Chapter 176 - The Third Option Out Of Two

For a few minutes, the air around our table was silent. Everyone was deep in thought, or at least, like me, tried to muster any productive thoughts. Instead of these, my mind kept returning to the sight of Andrey with a knife last night, his handsome face darkened by anger, his grey eyes murderous. Like that, he was a stranger to me. A complete stranger.

Even so, even if HE was a killer… I wasn't. Not like that, not in cold blood, and not even in hot one. It was hard enough to watch other people kill and die, even when they objectively deserved it and nothing less—even if there could've been nothing less. But to raise the blade myself…

"You know, Diana," Panda suddenly spoke, "Maybe we are so deep in all this supernatural stuff we forget that there are normal solutions that normal people use. Which says something about me, considering that I never wanted to get into this supernatural stuff in the first place."

"Huh?" I raised my eyes at her. "What are you talking about?"

"Why not just send him to jail? Normal jail. Shifters are strong, but they aren't so strong that some good prison won't hold one of them. And I'm sure it won't be hard for a vamp to convince the jury that Alexey deserved all the charges you come up with. Would take a while, I imagine… But still!"

I stared at her in astonishment. "Panda, this is brilliant. You get a bonus."

"Bonus?" Panda blinked in puzzlement.

"To your salary."

"Oh! Right, you still pay me the salary!.. Hey, why not a raise, then?"

I chuckled. "Let's see how grateful monetarily Avarice will be to me, and then we can talk about a raise." As my mood lifted, so did my appetite. I dug again into the still warm food on my plate, not just with hunger, but with a goal to fill my stomach as soon as I could. "I have to talk with her before I leave. Get Andrey, too."

"I will wait for you. Elder actually permitted it, since you don't have your own transport, and almost nothing works right now," Ghost said. "I'm glad you found the right decision for you."

I hummed with my mouth full. In jail, Andrey will be alive, and I will be safe from him. His life won't be pretty, that I knew, but there will be opportunities for him to make something out of it. It doesn't necessarily have to be a life sentence, too. Twenty years for a start… sounded good to me. After that, well, who knew what I would make out of myself?

Something out of his reach entirely, if things went like they should've.

"Are you going with us back to the coven, Sveta?" Ghost asked Panda. "I can drive you to your house if you aren't."

"No, please, don't." Panda shook her head. "Please, let me stay with you for now. Other hunters keep hounding me. I had to put my phone on silent. Just look at this." She pulled it out of her pocket and showed us the screen.

I raised an eyebrow. "Two missed calls? If they bother you so much, you can block them."

Panda huffed. "I should, I really should," she hesitated for a moment, then put her phone back. "Later, maybe. Either way, they know where I live, so I can't go back there."

"Alright, sure, go with us." I washed down the last the last bit of toast from my plate with a generous gulp of hot tea and stood up. "Meet again in an hour?"

"Ok." and "Sure!" were my unanimous response. An hour was a generous helping of time; I hoped I will have enough to arrange everything I needed.

⠀⠀

First, I had to speak with JJ again. I didn't even have to call him to find him—he was strolling around the street right outside of Avarice's gates. Energised as I was by the lack of heavy choice weighting of me, I bounced up to him and planted a hard kiss on his lips instead of greeting and almost knocking an umbrella out of his hand.

"You look much more cheerful than before, ma chèrie," JJ said after returning the kiss with enough skill and heat to make me feel a little wobbly on my legs. "May I ask you for the reason? Have you got some especially glorious news?"

"No, but I got some especially glorious idea." I grinned at him. "Panda had it, actually."

I explained it to him and watched how JJ's brows furrowed in thought. "Ah, yes… This certainly may work. I won't be the best person to arrange it, though. My knowledge of court procedures was rusty even a century ago. You should ask Avarice for it."

"Yeah… I had that thought, too… She has more people working for her, doesn't she? I imagine she has plenty of cops in her pocket, too, hah. Wonder if she will accept that sofa as a payment…" 

I bit on my lip, making the math of favours in my head. I helped heal Anon, and hey, health is worth any money, isn't it? Though Ghost did most of the job, but I had a feeling that if he didn't ask for a reward, Avarice won't give it. Then, I still had that damn sofa. I only needed to fix it…

"If she will give you grief, ma chèrie, and in her current agitated state of mind, this is what I fully expect from her, you only have to remind her whom she wants to be Denis's sire." JJ smirked. "She knows just as well as I do that this is a favour worth much more than what she gave to me already."

I frowned. "If it's so heavy, do you really want to go through with it? I mean… Well, I imagine you aren't keen on making new vampires by now."

JJ lifted his eyes to the sky, staring at something beyond my reach. "I promised it to him already, and I didn't do it lightly. I do believe it will be a good thing. But," he smirked at me again, "it will be good to use that opportunity to exploit Avarice while we can, too. Go on. You have a carte blanche to use my name in negotiations. Don't be shy."