Emily Kimelman - Sydney Rye 05 - The Devil's Breath by Emily Kimelman Read Free Book Online Page A

my napkin, inadvertently dumping the rest of the container onto my lap. “Shit,” I said, jumping up.
    The waitress hurried over. “Think you could make more of scene?” Mulberry asked with a sly smile on his face that made my palm itch to wipe it off. I took the extra napkins from the waitress and thanked her. She smiled at Mulberry and I didn’t like the look in her eye.
    I sat back down, pushing my eggs around with my fork.
    Mulberry leaned across the table to me. “Look, Sydney. All I’m saying is don’t let your personal feelings fuck this up for Hugh.” I felt an again at the end of the sentence and resented it.
    “I’m having dinner with Robert tonight,” I said. “At his house.”
    Mulberry cocked his head. “Really?”
    I shrugged. “You said I should give him a chance.”
    He frowned but didn’t say anything.
    “What?”
    Mulberry sat back in his chair. He waved for the check and turned back to me. “I had hoped to take you to dinner. Maybe tomorrow night?”
    “Did you just ask me out on a date?” I asked, laughing a little at the end.
    Mulberry smiled, his cheeks brightening. Jesus Christ, was he blushing? “Yes,” he answered.
    “No!” I blurted out.
    “Jeez, Syd,” he said, looking away from me. “That kind of reaction is not good for the ego.” When he turned back to me he was smiling, his eyes bright. He leaned across the table looking down at my stained outfit. “You probably need to go shopping,” he said.
    I looked down at the ruined silk top and thought back to the contents of my bag: jogging clothes, a couple of sundresses, a ratty pair of jeans, an extra bra, my leather jacket, a T-shirt with a rip in one armpit, and two white T-shirts, both with stains. I looked down at my one good outfit. The jeans were salvageable. “I wanted to go see Defry’s ,” I said.
    “I’ll drop you there. Lincoln Road is nearby, you can get whatever you need there.”

CHAPTER FIVE
Dangerous Dress Shopping
    Blue and I stood in front of the restaurant after Mulberry drove away. It had a green awning with Hugh’s last name, D efry , scrawled across it in white. The space for outdoor seating was empty, a gap in the sidewalk. The windows were dark.
    A couple approached, both dressed in beach wear, their skin glistening with sunscreen. They stopped in front of the restaurant a couple of paces from me.
    “That was the restaurant from that  show, right?,” said the woman to the man.
    “Yeah,” he answered.
    “So sad,” she said.
    “Do you think it was for ratings?” he asked.
    She slapped his arm. “That’s terrible.”
    He smiled down at her and they began to walk again. Never glancing at Blue or me, as if we were invisible. I didn’t even want them to consciously not look at me. Just let their brains filter me out. Keep the world the way it was supposed to be. Hugh was the one who told me how to hide. As long as you were something most people didn’t want to see they wouldn’t.
    I wondered if Hugh knew that being that unwanted thing meant you’d stepped behind a curtain. That you were back there with all of your own kind. That as much as you hid, you were also drawn. Did Hugh know this because he was a killer, too?
    Back in New York, when I realized that the bullet I’d just shot thunked into a corpse instead of the living, breathing man who killed my brother, I hardly had time to think. His security burst through the doors and I ran for my life. When I found out it was Bobby Maxim who stole my revenge, I blamed him for everything. The death of my brother, my own failure to avenge him, for the creature I felt myself becoming.
    But I didn’t try to kill Bobby. I held back, not wanting to do the exact thing that he expected of me. When Robert offered an end to Joy Humbolt in exchange for tracking down his Mexican friend’s missing daughter I went along, hoping to put my past behind me. But the girl, Ana Maria Hernandez Vargas, turned out to be a manipulative, cold-blooded killer