Whereupon he just stood there. Like, well, a dumbass.

“You know,” Tohrment remarked as he parked it on the sofa in the sitting area, “I’m not sure what I’m most surprised about. The fact that your coffin was full of flour, the hi-how’re-ya out of the blue, the pull-a-female-through-a-steel-door . . . or this.”

“What’s this,” Sahvage muttered as he turned around.

“The bonding.”

“I haven’t bonded with her, for fuck’s sake.”

The fact that he had to physically restrain himself from stamping his boot was something that he resolutely refused to dwell on.

Meanwhile, over on an armchair, the Brother Butch cocked an eyebrow. And didn’t say a goddamn thing.

Which made it worse, of course.

As minutes stretched into three hundred years of waiting, Sahvage paced up and back. A couple of times.

Then he stopped. “So you know where the Book is?”

Butch looked at Tohrment. Who shook his head.

“We have a couple of people working on leads.” Tohrment crossed his arms over his daggers. “But make no mistake, we will find it.”

Sahvage thought about the summoning spell. And kept his goddamn mouth shut.

“When we get its location,” Tohrment continued, “we’re going to need you to help us get it. And before you try to bullshit us again that you’re nothing special, you just pulled a female out of some kind of alternate reality through a steel door. We need you, warlock. Without your powers, we’re not going to get to goal.”

Sahvage narrowed his eyes. “Answer me this: What are you going to do with the Book when you get it?”

“Put it in a very safe place.”

“You’re going to destroy it?”

“It’s going to be in a very safe place.”

Sahvage thought about the brunette. And what that bitch had done to Mae.

Then he cursed to himself as he remembered what his Mae wanted the Book for. But maybe everything that had just happened had changed her mind—not that he knew the details of abduction yet. He sure as shit was going to find out everything as soon as she was able to tell him about it, though.

Because now there were two things on his extermination list.

“I’m staying here with Mae,” Sahvage said. “You get a bead on the Book, the Reverend has my number.”

“So you will help us.”

Sahvage stared right into the navy blue eyes of the fighter who had once been his brother in all but blood—and lied through his fucking fangs.

“Absolutely I will.”

• • •

As Erika stepped off the Commodore building’s main elevator, a couple of floors above where she’d been called into that scene with the murdered and desecrated couple, she was glad that short-staffing issues had kicked in once again.

Striding down, she did not miss her sleep. Her empty apartment. Her planned couple of hours off. She was firing on all cylinders.

The uniform by the door nodded to her and opened the way in. As she passed through, she nodded back at him.

“They’re in with all the books,” he said.

The direction was great—except for the fact that it presumed she knew anything about the layout of the rooms inside. But considering all of the balls in the air at the moment? The mystery of the body’s location was the simplest one she had to solve. Besides, all she did was follow the conversation. Soft. With some weeping thrown in for tragic measure.

According to Special Agent Delorean, the wife found the husband after he’d gone to investigate a tripped alarm. And the corpse was . . . right up Erika’s alley.

After she went through a room full of hunks of rock, and then one that had some pretty gruesome-looking old instruments in it, she rounded a corner—and took a memory snapshot: Nothing but shelves and books in this space, but that was not what was going to stick with her.

Over in the far corner, a very dead body appeared to have been used as a projectile against a section of shelving, all kinds of broken pieces of wood and disrupted leather covers and cracked spines around the remains.

Which were in a very bad state.

Delorean broke away from the uniforms and came over. “This has to be your boy. There’s no . . . it’s just like the scene at the club and the other places, as if someone waved a goddamn wand and tore him in half.”

Erika went over and knelt down. Maybe it was the exhaustion . . . maybe it was the fact that her nerves were shot . . . but she was having trouble processing the victim’s injuries. It was as if he had been pulled apart at the legs, the torso raggedly torn in half from crotch to throat.

A sense that she was being watched made her jerk her head back over her shoulder. But there was no one there—

Erika frowned and straightened. Inside a Lucite presentation stand with a lid, like it was something special, a book was set apart from the others and it captured her attention for no good reason: Even though she couldn’t see its cover or its spine properly, and didn’t have any clue about how fancy or expensive it was, there was just something . . .

Well, captivating about it—

“You okay?” Delorean asked.

“Is the wife in the other room?” she asked as she shook herself back to attention.

“Yeah.”

“I’m going to go talk to her.” Erika put her hand up to the special agent. “Just give me a minute with her alone.”

Without waiting for a response, she followed the sounds of sniffling through a couple more rooms, and found herself emerging into some kind of sitting area that seemed big enough to be in a hotel. Over on a set of sofas, by a curving staircase, a woman with really good hair and a puffy face was wearing a bathrobe-and-nightgown set that was quite possibly worth more than a month or two of Erika’s rent.

As she approached, she didn’t have to ask the officer to get up and go. He took one look Erika’s way and murmured something to the victim’s wife before excusing himself.

“Hi, I’m Detective Saunders,” she said as she came over. “I’m with homicide.”

The wife patted her red nose with a Kleenex and looked up. “I just told him everything I know.”

“I’m sure it will be helpful. You okay if I sit down with you?”

“I don’t have anything else to tell. Herb went down when the alarm registered motion and he didn’t come back. I waited about twenty minutes and then . . . I left our bedroom and found him . . .”

Erika lowered herself onto a white velvet couch that was part of an overall neutral color scheme—so that the masterpieces on the walls would show, no doubt. Jeez, the place was like a modern art museum.

“Why would someone do that?” the wife said as she stared at the wad of tissue she was holding. “Why?”

When those bloodshot eyes shifted over, Erika’s heart stopped.

“I am so sorry.” Leaning forward, she put her hand on the woman’s shoulder. “I promise you, I’m going to find the person responsible. I will bring them to justice if it’s the last thing I do.”

Maybe it was the female-to-female thing, maybe it was the honest-to-God communion Erika felt with the pain the woman was feeling, but the wife’s eyes watered anew.

“Do you think this has anything to do with the watches?”