Without Regret (Pyte/Sentinel #2)(44)

Instead the man dedicated ten years of his life on a girl who simply hadn’t been worth it. He’d taken every single job he could get his hands on, gone without and all for the sake of his compassionate besotted soul, leaving Kale with absolutely no choice but to go with him and protect him.

Not that anyone would believe him now, but Logan used to be the kindest man Kale had ever known. He would never willingly hurt anyone. He always went out of his way to help others, never had a bad word to say about anybody, and always had a ready smile. He’d also been the best and only friend Kale ever had, which was probably why he was here when he should be resting.

Resting? He snorted at the concept since that’s all it was him to him. No matter how many times he tried to bullshit himself with promises of a break after each job he knew it was all sugar coated bullshit he told himself as he tried to find the will to keep pushing through to the next job. A few more jobs and he would be set for life, which is why he should never have accepted this job in the first place.

A war was starting and he was in high demand. Instead of accepting Logan’s summons, which he knew was only going to end poorly, he should have entertained one of the higher offers since one of those offers would have brought him one step closer to his goal. Unfortunately for him he couldn’t forget the pain on Logan’s face the moment his world crumbled at his feet.

Sentiment had no business in his life and sometimes he wondered if he should do them both a favor and ram a stake through Logan’s heart. Not that the man had much of one these days. The man was cold, brutal and unforgiving. He was nothing like the young human who could fill a two day walk while they searched for work with endless excited chatter and couldn’t seem to stop smiling.

He felt the familiar tightening in his chest at the memory of Logan, carefree and smiling and shoved it away before he became sick. When everything was said and done the blame lay on his shoulders.

All of it.

After nine hundred years he couldn’t forgive himself or forget about his friend no matter how hard he tried. It was the same reason he took this job and why he would finish it for his friend and foolishly hope that it would earn a mediocre amount of forgiveness from the only friend he’d ever known.

He knew it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference what he did, but he couldn’t stop himself from hoping. When this job was done he’d have to face Logan’s anger once again. Not that he’d let the man have his revenge. He wasn’t a f**king idiot after all.

“Aren’t you going to shift?” one of the leeches asked, drawing his attention.

“No,” he said firmly, focusing his mind right back where it should be, finding Isabella McGuire. He never shifted. Shifting would mean losing control to his baser instincts and he would never allow that. Although he’d still be in control, his needs would be magnified and he’d be worthless. He’d had his last shift over five hundred years ago and had absolutely no intentions of changing it any time soon.

“Then why the hell are you here?” the man demanded.

“To make you ask questions,” Kale said distractedly as he scanned the one room apartment.

There was nothing homey about the room. There were no pictures lining the walls, nothing notably personal about the room in any way. There was no couch. The only place to sit in the room was the worn faux black leather desk chair and the unmade twin bed shoved up against the wall.

As he stepped away from the two vampires and their damn scent he closed his eyes and inhaled slowly, taking in every scent in the room and working through each and every one of them.

“Don’t f**king move,” he snarled when one of the vampires tried to move closer to him. After a small hesitation he heard the man move back, which was the only thing that saved him from getting his heart ripped out, for the moment at least.

He focused his attention back on the scents and knew Logan was right. The woman didn’t know she was a Sentinel. There was no scent of old blood, gun powder, silver or one of the hundreds of scents he’d detected in other Sentinel homes. He opened his eyes and strolled around the room, noting that nothing in the room, not that there was much of it, was breakable.

From what he could see in the open cabinets of her tiny kitchen, all of her eatery was made from plastic and paper. Among the scattered items on the small tiled section of the kitchen were several unopened package of paper plates, cutlery and plastic cups. He walked over to the cabinets, stepping on plastic forks, dozens of take out menus and a few cans of food and opened the one and only drawer in the tiny kitchen, already knowing what to expect and wasn’t disappointed.

“A woman after my heart,” he murmured as he picked up a box of Twinkies and inhaled deeply until he could scent the chemically altered filling through the thin cardboard and plastic packaging. His stomach growled viciously at the enticing odor. After testing the scent one last time to make sure it hadn’t been f**ked with, he ripped open the box and started to dig into the tasty treat.

He ignored the dirty looks Logan’s men were sending him and strolled around the room only pausing when he came across some papers that were anything but personal. They were random print outs about computer codes. Interesting, he thought as he demolished the entire package of Twinkies and headed to her small dorm size fridge, praying that she had the life saving elixir that he needed and knew she would.

It was pretty bad when the only person that hadn’t pissed him off today was the untrained female Sentinel that he was going to hunt down and hand over to Logan to no doubt be tortured and killed, he mused as he grabbed two cans of Coke out of her fridge.