Naughty Karma

Chapter Five Pandora’s Insomniac

Karma woke with a jerk, sucking in air with a hard gasp ripping her throat raw. She never came awake peacefully. The visions that chased her out of her dreams prevented that.

Gulping for oxygen, she rolled to study the illuminated face of her clock. Three-twenty in the morning. She’d managed to grab two whole hours of sleep this time. Not quite a personal best, but not far from it.

Karma untangled herself from the twisted covers and climbed out of bed, setting about the soothing routine of changing the sweaty sheets for fresh, crisp linens. She wouldn’t be getting back to sleep again tonight. Her heart rate gradually slowed as her hands went through the familiar motions, tugging and smoothing the cotton-and-silk blend.

She’d been Ciara this time. And she’d been drowning. Water had gushed into her nose and mouth, burning in her lungs, a searing pain radiating through her body as something held her under.

Since Ciara was one of her finders who spent the better part of her life floating in a pool to reduce the psychic dissonance caused by her gift, the dream was terrifyingly possible. Ciara was currently at odds with her new FBI handler, but surely he wouldn’t hurt her, or allow anyone else to. Though Karma had never met the man, so she didn’t have much to go on.

Instinct demanded she do something, but years of experience had taught Karma how to read the dreams, even if she couldn’t control them, and this one wouldn’t come true for several more days, if it came true at all. No need to call Ciara at three in the morning in a panic.

She’d learned the hard way when she was a teenager that people generally appreciated her “hunches” more when they weren’t accompanied by pre-dawn hysteria.

Karma looked down at the military precision of her made bed. Her hands had stopped shaking by the time she aligned the last pillow. Neat. Orderly. In control. So she could breathe again, master the fear that lingered.

The dreams always felt so real. Even if it never came true and Ciara escaped without a scratch, Karma couldn’t forget the feeling of water setting her lungs on fire.

If she told Prometheus about this, maybe he wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss her almosts. But she would never tell. Even her consultants didn’t know anything more specific than she had feelings and hunches. Her family knew because she’d started having the dreams when she was a child, but she’d never told another soul. She’d never even considered it. That telling Prometheus had even formed as a thought was…unsettling.

Which made sense in the way. Everything about the man unsettled her.

And now she was his boss. In a manner of speaking. Prometheus didn’t seem to be the kind of man who understood the concept of having a boss.

Prometheus. It couldn’t be his real name. Though as a woman named Karma, she couldn’t really cast stones. Her parents had each named one of their children—her sturdy, law-enforcement father picking Jake and her flower-child mother selecting something a bit more meaningful. Who had named Prometheus? He seemed like the kind of man who had sprung fully formed into the universe. Like Athena rather than the Titan for whom he was named.

Did he have a last name? What would he put on a W-2? Not that she could get him to fill one out, since he was working for her for good will rather than cash.

She needed to decide what she would have him do, something to show his soul wasn’t entirely tarred—which was a challenge not only because he was an ethical black hole, but also because she wasn’t even sure what he could do. What were the limits of Prometheus’s abilities?

And how could she ensure he really was cooperating? She’d have to assign someone to babysit him. Someone who wouldn’t be taken in or run into the ground by him. Her people were professionals, but Prometheus was a walking wrecking ball, chaos in human form. She needed someone to supervise him who would keep him in line.

It was only quarter past four when she finished her morning routine by sliding her feet into a new pair of Louboutins and pouring a second mug of oolong. She made her way up to the office. Living in the basement apartment beneath the Karmic Consultants offices was the ultimate convenience. Her commute each morning was a fifteen-second ride in the secure elevator that opened directly into her office. The efficiency was unparalleled. Do not pass go, do not take time to smell the roses. Her brother would have given her shit about her all work-no play mentality, but Jake was on his honeymoon with Lucy so he wasn’t here to be disappointed by her inability to goof off—even on a Sunday.

Because of the wedding the day before, she’d ignored all non-emergency messages and even in twenty-four hours they had stacked up. Karma settled into her Herman Miller Aeron chair and began putting her world in order, one email at a time, half her brain still considering the best strategy for handling the Prometheus problem.

She wished she could call Jake and talk it through with him. Her brother had done the original profile on Prometheus when she’d had him investigated after his name kept popping up in Karmic Consultants cases. But thanks to the matchmaking epidemic that had hit everyone she touched in the last year, Jake was temporarily out of commission as her primary confidant.

First Jake and Lucy. Then Jo and Wyatt. Mia and Chase. Ronna and Matt. Brittany and Rodriguez. Her consultants were pairing off at an alarming rate.

Next thing she knew Ciara would announce she’d fallen in love with her new FBI handler and—

A tickle at the back of her skull made Karma shiver as a new premonition seeped into her brain. Shit. Ciara is going to announce she’s in love with her new FBI handler. The question was, did that make her more or less likely to die by drowning later in the week?

Karma glanced at the clock that hung above her door, its graceful lines a perfect blend of art and function, like all the other objects in her work space. Quarter to six. Still too early to check up on Ciara.

At least this romantic hunch had been of the gentle reminder variety, as opposed to the bloody sledgehammer type that bludgeoned Karma in her sleep. When she was awake, she could batten down the hatches in her brain, keep the most vivid, gory pieces as bad feelings rather than a macabre play in which she was trapped as a doomed actor. Control. It all came down to control.

Karma pushed away from her laptop and went to her meditation corner, shielded from the rest of the room by a gorgeous Chinese screen. She slipped off her shoes and knelt, careful not to wrinkle her skirt. Incense made her sneeze, so she didn’t bother with it, her meditation space spartan and uncluttered.

Karma cleared her thoughts, working through the mental exercises and meditations that refreshed her balance and control. Lately she’d been forced to do them three or four times a day just to keep it together, but she refused to consider the possibility that the locks on the Pandora’s Box of power inside her were failing.

She finished her first cycle and decided to do a second round, just to be safe, when another scratch of foreboding teased the back of her skull. Prometheus.

Karma’s eyes snapped open. He was on his way here. Why was he on his way here? She’d told him Monday, damn it. She’d been counting on today to gather her thoughts and reinforce her mental defenses and now—

No sense bitching about it. He’d be arriving in ten minutes whether she was ready for him or not. Karma made it a point to always be ready for unexpected guests. Her internal early warning system made that possible; her unshakable desire to always be prepared and in control made it necessary.

She rose, smoothed the non-existent wrinkles from her skirt and slid her feet back into the Louboutins. Ignoring the sensation in her stomach that may have been mistaken for anticipation, she unlocked the doors to the outer office, flipped on the exterior lights, and put on a pot of coffee, since Prometheus didn’t seem to be the sort who would appreciate the reviving properties of a nice oolong.

She was back behind her desk, laptop tucked away in a drawer, hands folded on the dark marble surface when Prometheus let himself into her office without so much as a knock—just as she’d known he would.

He was dressed all in black today—black slacks, black shoes, black button-down shirt with the cuffs rolled to his elbows. All of it doubtless an intentional jab at her attempt to bring him over from the dark side.

He grinned, inky eyes twinkling as they locked on her seated behind her desk. “I see you were expecting me.”