Storm's Heart (Elder Races #2)(60)

Rune stared point-blank into Tiago’s gaze, his handsome face hard and unflinching. The First said in a calm voice, “I know you’re in there. You can hear me or you would have drawn blood by now. Think for a minute. Who needs us?”

Tiago sucked in a deep breath that shuddered through his frame as he fought to contain the beast. He turned his head to one side and growled, “Niniane.”

“That’s right.” Rune lowered his voice to a barely audible murmur. “You better listen to me. You f**k things up now and you can’t go back. They’ll never let you get near her again. Got it?”

That snapped Tiago’s head back into place like nothing else could have. He stopped straining against the other sentinel’s hold and said, “Got it.”

Rune’s tawny eyebrows rose. He lessened the pressure he had been exerting against Tiago’s clavicle. Tiago remained quiescent, as he maintained a hard grip on his beast. Rune nodded, let go and clapped him on the shoulder.

Rune turned to face the Dark Fae Commander. He said, “Okay, first, you’ve been harshing my good friend’s chi. I’m not liking you so much right now.”

“I’ll add a second point to that,” said Dr. Telemar, who stepped out of her corner. All her head snakes were looking at the Dark Fae Commander. “I’m not into inter-demesne politics, but you just maligned the integrity of my office and I’ll not stand for it. There’s not one damn thing out of place with my autopsy procedures, up to and including how the bodies of these Wyr are being processed.”

Despite getting her ass chewed on two different fronts, the cold anger in the Commander’s angular face dissipated. She straightened out of her defensive fighting crouch and looked thoughtful as she sheathed her swords. A couple of the medusa’s head snakes turned to blink at Rune. He gave them a whatthe-f*ck shrug.

Arethusa looked from Rune to Tiago. She said, “I heard what you said.”

Tiago might have gotten a grip on his beast’s leash again, but he didn’t trust himself to speak. The muscle in his jaw jumped. He bent to pick up his Ray-Bans and slid them back on his nose.

Rune was the one who replied. “To which bit are you referring, Commander?”

Arethusa looked at Tiago. He noticed she took care to remain on the other side of the room, but the scent of aggression had faded from her pheromones. She said to him, “Whatever else the Wyr could be involved in, it really does matter to you that the Dark Fae heir might need your help.”

“You think?” Tiago said from between his teeth. Sometime he wanted to get just one good shot at the Commander’s face. One of these days, Alice, he thought as he stared at her. Straight to the goddamn moon.

Rune said, “I have to ask you, Commander. What part of this”—he made an all-encompassing gesture that included the three dead Wyr, and Tiago and himself—“makes any kind of sense to you? Why would we send Tiago to find and protect Niniane and then send these bozos after her too? There are a lot easier and more straightforward ways to execute a couple of guys.”

Arethusa sucked a tooth as she considered them. “When I came in, you were talking about trying to get a positive ID on these three so you could look for a money trail. That’s what we did for Geril,” she said. “We looked for a money trail. You know what we found? He had a new Bank of America account in which he had received a substantial deposit this week from an Illinois company owned by Cuelebre Enterprises.”

Tiago’s eyes narrowed. “Which company?” he asked.

“Tri-State Financial Services,” Arethusa said.

Tiago looked at Rune, and they both started to smile.

Dr. Telemar spoke up. “I missed something. What is there to smile about in that?”

Tiago crossed his arms as he leaned back against one of the autopsy tables. He told Arethusa and the medusa, “Somebody made another mistake. Cuelebre Enterprises doesn’t own a company named Tri-State Financial Services.”

The Dark Fae Commander’s eyes narrowed, her expression full of skepticism. “And you know this so conveniently how?”

Tiago said, “Cuelebre Enterprises owns six companies that are based in Illinois. Thanks to Urien’s and Dragos’s recent fight over Urien’s attempt to secure a U.S. defense contract, those companies have come under a great deal of scrutiny at the head office in New York. Stocks have taken a dip, and Dragos is tired of f**king around with them. He’s working on getting them stabilized so that he can sell them off. If you dig deeper into your information, I think what you’re going to find is that you’ve got a dummy corporation on your hands.”

Arethusa stepped forward. She gripped the edge of an autopsy table and leaned on her hands, her mouth pursed as she regarded the corpse in front of her without appearing to really see it. “Okay,” she said after a few minutes. “I’ll check it out. Now what do you mean, somebody made another mistake?”

“Whoever set Geril and his buddies on Niniane didn’t know how much self-defense training the sentinels had given her,” Tiago said.

“Which was a lot,” Rune added. “She was not exactly an easy study. That’s simple enough to verify. Just ask her. We had to keep going over and over some things. That training was what saved Niniane’s life.”

Tiago continued, “They also didn’t know how much scrutiny Cuelebre Enterprises’ Illinois companies have been under recently in New York, or they might have chosen a different, less easily verified way to frame the Wyr. They also didn’t know that I had come to Chicago, or they would never have sent these guys after her. And that’s not all. We’ve now got two attempts to frame the Wyr. What do you have when you have the same MO in two different crimes?”