“Because Shona wasn’t the only one whose life was threatened the night we raided Rosen’s apartment.” Rosen had owned and run Rosen Pharmaceuticals, one of two private labs hired by the government to help find a cure for the virus. He’d been murdered by one section of the sindicati, but, unfortunately for the rest of us, he’d been infected by the virus, and had subsequently risen and come under Luke’s control. Whether he was still around and sane now that Luke was dead, I had no idea. PIT was leading the cleanup of the remaining infected and really didn’t believe in sharing that sort of information. I swung the car onto the main road. “The security guard’s life was also dependent on our good behavior, remember? We can’t be in two places at once, so, like it or not, PIT has to be informed.”

Jackson swore and scrubbed a hand across his eyes. “I’d forgotten about the guard.”

“He doesn’t deserve to die just because Rinaldo thinks we’re not holding up our end of the deal.”

“Which we aren’t, given we haven’t handed him all the notes we found.”

“But how does Rinaldo know that?” Frustration bit through my voice. “Especially since we haven’t told anyone—including PIT—about either the USB we found in the locker or the suitcase notes we photographed but didn’t give anyone.”

“He’s an exceptionally strong telepath—”

“Which means fuck all when neither of us can be read,” I said.

“De Luca’s get were there when we found the suitcase of notes, remember.”

His get—vampires who’d undergone the blood ceremony with De Luca, and who subsequently owed allegiance to his lair on turning—might have been, but I doubted they’d paid too much attention to our reasons for being there. Not when their sole intention had been to kill us in retribution for De Luca’s death—a death we weren’t responsible for, as much as I might have wanted to be. That honor belonged to Frank Parella, a sindicati general and De Luca’s factional opposite.

And while some of his vampires might have been present when we’d found the research notes at Denny Rosen Junior’s place, they’d been arrested and carted away by the time we opened the case and discovered just how important its contents might be. While some of the notes had been virus related, for the most part they’d dealt with a rather startling discovery—James Wilson, who’d been working for Rosen Senior’s pharmaceutical company and who was one of the two scientists leading the charge to find a cure for the virus, had isolated the gene he believed responsible for vampirism and thought it might be possible to reverse the process.