Must Love Hellhounds

maybe he’d come to apologize. I didn’t see the kid till after.”
    “Apologize?” Sara had the sinking feeling they’d all been drawn into one seriously bad lover’s tiff.
    “For cheating on me.” Marco finally looked her full in the face. “Here I was, being a putz. I gave my notice at the Guild, set up this place, all because he said he hated knowing I was putting my life on the line with every hunt. I even asked Simon to talk to some of the senior angels, see if we could maybe get the rest of Silas’s Contract transferred to an angel in the States so we wouldn’t have to keep going back and forth.”
    “Here.” Sara grabbed a dented but still whole bottle of water and threw it at him. “Breathe.”
    “I can’t.” He chugged the entire bottle, then threw it aside. “He was just using me. Wanted out of his Contract—his angel doesn’t like him. I could’ve swallowed that. Hell on the ego, but I’d have swallowed it. I loved him. But the whole time we were together, he was with . . . who the fuck knows. More than one guy.”
    “Marco, that doesn’t make sense.” Sara folded her arms. “Why would he set you up if he was the one cheating?”
    “’Cause I dumped him.” And in that moment, Sara saw the hunter Marco was. Hard, lethal, certainly very good at his job. “I told him to get out and stay out.”
    “Which meant he lost any chance of getting his Contract transferred.” Deacon didn’t move from his position by the door. “It sounds good. But all the evidence points to a hunter.”
    “He took my stuff. My weapons, clothes, one of the ceremonial swords I collect.” Marco ground his teeth together. “I feel so fucking stupid. I knew he didn’t handle rejection well, but I never thought he’d go around killing people just to get back at me.”
    Sara glanced at Deacon. He shook his head in a slight negative. She agreed. Marco was very, very believable. But it was his word against this Silas’s. If they backed him, the vampires would take it badly—unless they had proof. In which case, Silas would disappear to face angelic justice. Hunters could kill, but only in exigent circumstances, or when they had an execution warrant. It made more sense for angels to deliver any necessary punishment—they were faster, stronger, and far more cruel than the vampires they Made.
    “Security cameras,” she asked Marco. “Did you record the fight?”
    “No.” Self-disgust marred the handsome lines of his face. “I turned them off when I realized it was him—didn’t want anyone seeing how much of a fool I’d been. At least I wasn’t stupid enough to leave my gun behind. Shot grazed his head, knocked him out.”
    That explained how Marco had gotten the vamp into the basement. “We need to talk to Silas.” Sara stepped forward, expecting an argument.
    Marco got up. “I’ll take you—let’s see what the bastard has to say.”
    Letting him go on ahead, they followed with weapons drawn. Silas was pounding on the door by the time they got there.
    “Help me!” More pounding. “Help! I can hear you!”
    “Quiet.” Deacon’s voice cut through the pounding like a knife.
    Sara took the lead. “How’d you end up locked in the basement?”
    They got pretty much the same story as from Marco . . . but with the roles reversed. By the time it was over, Sara’s headache had turned into a thumping monster. How in hell were they going to fix this? The wrong move and a lot more blood would spill.
    She looked to Deacon. “Got handcuffs?”
    He handed her a thin plastic pair. “They’ll hold.” Marco lifted up his hands without question when she turned. Clicking the cuffs shut, she led him back upstairs, stashing him on the stairway that led up to his apartment . . . after blindfolding him and tying his feet together, then redoing the cuffs to lock him to the railing. Hunters were extremely resourceful when it came to survival.
    “I won’t run,” Marco told her, a broken kind of pain in his voice that hurt her.
    “For what it’s worth,” she said, “I believe you.” If she was going to be Guild Director, she had to learn to judge her people. “But we need proof.”
    “He’s smart. Part of his charm.”
    Silas hadn’t sounded particularly charming to Sara, but then, she wasn’t in love with him. Patting Marco on the shoulder, she walked out, pulling the door shut behind her. “Rodney,” she said to Deacon.
    “That’s what I thought.”
    “But even if he can tell their