put a blindfold on you?” Now where the hell had that question come from? Joel was sure there had been something else he meant to ask.
She stopped walking. “You sound jealous.” Chloe peered over her shoulder. “There is no need for that. I’ve never slept with Kingston. I don’t intend to do so.”
Good to know. Better than good. Yet he still had so many damn questions. “So you just let the guy blindfold you in the past because…?”
“He was taking me to see a certain portion of his business. The location of that business was confidential. He thought the blindfold would stop me from being able to ever get there again on my own.”
A sigh slipped from him. The scream of sirens was even louder now. “Let me guess, he was wrong.”
“Absolutely.” She skirted around a fountain. Headed toward a bench and a stone walkway. “I could find my way back there anytime I wanted.”
There was a lamp shining over the bench. The light fell on her. Made her dark hair gleam.
“You still didn’t tell me who called the cops. Did you do it?” He’d made it to her side.
She peered over at him. “I did tell you.”
“No, sweet—” He caught himself at her frown. Had he been about to call her sweetheart? Joel cleared his throat. “You didn’t tell me.”
“Sure, I did. Kingston.”
He blinked.
She kept staring steadily at him. Joel quickly replayed their conversation in his mind…
“Who called the cops?” His question.
“Can I trust you?” Her ever-so-cautious reply.
“I’m your partner! If you can’t trust me, who can you trust?” His grating demand.
“Kingston.”
Well, damn. She hadn’t been saying that she trusted Kingston. She’d been saying he called the cops. “Why would a guy like him alert the cops?” Before they’d left the club, Joel thought Kingston had made his opinion of law enforcement—and their involvement—pretty clear.
She leaned toward him. Put her hands on his chest. Brought her face in all close to him. “Because,” she whispered, “he is a cop.”
Joel shook his head.
“Undercover. Actually, more FBI than NOPD.” She was still close. “But please keep that information strictly confidential, would you?”
That jerk…that arrogant SOB had been undercover?
“Don’t worry. It will appear that someone else called the cops. The blame will be placed on one of the players at his VIP game. Maybe it will even be placed on you or me.” A shrug. “But Eli will be questioned by the FBI. And I imagine that Kingston will manage to maintain his cover.”
“You can’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“Keep me in the dark. I need to know important shit like this. Before we went in the Serpent, I should have known the truth about him.”
“But if I’d told you all of this before, your reaction to Kingston would have been different. You needed to treat him with suspicion. You needed to act as if he was the enemy.”
“It’s called trust,” he forced from between clenched teeth. “I believe we addressed it before and—” He broke off. Chloe wasn’t listening to him.
Her head had angled toward the bench. “Something is there.”
He frowned at the bench. “Looks like someone just left a piece of paper on the bench. No big deal.”
But she was pulling away from him. Creeping toward the bench.
Fine. If she was going to look, he’d play along. The closer he got to the bench, the better he could see—
It was a card. Not some piece of paper.
Death.
A curse broke from Joel as he realized that he was looking at another one of those cards, a tarot card. Beneath the light, he could see that a black knight was riding on a white horse, and under the horse’s hooves, the word Death was clearly written.
Wonderful. Fantastic.
He lifted up the card, holding it only by the right edge, and as he angled it beneath the light, he realized that the knight’s face? It was a skeleton. “Yeah, this shit isn’t good.” His head snapped up as he studied the darkness around him. “Who the hell is there?” Joel called out.
“We should leave.” Chloe bumped into him.
He didn’t see anyone in the dark. Didn’t hear anything. “Maybe this was left by one of the people who set up a table in the Square during the day.” He’d passed by before and seen plenty of psychics and fortune tellers working with tourists. Could have just accidentally been left by one of them, but…
But we found the other tarot card in the alley behind the strip club. What were the odds of them randomly finding two of