At ten till six, the sun finally sunk behind a bank of heavy clouds that signaled rain was on the way. Good. The Quarter could steam in the heat instead of just baking.

The bell rang, and the door opened. For the second time today, Liam Quinn crossed my threshold. His lip was still swollen, but it looked a little better.

He’d brought a brown paper bag and a very petite woman.

She was a slip of a person, barely five feet tall and delicate. She had long, wavy blond hair, her eyes round and green beneath darker brows and above a slightly upturned nose. She wore a long, sleeveless, gauzy dress in mint green with a darker ribbon around the waist.

“Nix, this is Claire. Claire, Nix.”

“Hello,” she said, looking me over.

“Hi,” I said, doing the same. She was the woman who stood between me and monsterdom. I wanted to be sure of her.

Liam held out the paper bag. “This is for you.”

“For me?”

“Bread. I brought it for you.”

I wasn’t sure I could have been more surprised. I wouldn’t have figured a bachelor bounty hunter for a baker. “You bake?”

He grinned. “Do I look like I have the patience for that? Eleanor made it. She trained in France.”

I opened the bag, looked inside. A crusty round loaf of bread sat inside, just like the kind my dad had sometimes brought home from a patisserie on Ursulines. It smelled like flour and yeast. If there were gifts involved, maybe this Sensitive-training gig wouldn’t be so bad.

I looked up at him. “It looks amazing. Seriously, thank you, and thanks to Eleanor, too. I really appreciate it.” Maybe Eleanor should be the recipient of the Glorious Final Stick of Butter.

“Where should we work?” Nix asked.

“Why don’t we go discuss that upstairs?” Liam suggested. “Fewer eyes curious about an after-hours meeting with a bounty hunter.”

“Containment does think I’m your trainee.”

“That’s a point.”

I held up the bag. “Let me just put this in the kitchen.”

I left the bread on the counter, closed the curtain behind me, and led them upstairs to the second floor. There wasn’t as much room here as on the third, but I wasn’t ready to invite either of them into my personal abode. Besides, people usually got a kick out of seeing the inventory.

We reached the second floor, and I opened the door, gestured them in. “The storage room.”

Liam looked over the furniture and antiques with wistfulness in his eyes, but it was shielded by his masculine brow and pursed lips. Nix didn’t worry about hiding her emotions. She walked right in, began moving from item to item, trailing small, slender fingers over everything.

“No Gavin?” I asked quietly as Nix pulled open a drawer in a tall chest, checked the contents, closed it again.

“He has a previous engagement.”

She flipped through a shoe box of postcards.

“What does he do?” I asked.

“Most of the time, whatever he wants.”

That was all Liam said, but his tone made it clear that he wasn’t thrilled about it. Not that he told me what “it” was. If I ever needed a man to keep a secret, Liam Quinn was the obvious choice. I could fill a book with what I didn’t know about him.

“And more specifically?” I asked.

“He’s a tracker. He travels mostly in the Zone, finds things, people who don’t want to be found.”

“For PCC?”

“Sometimes. Not always. He’s got good skills, but he’s . . . unsettled.”

“Yeah. I got that from your talk with him. Bad blood between him and Eleanor?”