In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) Read Online Free Page B

owned the place.  With the way she was cozying up to Sky and her aura of command he might have thought Ann was the Focus here, save for her non-exceptional appearance and lack of a Focus’s glow.
    “Uncanny as always, Gilgamesh,” Ann said.  “Sky’s more worried than we are.  Lori’s just having a bit of angst.  She isn’t neglecting her Focus duties.”
    “I’ll knock first,” Gilgamesh said.  From inside her tiny room Lori was sign-language strangling someone, likely Sky, Ann or both.  Sky, from his ignorance, still couldn’t metasense Lori.
    Dealing with either of the three Arms was far easier than dealing with Inferno.
     
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    He didn’t have to knock.  Lori opened her door a crack, to verify it was him, and let him into her tiny room, nothing more than the closed off end of a hallway.
    “Focus Rizzari,” Gilgamesh said.  He wasn’t sure which Lori he would be dealing with today.  There seemed so many.  He didn’t get any amorous vibes from her this time, but he did notice the box of tissues and wadded up mess of tissues overflowing the small trash can.  “I was visiting…”
    “Shh.”  Lori led him over to her undersized bed, sat him down, and sat down beside him.  She leaned against him and put his arms around her.  “Perfect.  Uncomplicated and unconfused affection.”
    To which Gilgamesh didn’t say a thing.  If his feelings toward Lori weren’t complicated and confused, he couldn’t imagine what she ordinarily dealt with.
    While Lori luxuriated in his embrace, he absent-mindedly picked dross off her and did a detailed examination of Inferno.  Today was Saturday, meaning Lori was possibly in the dumps from Inferno’s Friday night fling.  She normally recovered by noon, though, and it was late afternoon.  Of the 32 Transforms currently on site, eleven of them appeared recently re-tagged and all of their glows metasensed cleaner than he remembered.  Ann’s looked practically pristine.  Hmm.  Without much work, Gilgamesh identified two other women Transforms, one he recognized by her glow (Eileen) and one other, who were similarly clean.  These were Sky’s lovers.  He also figured out how Lori was fooling Sky, with a staged set of juice patterns in the hallway that first played with his metasense and later tweaked his memory so he wouldn’t remember being in the hallway.  Nasty.  He also identified three Chimera traces around the poolside cabana, six days old, which belonged to Hoskins, Sellers and Knox.  Occum’s Nobles, which Gilgamesh knew far better than he liked.  This was new.  When he last visited here, before the Rogue Focus takedown, Lori had said she had never met any of the Nobles.
    Lori giggled and put Gilgamesh’s hand on her lower belly.  Kick.  Kick.  Gilgamesh smiled at the faint baby movements.  “You’re over half way through, aren’t you?”
    “Uh huh.  Almost five months along,” Lori said.  Her voice was low and dreamy.  Relaxed.  “The pregnancy is behind a bunch of the problems I’m having.  The hormones are playing with my juice control.  Last Tuesday there was an emergency I had to defuse – Flo got a cow heart delivered to her in the mail with a warning that if she didn’t break with me the next time it would be Sammy’s.”  Sammy was one of Focus Flo Ackerman’s household leaders.  “I was at the lab, refusing to answer the phone, so Connie sent a team over to deliver the message.  I didn’t even come close to losing my temper, but I shorted the lot of them by accident when they showed.  I never do that.”
    “Let me guess,” Gilgamesh said.  “There’s going to be a fancy paper coming out someday about Focus pregnancy hormone changes and their effects, isn’t there?”
    “Yah.  If I don’t go completely off the deep end first.”  She sighed.  “I probably should have told someone what I was doing for the past few days so they wouldn’t panic.  I only showed up for the beginning of Friday