Page 23 of A Lion's Heart
Kyss chuckled and flicked the long tail of her hair over her shoulder.
“What? Decan’s not sharing secrets with you yet?” Kyss asked and moved away from the door as Nisa had continued to stare at her expectantly.
“Just tell me what you know.” Nisa insisted as she pulled the driver’s side door open.
She had no intention of discussing Decan and what he did or did not say to her with this female.
“I know what I said I knew.” Kyss talked as she opened the other door and sat sideways on the back seat right next to where moments ago Nisa had placed her duffel bag. “Lial was at the scene of the last murder.”
“Gillian Peterson, niece of Aldo Peterson, senior member of the Ruling Cabinet, was killed three nights ago in a hotel room in Houston,” Nisa stated as she recalled what she’d read from the human media sources. It was easy to tap into their global internet system. The trick was doing so without leaving any footprints back to the ViceSecure link that supported all the Shadow Shifter intelligence. She’d managed it easily on more than one occasion. This last time had been the first that she’d been searching for information about a murder.
“They want us,” Kyss said. She was sitting with her elbows on her knees while she stared down at her black painted nails. “They act all scared because they know we can shift into a three hundred pound cat at any minute and rip their throats out. But really, that shit turns them on.”
Nisa was now sitting in the driver’s seat, the door still ajar, hands resting on her lap. She could see Kyss through the rearview mirror.
“I went to this club once. You might know it since your Auntie Caprise used to dance there. It used to be called Athena’s. Actually, it still is even after all this time. Of course it’s under new ownership. Some sleazy old dude. Anyway, humans are still just as basic as an always horny shifter. These two guys saw my tat,” she paused and then looked up to the mirror to stare directly at Nisa.
“It’s on my inner thigh. You can see it too if you want.” Kyss winked.
Nisa tilted her head and quirked her lips. “No thanks.”
Kyss shrugged. “Your loss. So, moving on. After they saw the tat they got all hot. I mean, their cocks were just about bursting through their jeans they were so ready to get inside me. I’d been hitting a three day dry spell so I figured what the hell. We go back into one of the rooms there and the guys are naked in like five seconds. But before I could even take my shirt off they were asking me to shift for them. They wanted to know what it felt like to have a big sexy cat licking all over their body. Wanted to see if that would get them off.”
Nisa gasped. She’d meant to remain straight-faced and stoic, but Kyss’s candor took her by surprise.
“It did,” Kyss continued with a nod and a grin. “Faster than even I thought it would. So yeah, they’re interested in us for all sorts of reasons. Gillian Peterson was just like those hard-up jokers at the club. She loved getting laid by a cat. Lial had been giving her exactly what she wanted for the past few months, for a hefty fee I might add.”
“She was paying him to have sex with her?”
“She was financing her own brothel,” Kyss said. “Lial and a gang of other Serfins were all too happy to give those uptight socialites exactly what they wanted but couldn’t get from their starchy human guys. That’s probably how he ended up in Gillian’s hotel room.”
“Why would he kill her?” Nisa asked.
“I didn’t say he did,” Kyss replied.
“No. But you are saying too much,” Decan announced, irritation clear in his tone as he reached into the back seat and yanked Kyss out.
Nisa had felt his approach, but she hadn’t cared. She wanted to know what Kyss knew and she was fairly certain that if she asked Decan he wasn’t going to tell her.
“I was just answering your girlfriend’s questions,” Kyss replied and looked up at Decan with pouting lips. “I want to ride with you.”
Nisa watched as Kyss’s hand trailed a path from Decan’s shoulder down his torso, to just above the buckle of his pants because that’s when he grabbed her by both wrists and pulled her up until only the tip of her boots touched the ground.
“You’ll ride in the second vehicle. You’re gonna keep your mouth shut and your hands to yourself,” he told her.
Nisa wondered what she was seeing. She was pretty sure that Kyss had just made a very sexual overture toward her. And now she was clearly tempting Decan, for the second time. As much as she normally believed that she loved unraveling a puzzle, this chick and what was going on in her mind wasn’t something Nisa wanted to explore. With that thought she pulled the driver’s side door shut and started the Tracer’s engine. When she’d tossed her bag on the back seat, she’d put her board on the front passenger seat. It was powered up and when she started the Tracer, the vehicle’s diagnostics report came onto the screen. The tracking system had definitely been disabled by someone who knew how to hack into her system.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Decan asked when he had to go around to the passenger side door and open it because Nisa had locked the driver’s side door.
“I’m getting ready to drive to Houston. If you’re coming you should climb in.”
He was irritated. She didn’t have to look at him to figure that out. “I told you this was my mission,” he said.
“And I’m not arguing that fact. That doesn’t mean that I can’t drive my own vehicle. If you get in,” she said and reached for the board, “we can get moving.”
She slid the board down into the compartment on the door so that he couldn’t see the screen. Decan knew that the tracking system had been disabled. He’d had to since he wanted to keep reminding her that he was the leader of the mission. If she asked him why, he wasn’t going to tell her. Or at least he wasn’t going to be honest with her. The aroma of his lies always lingered just beneath that other very alluring scent he carried. The one that was like a direct communication link to her cat.
He surprised her by waiting only a beat and then getting in. But not before giving a nod to someone outside of the vehicles—probably the Serfin guard named Gold that had joined this group along with Decan. This shifter had a history in Oasis, one that was a bit turbulent but not so much that her father refused to let him be a part of this mission. Either that, or Decan had some very special reason for keeping Gold with him and he’d somehow been able to convince her father that this was a good idea. That was something else for her to contemplate.
