Born To Be Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 3 Read Online Free PDF Page B

road.
    “What are you doing?”
    “I’m not focusing. They’ll go faster,” Brody said. He double-parked the car and turned on me.
    “Give me those.”
    I handed over all the flyers, watching him as he scowled. Brody Rooks wore his thirty-something years more comfortably than most men, for all that they’d been really hard years. Six feet tall, with a hard, functionally strong body that he dressed in rumpled suits and attitude, he was a grimmer, rougher-edged version of the man I’d known and massively crushed on as a teenager, when the two of us had worked missing children’s cases through the Memphis police department. But his scowl was the same, and he leveled it now at the posters, lingering over the kids’ images we both knew all too well. Without looking up at me, he kept talking. “Why were you in the airport? Where are you coming from?”
    I stiffened at the accusation in his tone. “Not really your business.”
    “You getting shot at makes it my business.” He lifted his head and speared me with his glare. “Where?”
    “Germany. Pleasure trip.”
    Brody’s snort spoke volumes, but I didn’t care about his delicate sensibilities. Nevertheless, it marked the second time this week that I’d been targeted, and even for me that was a lot.
    “Um, you remember Viktor Dal?”
    He hesitated a second too long, then handed me back the flyers. “Why? We’re going to the station. Why do you mention Dal? What the hell does he have to do with anything?”
    “Nothing. It doesn’t matter. Why are we going to the station?” I tried the door, but he’d locked it. Figured. “I don’t want to go to the station. I want to go to my hotel.”
    “Tough.” We drove in silence until we reached the familiar building, and he turned into a parking space, popping the locks on the door as he picked up the flyers. “Nikki’ll be here within the next ten minutes anyway, the way she was ramming her limo into anything with wheels. If she isn’t arrested, she’ll be making a statement as well.” He glanced at me when I didn’t move. “Why, you got someplace else you need to be?”
    I tensed, waiting for Armaeus to speak in my head. He didn’t. I shrugged.
    “I guess not.”
    We went inside, and the rounds of paperwork and reports commenced. Night turned into morning, Brody growing surlier by the minute over the posters. He placed a lot of calls, but we weren’t getting any information back. To make matters worse, the police cruisers had lost the fleeing shooters.
    Nikki never showed either. I had a feeling there’d be no official record of any cars slammed into by the Arcana Council’s town car.
    Through it all, Armaeus remained radio silent. Frankly, this was starting to piss me off. Not that I particularly enjoyed his typical babysitting routine, but I’d left two major artifacts for him. He knew I was in town. He sure as hell probably knew that I’d been shot at—yet he couldn’t be bothered to make contact? Who was he with that was distracting him so much?
    A completely unexpected curl of rage unfurled within me at that thought. I tried to stuff it back into the hole it seeped out of. Rage wasn’t helpful. No matter how good it felt.
    Neither a Council car nor Armaeus’s private limo awaited me when Brody finally let me out of the police station, however. It wasn’t as if I expected special service, but up until now it had been Armaeus’s habit to fetch me back to him after certain incidents. Tonight had definitely qualified as an “incident.”
    So where was he?
    I hailed a cab. Miles rolled past with the chatty driver, yet still no peep from Armaeus during my ride over to the Luxor or on the way up to his rooms. By the time the elevator doors finally slid open into his opulent penthouse office, I’d worked up an impressive head of steam, which I fully intended to unload on the pompous, presumptuous, totally preoccupied Magician.
    Right up until I saw him sprawled out on the floor.

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