Free Death's Daughter by Kathleen Collins Page B

Thomas’s rooms to put her stuff away. The bag of clothes would be easy to square away, so she grabbed it up and headed into the guest room. She filled the drawers of the dresser and put her toiletries in the bathroom. Her bag got tossed into the corner out of the way.
    Her weapons would be harder for her to unpack. She couldn’t just leave them out on display. While Thomas’s home was secure, there were still people who had access to it. And knowing her luck, they’d want to examine the pretty sword and end up chopping a body part off. That would be messy and cause her to have to fill out more paperwork than she had a mind to.
    She left the rest of her stuff where it was and headed to a door on the other side of the living room. If she remembered correctly, this was Thomas’s office. She punched her code in the keypad by the door, uncertain if it would work. The door clicked open. With one finger, she pushed it the rest of the way open, then stepped into the dark room. She felt along the wall and flipped the switch. Soft light flooded the room.
    Thomas’s desk still sat toward the back of the room facing the door just as she remembered. To her left was a wall of bookshelves filled with a variety of reading material. To her right, where a loveseat used to sit, there was a large weapons cabinet. Beside it on the wall were mounting brackets for her sword. Unless Thomas had acquired a lot more weaponry than he used to have, he’d remodeled with her in mind. She walked to the cabinet and punched in her code. It opened to reveal three guns, some ammo and lots of empty space.
    She turned to get her bag and her eye snagged on a photo on Thomas’s desk. She walked over and picked up the delicate silver frame. In it was a picture of her and Thomas she’d never seen before. They had their arms wrapped around each other’s waists and they were laughing, their foreheads touching. It had to have been taken right before he left. They looked so happy. Sorrow plucked at her heart that they had lost that. She wondered if they’d ever get there again.
    Irritated with herself for her morose thoughts, she sat the picture back on the desk harder than necessary and strode out of the room to get her weapons. It didn’t take her long to fill the cabinet with an arsenal unlike anything it had ever seen before. It wasn’t so much the volume as the variety—grenades, guns, knives, ammo and holy water all had a place on the shelves. She placed her sword in the brackets next to the cabinet then locked it.
    She turned the lights out and shut the office door behind her. The phone rang in the kitchen and Juliana wandered over and picked it up. “Hello?”
    “It’s Nicholas. A man called Agent Grace is asking for you. He has several officers and lots of boxes with him.”
    “Very good. Have them shown to the ballroom. I’ll meet them there.”
    Jeremiah and four officers awaited her in the hall when she got off the service elevator. She unlocked the doors and opened them with a grand gesture. “Welcome to Command Central.”
    Jeremiah whistled through his teeth as he stepped into the room. He looked over his shoulder at her, a question in his eyes.
    She shrugged. “He likes to take care of me. This is his way of doing that.”
    He arched a nonexistent brow but didn’t say anything. The four uniformed officers followed him into the room wheeling a pallet of boxes between them. Directly behind them came an army of hotel employees armed with tables, chairs and the whiteboards she had requested. They had the room set up in record time, including a full coffee bar to one side of the room. Nicholas watched it all, gave her a bow when they finished and followed them out.
    “Well, that was something,” one of the uniforms said, breaking the silence.
    Juliana agreed but instead of saying so, looked at Jeremiah. “Are they ours or are you just using them for manual labor?”
    He smiled. “They’re ours.” His smile grew until she could see