Читать книгу Underground Warrior - Evelyn Vaughn - Страница 9

Dallas, West End, August

“He said to come alone,” said the pretty woman.

Her partner answered, “They always say to come alone.”

Silently spying on the couple from her corner of the sun-drenched restaurant patio, Sibyl analyzed her discomfort. It wasn’t fear. Fear she understood—had understood since, as a twelve-year-old, she’d watched her world end. Red-and-blue flashing lights. A pounding on the door. Mama’s cry…

Sibyl pushed the memories safely behind a wall of reason. She’d come here for information. Exposure was the one thing her enemies—a secret society of powerful men, of killers—feared.

A pounding gavel. “The court finds Isabel Daine guilty of arson and manslaughter.” A public defender too drunk to sugarcoat it. “Some people in this town, you just can’t fight.”

Some people. Why not just say secret society? The Comitatus. And no people willing to admit who really started the fire that killed her father.

The wealthy, powerful society wouldn’t allow it. Perhaps Sibyl could catalog her newest discomfort as frustration. Arden Leigh, socialite daughter of a Dallas Comitatus leader, had broken her emailed promise. Sibyl—anonymous under the handle of Vox07—had specified that they meet alone. Instead, Arden brought a suitor. Despite his old T-shirt and faded jeans, his posture and speech patterns bespoke wealth. Power. Comitatus.

“Thank heavens I have a big, strong man to protect me,” Arden teased her beau. Sibyl’s stomach twisted as she watched. She had to get out of there.

Across a wide parking lot, a yellow-and-white light-rail train slid to a halt with a ringing of bells. While disembarking passengers distracted the pretty couple, Sibyl scribbled a simple, angry note onto a strip of paper placemat—Liars!

Risky or not, she couldn’t just ignore people lying, cheating and getting their own way at the expense of others. Not powerful secret societies descended from bloody conquerors like Charlemagne or Genghis Khan. Not beauty queens with false smiles and doting, disguised lovers. Not anyone.

Swallowing back her hurt, Sibyl stood to leave the patio. She dropped the note surreptitiously into the socialite’s purse as she passed.

Suddenly, the woman’s partner blocked the one exit. “Hiya, Vox.”

Sibyl spun and ran, vaulting the iron fencing of the patio and racing across a hot, Texas parking lot toward the train stop. She dodged surprised tourists. She threaded between cars. The 2:18 pulled away from the historic district, but she could lose herself in the crowd heading for El Centro Community College just beyond, if she…could…just….

The obstacle of a second man, angling toward her from behind the train stop’s handicap access ramp, forced her to a stumbling stop. No….

Tailored suit, despite the August heat wave. Expensive sunglasses. An air of absolute entitlement, even for nobility. More Comitatus.

If her years of uncovering every scrap of information she could find on them had taught her nothing else, it taught her how to recognize their agents.

Fight. No, move. No—fight! Sibyl pivoted—but here came the couple who’d chased her. She fell an instinctive step back and spotted a third enemy—privileged walk despite his cheap clothing and beach-blond hair—closing in from another direction. They’d surrounded her. They’d won. Again.

“It’s all right, honey!” lied the beauty queen, reaching for her. “You can trust—”

The scream of a train whistle drowned her out.

Sybil spun to face the light-rail train that loomed down on her with an urgent wail of warning. A blow hurled her into brick pavement.

Then…? Silence.

Wouldn’t a train’s impact hurt more? She curled her hand on the hot bricks beneath her…and smelled the earthy, unmistakable scent of man on top of her, sheltering her. She felt the rub of coarse skin on her bare arms, of denim on her bare legs. Despite the gruff cursing over the screech of metal brakes, she felt safe.

Literally. Someone saved her.

Someone who weighed almost as much as a train, even so.

Opening her eyes, Sibyl turned her head to the man who rolled off her. His size momentarily blocked the sun and blue sky. Swarthy, she noted. Angry…she’d been angering men for a long time now. This one, at least, had some cause.

He could have died. Which meant he, at least, didn’t want her silenced.

“What the hell were you doing?” her savior demanded, cutting through her shock. His accent held the familiar trace of Louisiana—rural Louisiana. He pulled her effortlessly upward with one huge, rough hand around hers, and she let him. “When a train’s about to hit you, you move, you don’t just stand there!”

Sibyl barely reached his broad chest, even in her cowboy boots. The muscles of his shoulders bulged under his T-shirt; the muscles of his thick arms she could see for herself under sun-browned skin. Substantial, she thought. Blue collar, not white collar. A two-day beard shadowed his jaw. Primitive. And he'd risked his life for her.

A strange sensation filled her. After a decade alone, she searched for a label, then surprised herself. Trust? She trusted him. Completely.

“Oh, thank God!” Arden Leigh put on a surprisingly good show of concern. So did her beau and the blond man, with their prep school postures and thrift store clothes. The one man who’d dressed Comitatus-wealthy had vanished. Safe. “We didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“I guess you just don’t have the way with women that Trace does.” The blond man laughed. Sibyl’s hero grunted casual disgust, but she didn’t hear his reply.

They were together. This man—Trace—who seemed like the anti-Comitatus, knew people she’d assumed were her enemies. And yet, as the others crowded around her, Sibyl instinctively pressed back against her savior’s solid body. Fear, she understood. It shouldn’t stop her from finding out more about these not-quite-Comitatus types…or their friend. If she could trust him.

Needing time, needing proof, Sibyl rolled her eyes upward and dropped into a feigned faint, like some damsel in distress.

Her hero caught her, swept her into his hard arms, held her close to his broad, warm chest—and growled an unheroic, “Crap.”

Sibyl had no intention of analyzing the feelings that swept past her wall of reason, this time.

Some truths were just too dangerous to consider.