blame? Or should I try to slink away without bothering him?
Sometimes it really sucked knowing the truth about him. Even having witnessed his Hand of Doom in action, I doubt I’d have felt this level of dread if I thought he were merely another Liberi. But I did know the truth, and I wasn’t sure what would happen if Anderson reached his breaking point.
“Don’t stop breathing on my account,” he said. His voice sounded almost normal, but there was still something about him that felt dangerous.
“I’ve seen you lose it before,” I replied quietly, thinking about what had happened when we’d trespassed on Alexis’s property to rescue Emma from the depths of his pond. Alexis had taunted Anderson with what he and Konstantin had done to Emma while she was in their custody, and Anderson had dispensed with his mortal disguise and turned into a humanoid pillar of fire. “I don’t want to see it again.”
“I didn’t ‘lose it,’ ” he said, sounding affronted.
“I saw you turn into—”
“I know what you saw.” He turned and looked me squarely in the face. “I was entirely in control of myself, Nikki. I had always planned to . . .” He looked around, as if just noticing we were standing in the foyer, where anyone could overhear. “What I did then was calculated. Trust me: you don’t want to be near me if I ever really do ‘lose it.’ ”
Oh, I trusted him about that all right. I might not know the details of what would happen, but it would be ugly, and there was likely to be collateral damage.
“I’m . . . sorry about Erin,” I said, because I couldn’t walk away without saying it.
“Me, too.” He was almost eerily calm now, his face showing no emotion, his voice flat. “I need to be alone right now.”
He turned from me without another word, climbing the stairs, no doubt heading for the east wing, which was his private domain within the mansion. My throat was tight, and my heart hurt for him. I’d had very little contact with Erin, and my memories of the time were a little hazy, but I remembered how she and Anderson had sniped at each other as ex-lovers often do. Yet Anderson had loved her once, and to have Emma bring about her death was a devastating blow. I wished he had someone to turn to, someone to give him support and companionship to help him through.
But Anderson was a god in hiding, and that meant he had to be used to dealing with the hardships of life alone. My heart might ache for him, but there was nothing I could do.
After Emma left, I tried to forget all about her nasty visit. I had enough crap on my plate that it wasn’t too hard.
Despite Cyrus’s unequivocal warning that I was to back off Konstantin, I had no intention of doing so, especially now that I’d crossed Emma off my suspects list. It was still possible Anderson was behind it, that he’d done it to light a fire under my ass, so to speak, but Konstantin was the more likely suspect. It might have been smarter for him to leave me alone, but being deposed from his position as “king” of the Olympians, he might be angry enough to act on emotion rather than logic.
I wasn’t breaking the treaty by merely driving around the city looking for Konstantin, but just in case Cyrus didn’t see it that way, I rented a sedan that would blend in with the city’s traffic. Last night had revealed the pitfalls of cruising around by myself and trying to follow my instincts. I needed to be able to let my conscious mind drift, which was hard to do—and potentially dangerous—while driving. I’d be much better off if I could get someone else to do the driving for me.
There were only three people in the house I was willing to spend that many hours shut up in a car with. My first choice, naturally, was Jamaal, but he turned me down with some lame excuse about being too tired after having worked so much with Sita during the day. He didn’t look tired when I cornered him. More like sullen and . . . distant. He was drifting further away, and I might be the only one in the house who saw it happening.
My second choice was Maggie, but I couldn’t find her, and she didn’t answer her cell. My third and last choice