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to keep from
     following her out himself. Maybe then she would have tried some of those defensive
     moves on him. The thought made him smile. He’d never let anyone pin him, but with
     Sofia, it might open the door to all kind of possibilities.
    Resigned, Phenex stepped through the hidden doorway into a dimly lit corridor that
     he knew ran, mazelike, behind the walls of the entire building. If you didn’t know
     where you were going, or how to open the doors back into the club proper, you could
     wander in here forever. He’d heard rumors that more than one curious human had been
     pulled out starving and half-crazy—and he didn’t doubt them. Justin could be annoyingly
     soft when the mood struck him, but never when it came to security. The man was a soldier
     through and through.
    All the more reason why Phenex didn’t get what had just happened.
    Justin walked a few paces away before turning and waiting. Phenex stalked over to
     him, keeping his voice low.
    “Well?”
    Justin looked annoyed, a good sign that he hadn’t just decided to embrace mercy on
     the off chance it would buy him a little redemption should anyone ever manage to get
     a stake in him—which was unlikely.
    “Give me some credit, Phenex,” Justin said. “I’m having her followed. Like I said,
     this isn’t the first time we’ve had to bring out the cleanup crew recently. I’m starting
     to think there’s an organized group of breakaway vamps trying to use Amphora as their
     own personal feedlot. It needs to stop before we do end up in a situation where I can’t keep the police out of it.” He ran a hand through
     his short crop of hair, the first time he’d let his agitation show. “You know how
     much this could ruin.”
    Phenex did, though most of the sympathy he mustered was out of a desire to preserve
     his own comfortable living situation. The vamps, weres, and other night creatures
     of Terra Noctem needed the freedom to feed, the safe-from-human-eyes jobs, and the
     steady cash flow that places like Amphora provided. When it worked and everyone followed
     the rules, Amphora was a bridge between day and night that drew humans and supernatural
     beings alike. If things started to fall apart, it was going to get dangerous on both
     sides.
    And he’d be stuck in the middle. Without making overtime, no doubt. The angels were
     picky about only paying for the work they’d specifically doled out, which usually
     entailed cleaning out pockets of low-level demons in areas where they were threatening
     to tilt the balance between light and darkness in what Heaven deemed to be the wrong
     direction. Dirty work, and lots of it—enough that the angels had gotten desperate
     enough to pay for help in the first place. But protecting Terra Noctem was expected
     to be, much to his continuing annoyance, gratis.
    “You could have said something,” Phenex grumbled, caught off guard by the depth of
     Justin’s concern about the situation. He and his brothers had been out of Hell for
     over a year now, and even if they hadn’t exactly kept out of trouble, they were earning
     their keep. It would be nice to be in the loop at the beginning more often. At least
     as a kind of “thank you” for not wrecking anything so far. Well, anything big. The
     other stuff was the fault of the demons they were paid to hunt down. Mostly.
    Justin shrugged, frowning. “I didn’t know what I was looking at. I still don’t.”
    “Could be demon involvement. Though Uriel would probably have already shown up if
     it was.” The archangel, for all his annoying righteousness, had an amazing nose for
     demon-related trouble. And Uriel just loved that he now had a band of black wings to take care of it. Just thinking of the Heavenly
     golden boy had Phenex curling his lip. Uriel seemed to be looking at the renegade
     Fallen as some kind of weird pet project.
    He didn’t need to be anyone’s project. All he really needed right now was a stiff
     drink.
    Justin