“And then?”

“And then I got the four of us in here and barred the door, and the rest you know.”

Andrea sighed. “It’s not good to deny the PAD access. They don’t like that.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Like where she’d been these past two months. Maybe she’d joined a nunnery. Or the French Foreign Legion.

“You could’ve called the Casino. They would’ve unleashed a horde of lawyers.” Andrea poured peroxide onto the wet wood.

I straightened. “The First Response Unit is all trigger-happy jocks. They were still swimming on the high of taking out a bloodsucker. I listened to them pound bullets into the pavement for nearly five minutes. It was overkill. The only way their day could have gotten better would be if they could kill another vampire. Or perhaps several. If I called the Casino, no matter what I said, the People would send a vamp out. That’s their default response. The PAD would shoot it, and the People would retaliate. It would spiral out of control, and I wanted everybody calm so I could keep Emily breathing.”

“Did Ghastek say why they had a loose vamp running around?”

I grimaced. “Something about a pregnant girl fainting.”

Andrea wrinkled her nose in a telltale shapeshifter sneer. “I smell bullshit.”

She was right. Two navigators, both fainted while piloting the same vampire? Ghastek fainting? That just didn’t happen.

I got a dry rag and wiped up the peroxide. The stain didn’t look too bad now. Still, once blood stained something, it stayed there forever, even if you could no longer see it. My office was christened in Emily’s blood. Yay.

I dumped the rag into the bucket and looked at Andrea. “My day didn’t go well.”

“I see that.”

“The PAD probably wants to shut me down, the People will find some way to blame me for the slaughter of the vampire and expect restitution, and Curran found out that I risked my life to save a Master of the Dead, which means I’ll have a lot of explaining to do at dinner, because Curran believes I’m made of glass. If I had been shot and the Pack found out that the Beast Lord’s mate and sugar woogums had been injured as a result of the People’s fuckup, they would have collective apoplexy and storm the Casino.”