Piscary shifted in his chair, and his robe parted to show his knee. I quickly looked away. “Thank you,” he said. “I hated sunrises when I was alive. Now it’s my favorite part of the day.” I sneered, and he gestured to the table. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“Coffee?” I said. “I would have thought it was against the gangster code to have coffee with someone before killing them.”

His thin black eyebrows rose. I realized he must want something from me, otherwise he would have just sent Algaliarept to kill me on the bus.

“Black,” I said. “No sugar.”

Piscary gave Kisten a directive nod, and he slipped soundlessly away. I pulled out the second chair across from Piscary, flopping down with my bag on my lap. I glanced out the fake window in the silence. “I like your lair,” I said sarcastically.

Piscary raised one eyebrow. I wished I could do that. Too late to learn how now. “It was originally part of the underground railroad,” he said. “A foul hole in the ground under someone’s shipping dock. Ironic, isn’t it?” I said nothing, and he added, “This used to be the gateway to the free world. It still is, occasionally. There’s nothing like death to free a person.”

A small sigh slipped from me, and I turned to the window, wondering how much wise-old-man-crap he was going to make me listen to before killing me. Piscary cleared his throat, and I looked back. A wisp of black hair showed behind the V of his robe, and his calves visible through the wire mesh of the table were hard with muscle. I recalled my lust rising hot and fast in the elevator with Kisten, knowing it had mostly been vamp pheromones. Liar. That Piscary could to that to me and more with nothing more than a sound turned my stomach.

Unable to stop myself, I sent my hand over my neck as if to brush my hair from my eyes. I wanted to hide my scar, though Piscary was probably more aware of it than the nose on my face. “You didn’t have to rape her to get me to come see you,” I said, deciding to be angry instead of afraid. “A dead horse head in my bed would have done it.”

“I wanted to,” he said, his low voice carrying the strength of the wind. “Much as you’d like to think otherwise, this isn’t all about you, Rachel. Some of it, but not all.”

“My name is Ms. Morgan.”

He acknowledged this with a three-second, mocking silence. “I have been spoiling Ivy. People are beginning to talk. It was time to bring her back into the fold. And it was a pleasure—for both of us.” A smile of remembrance came over him, a glint of fang and a soft, almost subliminal, guttural sigh. “She surprised me, going far past my intended purpose. I haven’t lost control like that for at least three hundred years.”