposed to put the victims on trial. But more often than not, that was the job. Arguing why certain people deserved to live and others deserved to die. Sometimes you just had to park morality at the door and look at the shades of gray. It didn’t help that the world had changed in the past few years. Practicing law in America, practicing medicine, practicing basic humanity…none of it was like it had been when Neha was growing up. There were more shades of gray than anything else.
Yeah, she would’ve made a lousy wife to a nice, well-adjusted guy her parents approved of. To that staid L-school son-in-law they were still dreaming about. Maybe she would’ve been safer, but safety was overrated. Hell, when you had darker skin—no amount of Fair & Lovely skin cream could turn her into a white girl—safety was a flat-out lie.
Nate and Dustin grabbed a private car back to the office. It was only a ten-minute walk, but Neha wasn’t surprised they wanted to keep the dust off their Ferragamos…and avoid the drone sweeps that had become part of daily American life these past few years. Part of the deal that kept the Sanctuary Cities running was mandatory surveillance. The footage was flagged for criminal activity by algorithms and then pored over by a joint federal-state task force. Ostensibly impartial, the group was composed of humans and a few warlocks who’d been cleared for intelligence work. There were countless task forces and bureaus these days. They all amounted to the same thing: control. She was probably on multiple watch lists already, and her serviceable DSW pumps had seen better days and many a block. Even cell blocks. And they’d be seeing a lot of Joe Peluso in the weeks to come.