Dragon Justice Read Free Page A

disgrace.
Never mind that the Ancient had brought it on itself; we were still the ones who
had exposed it. The fact that the honored one had chosen suicide rather than
live with the knowledge of what it had done…
    Technically, and what passed for legally among the fatae, what
happened wasn’t our fault, nor our responsibility. But I still felt sick about
it and suspected the others did, too. I didn’t want to deal with a fatae
case.
    “Still.” I was running through excuses and justifications in my
head, if only for the practice. “Someone else could handle it. What about
Sharon? She’s good with delicate situations.”
    “You’re the fatae specialist,” Nick pointed out with damnable
reasonableness. “Stosser will put you on it, if there’s anything to be put
on.”
    Right on cue, there was a touch of current against my
awareness. *torres*
    The feel of that ping was unmistakable. I sighed and got to my
feet. “I hate it when you’re right,” I grumbled, shoved my lunch back into the
fridge, and headed into the office to face my fate.
    We had started two years ago with one suite, taking up a
quarter of the seventh floor. About a year back the guys acquired the second
suite of offices on our side of the building and combined the space, repurposing
the original layout into a warren of rooms that gave the illusion of privacy
without sacrificing an inch of workspace. Nice, except when you were doing the
Tread of Dread, as Nifty had dubbed the walk from the break room to Stosser’s
office at the very end of the long hall.
    I knocked once, and the door opened.
    “Sir?”
    Usually I’d have started with “you rang, oh great and mighty?”
but what worked with humans could backfire spectacularly with fatae. The fact
that I knew that—the result of years more experience interacting with the
nonhuman members of the Cosa than anyone else in the
office except possibly Venec—was why I’d been called here. Nick had it in
one.
    “Torres. Come in.”
    I came in, closing the door behind me, uncertain of where to go
after that. The office was large enough to hold five people comfortably, seven
if we all squeezed. Right then, there were only four—me, Stosser, and two
figures, cloaked, with their backs to me—but it felt crowded as hell.
    Then they turned around, and all the air left my lungs in a
surprised, if hopefully discreet, whoosh.
    * * *
    Benjamin Venec took good care of his investigators. If
they were stressed, he gave them something to snarl at. If they were worried, he
could provide a sounding board. If they were pissed off, he was willing to fight
with them. But he couldn’t force them to relax; even if that had been his style,
his pups were stubborn. They’d decide when they went down, not someone else,
opponent or boss.
    So he could have told Torres to go home and get some sleep. She
might even have gone—or at least started to. But he knew her: something shiny
would catch her attention, either a case or a person, and she’d be off again.
That was just…Torres.
    The fact that he had given up any right to be jealous of either
things or people she deemed shiny didn’t seem to help the slight burning
sensation to the left of his gut when he felt her sudden rush of surprise,
followed by a shimmer of glee and anticipation that was uniquely Bonita
Torres.
    Her signature was like coconut liquor, spicy and warm, and he
let himself enjoy the taste—offsetting the burning sensation, or enhancing it,
he wasn’t sure.
    The pleasure was balanced by a sense of moral discomfort,
though. They’d agreed to stay out of each other’s headspace unless invited.
Bonnie had been scrupulous about maintaining that agreement. He hadn’t. And
claiming that it was part of his job, as her boss and teacher, nothing more than
he did for the others, only went so far in justifying what his mentor would have
called a blatant misuse of Talent.
    Ben didn’t even try to justify it, not to himself. He might be
a bastard, but he