Shadowed Steel (Heirs of Chicagoland #3) - Chloe Neill Page 0,28

sun came up, or I’d have been burned.” I pulled up my sleeves, showed the unmarred skin. “I wasn’t.”

“Armored car?” Gwen asked.

“I don’t have a car, much less a sun-shielded one. Regardless, I was at the loft. The building has a security camera on the door. Lulu wanted to be sure she was in a secure building.”

Gwen looked up at the window, nodded at someone on the other side, who, I guessed, was now in charge of obtaining a copy of the video.

She looked at me again. “So you ordered someone to do it.”

I met her gaze, steadily. “Your first theory was that I killed a man I barely know in a building I’ve never been in for no apparent reason. That didn’t pan out, so you think I have assassins on call, and I’d have them do my dirty work for me. I’m not sure which is more insulting,” I said and heard the temper in my voice. Didn’t mind it.

“If a vampire killed him,” I continued, “he’d either have stayed in the building or had a sun-shielded car of his own. If it was a human, he could have walked away. Is the building secured?”

“Not the area where Blake was found,” Gwen said. “There are public restaurants and shops in the lobby. He was found on that floor, albeit in a low-traffic area. You’d need a badge for the elevators to go up to the business floors.”

“Residences?”

“No.”

They might have pulled me in for questioning, but if they’d really believed I’d done it, they wouldn’t be giving me so many details. So while I let myself relax, I didn’t let my guard fully down.

“Why was Blake in the Brass & Copper building right before dawn?” I asked. “If there aren’t any residences, there’s nowhere to bed down if he misses the timing and the sun comes up. That’s dangerous.”

“Coffee,” Theo said. “There’s a coffee shop in the lobby, and it opens early. We have a surveillance shot of him buying a drink shortly before he was killed.”

“Alone?”

“Alone,” Theo said. “Doesn’t mean he was alone when he went into the building or afterward.”

“Perhaps you glamoured him,” Gwen said. “Convinced him to do something risky. Maybe you hoped the sun would do the work for you.”

Instinctively, I touched the spot on my thigh that still bore a pale scar, earned in Minnesota when a magic-crazed shifter had tried to rip the protective shielding off a window in the middle of the day. He’d managed only to damage it, but the thin bead of sunlight hurt worse than a blade. Had hurt badly enough to wake me from daytime unconsciousness.

“Glamour doesn’t change minds,” I said. “It lowers inhibitions. It’s persuasive, but sunlight kills. You’d need something more than glamour to convince a vampire to risk it.”

Coffee addiction or not—and I knew from coffee addiction—was a vampire going to risk death by scorching just to get a fix? “You’ll need to check how he arrived—and how he intended to get out again. It’s very risky behavior, especially for someone who isn’t from Chicago and doesn’t know their way around.”

Gwen didn’t look thrilled that I was giving her investigatory advice. Which I suppose seemed pretty cocky. “What do you have against the AAM?” she asked.

I understood that presumed motive was a fundamental part of her investigation. But it was becoming harder not to take the questions personally. “I have nothing against the AAM. As I said, we disagree about interpretation of the rules.”

“And you’re angry at them?”

“I’m angry that the organization gives so little value to the life of a human. Especially when that human was nearly killed in a supernatural feud that had nothing to do with her.”

“Blake came to your home. Threatened you.”

“He came to my home with two other vampires on behalf of the AAM. He didn’t threaten me. He asked me to meet the Bureau in Grant Park.”

“And you suggested the Grove.” She looked up. “Why?”

“It’s outside the city. Less populated, so there’d be less risk of human injury if things went awry. Which they did.”

Her brows lifted. “You were expecting violence.”

I knew she knew all this. Some she’d heard from me at the Grove; some she’d heard from Theo. But I kept playing along.

“The Bureau came to Chicago,” I said with monumental patience, “to accuse me of breaking their rules by saving a human life. That doesn’t scream ‘reasonable’ to me. So I expected more unreasonable behavior to follow. I was right.”

“They claimed you drew first blood.”

She had done

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