He wished he could figure it out. What was it that connected him to her? He had lived a very long lifetime, all of it in secret. Sometimes it had been difficult to keep the secret of who and what he was from the humans around him, but never to the degree that he would break the law willingly. Now he had done so. For a woman he barely knew.

And yet he couldn’t escape the feeling that he knew her on a different level than anyone else in his life. It wasn’t just sexual—although there was plenty of that—it was more. But he could not explain it, and he was giving himself a headache trying to figure it out.

Maybe it wasn’t meant to be figured out, he thought then. Maybe it was simply meant to be enjoyed. Yes. He would enjoy discovering her. Unless…unless they took her away from him and demanded he never see her again. Then he would be powerless. If they judged against her and therefore judged against him, he would be severely punished if he tried to strike up a new friendship with her afterward. And it was one thing to break the law, and quite another to do it again while flying in the face of the committee. As it was he was potentially facing a tribunal.

No. A lot rested on Renee, and it wasn’t fair to her. She would be under enormous pressure to perform well for the committee and all he wanted was for her to have the freedom to just be herself.

He wondered when they were going to call her to them. It had to be today. The longer she was out there without their approval, the longer they were in danger of exposure to the world. At least, that was their thinking anyway.

He made it back to his office without collapsing under the weight of his thoughts and found a stack of messages awaiting him. More delegates responding to the additions to the treaty. He was returning calls when his secretary rang through to him.

“Danton is here to see you,” she said.

“Send him in,” he replied.

Danton walked into the office and greeted Rafe with a nod of his head.

“Can you bring your human woman to the committee within the hour?”

“I’m not certain. She has a job, you know.”

“Yes, a job which risks our exposure. Get her and bring her here. You have two hours.”

With that, Danton turned and walked out. It was an unfriendly exchange, but Danton wasn’t his friend right then.

Rafe found his phone on his desk and dialed Renee’s number. It was nearing five o’clock and he thought she should be calling him to come and pick her up. She had promised him she would stay indoors and stay in touch. She had called him once early on in the afternoon, but since then there had been nothing.

When she didn’t pick up, he immediately began to worry. He hung up on her voicemail. He couldn’t leave her any messages just in case they wiped her memory of him. Otherwise she would be listening to a message from a stranger and wondering who he was. As it was her phone would have to be wiped as well since they had texted back and forth and she had taken his picture.

He tried calling again and when she didn’t pick up he decided to go straight to the station. It wasn’t exactly wise for him to be seen by all of her coworkers, but he didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, they could go back into the memories of all of the humans he had met through her and try to erase him from her life. Maybe, just maybe, some part of their acquaintance would survive and she would be compelled to find him again.

But the odds were better that the committee would allow her to remember him as a brief dating acquaintance and then implant the memory that they had not clicked. He would be nobody to her.

Rafe ignored the remaining messages on his desk and grabbed his coat. He pocketed his phone and headed out of the building.

It was a relatively short ride to her precinct since they were on the same side of town. It was surprising that a sycophant had killed in that precinct, one that was close to the building that housed many of the lawful vampires in the state. A sycophant would have to be mad to hunt prey in lawful vamp territory.

But clearly all of the sycophants had gone mad and those invisible boundaries between their side of the city and the e-vamp side of the city were dissolving. The e-vamps had to do something and they had to do it quickly.

He arrived at Renee’s building and found out which floor the detectives were on. He found homicide easily, as it was labeled quite prominently, and began to look around. The detectives were sitting in cubicles, some immediately visible and some blocking his view of whoever was seated within. He moved forward so he could see better and searched for a shining blond head amongst the balding and graying ones. It made him realize how young she was to be a detective. She had to have excelled in her career to be where she was right then. It made him inexplicably proud of her.

One dark head popped up and took notice of him. He got up and walked over to him.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“I’m looking for Renee Holden.”

“She and her partner are in an interview at the moment. They should be out soon. If you want to have a seat…” He gestured to a row of chairs where others were seated and waiting as well. Rafe was impatient, however, and felt the need to stress, “This is very important. A time sensitive issue.”

“I’ll go see what I can do to speed her up,” the officer said, “but these things take as long as they take.”

“All right. I’ll wait,” Rafe said, finding a seat and trying not to let his frustration and worry show.

Luckily it wasn’t long before he saw Renee emerge from one of the side rooms. She was talking to two women and a man, making him wonder which of them was her partner. It only took a few moments of reading body language for him to realize it was the attractive male. She had mentioned her partner in passing during their first dinner, but she had just referred to him as her partner and not by name.

He wondered now why that was. Had it been a purposeful omission? Was she reluctant to bring up another male because they had a romantic history? As they said goodbye to the two women, Rafe realized they made a very attractive couple. They were in sync and seemed to work together smoothly. But then, she had said she and her partner had been together for two years now, ever since she had made the homicide unit.

Renee looked over and noticed him immediately. She stopped talking almost instantly and her partner followed her gaze to him. She said a final farewell to the women and walked up to him.

“Rafe, what are you doing here? I said I would call when I was ready to leave.”