Steal the Day (Thieves #2)(36)

It wasn’t until I got to the kitchen that I realized just how much explaining Daniel would be doing.

I looked out the window in my back door and saw Daniel talking to Chad in the moonlight. They stood in the yard, and Daniel had one hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. It looked like Daniel was giving the other man some advice. I say “looked like” because I was so deeply wrong.

In the next second, Daniel’s free hand stabbed a knife straight through Chad’s heart.





Chapter Ten





I was out the door and flying across the porch before Chad’s dead body could hit the ground. Daniel stood over the corpse, but I was pleased to see a look of pure terror cross his handsome face when he realized I was coming his way. He let the knife drop and actually tried to back away.

“Daniel Donovan,” I screamed without thought. It didn’t matter. My nearest neighbor was a mile and a half down the road. Of course, that neighbor was Chad, and he wouldn’t be calling the police any time soon. “You murdering son of a bitch.”

I swung and caught him in the chest, and he had the very good sense to try to look wounded. Neil stood in the background with plenty of distance between himself and whatever violence I was about to visit on my husband.

“Zoey, it’s not what you think.” Daniel’s voice was calm, his breathing steady.

“Not what I think? You stabbed him through the heart! He’s dead on my lawn, Daniel. What are you going to tell me, that he committed suicide?”

“Would you believe me if I tried?” he asked, his voice slightly hopeful.

I slapped at his chest again. “No, I will not believe that he ran at the knife you just happened to be holding out at the very exact level his heart was at. I can’t believe this. What the hell are we going to do with that body?”

The trouble with human bodies is that unlike most supernaturals, they decompose very slowly. Most vampires will turn to ash if hit by enough ultraviolet light, or they have been known to explode from time to time when staked. If you’re going to stake a vampire, don’t wear your best clothes because no amount of dry cleaning will ever get that shit out. Werewolves and other shifters decompose very quickly, so if you take one down you really only have to keep prying eyes out of your kill zone for a day or two. Chad would not be going down so easily. Chad would hang around for years just waiting for some snotty CSI wannabe to solve his untimely murder.

“Don’t worry about the body,” Daniel said with assurance. “I got that covered, baby.”

I laughed a little hysterically. “Good, I’m really glad you thought this out. I wouldn’t want you to go around murdering our neighbors without a really good plan in place.”

Neil tried to interject some reason. “Zoey, if you would just let us explain.”

I turned on him, and he shrank back. “You stay out of this. You don’t want to be on my radar right now. I already shot one wolf in the balls tonight. Don’t think I can’t make it two.”

Neil gulped. “You’re on your own, Daniel.”

I rounded on my husband again. “Yes, you are because I am so not taking the fall for this one, Danny. Those guys earlier this year in the hotel room I will concede deserved to die.”

They’d tried to kill all of us, but Danny and Neil took them out. Luckily a nice group of fairies took care of those bodies since we’d been too busy to do our own cleanup. I didn’t like having to deal with bodies. Bodies were messy.

“I’m glad you approve.” Daniel was far too calm for the situation. I knew he’d been forced to do wet work for the Council as part of his parole, but now I wondered just how much it was affecting him.

“I do not approve of this. He didn’t do anything, Danny. He tried to kiss me once.” I whirled on Neil. “And you! I thought you liked him. He makes one mistake and you let Danny murder him? No one is going to be hot to date you after this makes the rounds.”

Daniel laughed outright. “You think I killed the kid because he kissed you? Seriously? I sent you off with Dev, who was obviously horny out of his mind, so I could murder some gay dude who kissed you and then spent the rest of the night salivating over me and Neil?”

Put like that, it did sound stupid. However, there was still a dead lawyer at my feet. I sidestepped the ever-growing pool of blood, praying I didn’t track it back into the house. I remembered something Michael had said a couple of days earlier. “I believe the term is righteous kill.”

It was the term the Council used for legal executions.

Danny actually bent over laughing. “This is not a righteous kill, Z. Dev, who flagrantly screws my wife at every given opportunity, would be a righteous kill if we hadn’t reached an agreement. Chad here is an idiot who didn’t know better. The Council doesn’t let us run around killing every human who happens to hit on our wives. I know you haven’t met any other companions, but as a class of females, you tend to rate high on the hot scale. There would be a lot of male bodies piling up if we did that.”

He’d said a lot, but I really only caught one part of it. “Agreement?”

Vampires really can pale when they get scared. “Yeah, I agreed to not kill him.”

There was way more to that story. “That was our agreement, Danny. What was your agreement with Dev?” And why the hell hadn’t Dev mentioned it?