I haven’t written an e-mail in weeks, she thought, annoyed as she entered her password for her inbox. Must be SPAM.

It wasn’t SPAM. There were over four hundred new messages waiting to be read, and the senders column read like a Takyn roll call: Romulus, Jezebel, Vulcan, Paracelsus, Delilah, Zephyrus, Magdalene, Orion, Sapphira . . .

Before Rowan could open the first e- mail, an IM screen popped onto the monitor. The sender was Paracelsus.

P: He jests at scars

She typed in the last words of the quote to confirm her identity: that never felt a wound.

P: Where are you? Are you hurt?

No, she wrote back. I’m fine. I’m in New York.

P: I know. I’ve been turning it upside down looking for you.

She chuckled. You’re still here?

P: Of course. I wasn’t going to leave until I knew you were all right.

I’m good. It wasn’t exactly a lie. Sorry I haven’t been in touch.

P: You vanished off the face of the earth for weeks. We’ve been frantic, all of us.

That explained the e-mail overload. But no one should have been worried; she always checked in. . . . Rowan frowned. She hadn’t checked in, now that she thought about it. She’d completely forgotten about her friends.

I got tied up with personal business, she typed. But I’m okay. Everyone else all right?

P: No. G. sent a team to New York to take a special girl. We thought they were after you. Then they disappeared. Another player in the game.

Rowan sat back in her chair, trying to take it all in.

He couldn’t have tracked me, she wrote back. I dumped the bike. He doesn’t have anything on me.

P: V. finally gained access to G.’s clubhouse. What little there is about the op says the target is a female with plenty of talent who escaped custody.

That could be any of us girls. Yet even as she typed the reply, she remembered facing Genaro’s goons in Price Park. Technically speaking, she and Vulcan had escaped custody, although she couldn’t have left behind any DNA for them to mess with, not unless . . .

She had touched one of Genaro’s hunters. She had needed the physical contact to shift into the woman he loved most, some blond bombshell named Rosie, and tap him for information. She must have shed some skin cells when she’d dreamveiled herself.

If G. and this other player are after me, she wrote to Paracelsus, I should get out of Dodge now.

P: No, my dear, it’s too dangerous. We have not yet identified this new player, and losing the team will have G. watching all points of exit. Stay where you are and keep your head down until V. and I can arrange safe passage.

Safe passage meant creating a new identity for her and relocating her across the country. So much for Rowan Dietrich, she thought. On the IM screen, she typed When should I contact you again?

P: Check in with me in a few days. I sent you my Lucky Lotto numbers. You should buy a ticket today.

That translated into instructions for her to buy a throwaway mobile phone and call him on a number he’d e- mailed her. Okay, I’ll take care of that as soon as I leave here. My access is public, so would you pass the word around to everyone?

P: Consider it done. Be careful, my dear.

Rowan closed the IM screen, checked Paracelsus’s e-mail and jotted down the phone number disguised as Lotto numbers, and then wiped all traces of her session from the terminal.

At a nearby convenience store, Rowan picked up a throwaway phone and a card for several hundred minutes’ worth of air time. As she stood in line to pay for it, she thought of all the e-mails stacked in her inbox. She had never received so many, and the idea that evidently all of the Takyn were worried about her made her feel absurdly pleased.

Sometimes, especially after Matthias had brought Jessa back from Atlanta, she’d felt as if she’d become more of a liability than an asset to her boss. She should have remembered that she had other friends, good friends who cared about her and wanted her to be happy.

She should have remembered . . . “That son of a bitch.”

The Puerto Rican man standing in front of her glanced back. “You talking to me, lady?”

“No. I mean my bastard of a boss.” She dragged a hand over her head. “He’s been messing with my head.”

The man grimaced in sympathy. “Mine uses a stopwatch when I take lunch. I come back five minutes late, he docks my pay.”

Rowan clenched her jaw. “Yeah, well, mine isn’t going to dock me anymore.”

Chapter 15

Dansant had Lonzo send Rowan on an errand to get her out of the kitchen, and then called each of the cooks into his office, where he had what the others thought was a private meeting to discuss their performance on the line. Using his influence over them, he instructed them to accept Rowan as the new sous-chef, and almost all of them did.

Only Lonzo, who had the strongest will of all the men, resisted briefly.

“She’s just a kid,” he told Dansant in an uncertain tone. “She ain’t got the chops for it.”

Dansant tried another approach. “Do you like Rowan, Lonzo?”

“Yeah, Trick’s okay,” he admitted reluctantly. “For a woman.”

Dansant suspected that his garde-manger’s chauvinistic attitude toward the fair sex would never change. “She has learned a great deal from you.”

Now the burly man’s chest puffed out. “I’ve taught her a couple things, sure.”

“Then you will agree that it is a credit to you that she has moved up to become the new sous- chef,” Dansant told him. “That is why you will accept this, because it was your teaching that helped her.”

“No shit?” His expression became filled with confusion, and began to clear. “I’m that good a teacher, huh?”

Dansant had suspected appealing to his chef’s vanity would be a way around his stubborn will. “Yes, you are. And you will watch over Rowan and assure that others are respectful of her. An insult to her is the same as an insult to you. Do you understand my instructions now?”

The last of the doubt faded from Lonzo’s harsh features. “Yes, Chef.”

It was rather comical, watching the reception the line cooks gave Rowan when she returned from the market with the Italian parsley Lonzo had sent her to buy. Vince cuffed her shoulder as he passed by her, and George asked her if she needed help setting up Bernard’s old station to her liking. Manny gave her advice on how to stock her speed racks, and even Enrique watched her anxiously, so that when she needed a certain pan or dish he had it at her station before she could call for it.

Much to Dansant’s disappointment, Rowan showed no reaction, although she flinched several times whenever he came near her. Unlike the enthusiasm she had shown on previous shifts, now she took no interest in his preparations, and left her station only to make a quick trip to the restroom halfway through the night.

Her cooking was as inventive and marvelous as Dansant had hoped. She remade his cuisses de canard au chou, using a dusky merlot instead of the traditional cognac, and cranberry jelly instead of tomato paste. The result did not greatly change the appearance of the dish, but subtly altered the aroma and emphasized the flavors. When Dansant made the first of his customary rounds of the dining area, his patrons raved over the dish.

“This reminds me of the duck we used to have at Thanksgiving every year,” one delighted matron told him. “My grandmother used cabbage in her stuffing, and would glaze the bird with cranberries and burgundy.”

“I thought Americans celebrated Thanksgiving with turkey,” Dansant said.

The woman chuckled. “Not when their father goes duck hunting every November.”

The kitchen remained busy for the rest of the night, and Dansant decided to keep his distance from Rowan to let her enjoy her victory. It wasn’t until after closing, when the line cooks congratulated her on their way out, that Rowan looked directly at him, her eyes filled with suspicion and dislike. He returned her gaze until the last cook had left, and watched her stalk toward the stairs.

“Rowan.” He watched her come to a halt. “Don’t go.”

She spun around, her features tight, her eyes glittering. “Is there something else you wanted, Chef?”

“You have obviously had enough congratulations,” he said, walking toward her. “I thought you would be pleased.”

“I would be, if they were sincere.” She closed the distance between them. “What did you do to them?”

“Do? Nothing.”

“The same way you did nothing to those kids the night we went to the opera,” she countered.

She thought he had hypnotized the line cooks. Well, it wasn’t far from the truth. “I may have threatened to fire them all if they treated you badly.”

“They’re cooks. That would have made them behave worse.” She planted her hands on her hips. “Have you ever done that to me? Hypnotized me, made me forget things?”

He didn’t stop to wonder how she had come to such a conclusion. He also felt a fresh wave of shame for the times he had used his influence over her. “I have only tried to be your friend, Rowan.”

“Friends don’t fuck with other friends’ minds, Dansant.”

He could compel her now to forget all about this unfortunate discovery, and tomorrow night she would be back at his side and happy to be there. And he would be even more of a monster than he already was. “If I have said or done anything to upset you, I apologize.”

She sat down on the bench by the table where the line cooks ate together. “I don’t know what to believe from you anymore. You’re making me think crazy things.”

He wanted to tell her everything, but it was not yet time. He had to first regain her trust. “How can I convince you that I am sincere?”

She seized an apple from the bowl of fruit on the table and tossed it to him. “Take a bite of that.”

He regarded the apple and then her. “Why?”

“Because if you’re who I think you are, you won’t. You can’t.”

He polished the apple on his sleeve and took a bite, and then another. Only when he had reduced it to a core did she sigh and prop her head in her hands.