After a blur of time, her body slumped to the right, then she had the strange sensation she floated through the air. Opening her eyes a crack, she realized Sten had taken her out of the car, cradled her in his arms, and was carrying her somewhere. The dark December sky turned to soft interior lamp lights. Forcing her eyes to open wider, she saw a stained ceiling, then the plain twin bed she lay in, and finally bits and pieces of what looked like a shabby extended-stay hotel room around her. Couch cushions propped her legs up, she guessed put there by Sten to alleviate her shock.
“Where are we?” she asked weakly, unable to muster the energy to sit up and look around.
“It’s called a safe house,” he said, ransacking a cupboard in the kitchen. “It’s cheaper than a beach house.”
“Why are we here?”
“Because you’re a fucking mess.” Walking back to the bed with an armful of medical supplies, he added, “And if you’re arrested, we’ll both be in deep shit.”
“I thought you only cared because I owe you.”
“That, too.” He dumped the supplies on a nightstand, then lifted her head and pushed a pillow underneath with surprising gentleness. “There are several reasons.” After pouring three shots worth of whiskey into a mug, he held it to her lips. “Drink.”
Val gulped it down. She closed her eyes and felt the liquor burn a path down her throat, a soothing sensation compared to the rest of her body. With the same rare gentleness, Sten rolled her onto her left side and took hold of her right wrist and elbow.
“This might hurt a bit,” he said.
Slowly, he rotated her arm upward. Pain grew like water building behind a dam, until the dam broke and she cried out when her shoulder popped back into its socket. She let out a long exhale as her arm finally relaxed.
“Thank you,” she mumbled, eyes closed and barely awake as a reprieve from the worst of her pain combined with the alcohol worked their magic.
Only vaguely did she feel him threading her coat and sweatshirt from her torso, rolling her onto her back, and slipping off her shoes and pants until just her bra and panties remained. She had no energy to protest, and God help her, she trusted him. Like it or not, she had no choice. They were partners. Shit.
He tenderly touched the skin around the stab wound on her chest. “You’ve got the luck of the Irish, or wherever that red hair comes from. Looks like Eleanor missed all your vital organs. Guess she didn’t pray for your death hard enough.” She heard him riffling through his medical supplies for a moment. “This is gonna hurt a bit, too.”
Val jolted awake as her wound caught fire—he’d splashed disinfectant on it.
“Give me the liquor!” she rasped.
He passed her the bottle, and she gulped down a mouthful. When a needle punctured her skin, she worked to stifle a scream, clamping her teeth together and clutching the sheets with white knuckles as he sewed the cut closed.
“You’re being a real baby right now,” he said.
“Shut up.”
“Ever try doing this on yourself? It fucking sucks. Especially when you’ve been shot in your dominant arm so you have to use your off-hand, and there’s a kill squad actively looking for you, and all your mates are dead, and you’re eleven years old.”
After she took another desperate drink, she asked, “Why haven’t you told me about your past before?”
He shrugged as he sewed, every pass of the needle through her skin a new agony. “Why would I? We were never really together.”
They weren’t now, either…Ah hell, yes they were. At the moment, he was all she had. “I’m sorry your childhood sucked.”
“Oh, you thought I was talking about myself? I was describing a hypothetical. And anyway, once you’ve heard one sob story, you’ve heard ’em all. Just fill in the blanks of misery. Family member or members died when I was blank years old, henceforth abused or taken advantage of by blank, felt different synonyms for alone all my life, plus some unrequited or tragic love thrown in there somewhere. I’ve just described the life stories of ninety percent of the population.”
“Jesus, Sten, shut up—”
The horrible needle stabbing stopped. “Look at that, all done.” He’d been talking to distract her. She forgot—he never did anything without a reason. He dressed the stitches with gauze and medical tape, then lifted her arms and leg to inspect the gashes there. “You can probably get by with butterfly bandages on these—unless you want me to stitch them up, too.”
“God no.”
She whimpered as he poured more disinfectant into the three other gashes, then applied the bandages. Dropping the half-empty whiskey bottle on the carpet, she let blessed unconsciousness take her away, not sure she wanted to return.
* * *
Val woke up from what she hoped had been the worst dream of her life. As her surroundings came into focus and the pain of her many wounds screamed across her body, her heart sank—nope, the last two awful days had actually happened.
Tucked snuggly underneath a comforter, she pushing herself up on her elbows and took a better look around. Sten’s safe house wasn’t in a hotel room, she realized, but a low-rent studio apartment. It did, however, looked like a cheap hotel room…just like the one in her earlier vision, when she’d argued with Sten and he mentioned her mother—which had brought her to him in the first place. Great, they’d come full circle.
With a groan, she sat up and dragged her legs over the side of the bed. A small, thick cathode-ray television droned in the corner, showing the local news in oversaturated colors. Summing up all the calamities that had befallen Seattle in the last few weeks, an anchorman announced a special guest—ex-mayor and current Congresswoman Delilah Barrister. Val flinched when her face materialized on the screen.
“These terrible tragedies break my heart,” Delilah said, contorting her face into what Val considered the fakest expression of sympathy ever. “Luckily, Seattle is strong, and I know we’ll get through this. We’re stronger together!”
As Delilah kept lying about how much she cared for the city, Val hefted herself off the bed, walked to the television where it sat atop a beat-up end table, and with one strong yank she tossed it to the floor. With a flash and a pop, the screen cracked and went black.
A moment later, Sten entered through the front door, dusting a light coat of snow off the shoulders of a black field jacket. He’d ditched his work suit and tie for a pair of faded denim jeans and military-style tan boots—his shit’s-hit-the-fan outfit, apparently.
Cocking an eyebrow at the broken TV, he took off his jacket and smoothed out a bunched-up black wool sweater he wore underneath. “Finally, you’re up. I thought you were going to sleep all fucking day.”
Maybe she should have. What was the point of waking up anymore? Max was basically dead, her mother had betrayed her, an evil cabal had kidnapped her children and she had no idea where to start looking for them, and Delilah was using the city’s chaos for her own political gain. She should’ve stayed blissfully asleep.
Sten walked to the kitchen, poured himself a mug of coffee he’d made sometime before Val woke, and took a long slurp. “Checked the police scanners. They’ve got an APB out for you, but no arrest warrant yet. Still, if they see you all banged up, they’re gonna know you tangled with Eleanor, and into the slammer you’ll go. That is, unless you can prove stabbing a woman in the heart and throwing her off a roof was all in self-defense.”
“No, I went there to kill her.” Despair wrapped around Val’s heart and hollowed out her voice. Returning to the bed, she sat in a heap. “Eleanor was going to kill me, but I changed it.”
He walked to Val and held out his coffee cup, offering her a drink. She ignored it.
“They want me to work for them, because I can change things.”
“Makes sense. They want your kids, but they need you and Carressa out of the way—especially you. They know you’ll never leave them alone until you get the kids back, but since you can change the future, they can’t predict what you’ll do. You’d give Northwalk a run for their money, and they don’t want to deal with it. Since Eleanor failed to kill you, the next best thing is to force you to work for them, control you that way. A classic ‘threaten a loved one to ensure compliance’ move.” He sipped coffee and frowned at the far wall. “I’ve seen them run similar plays.”
Chugging the rest, he set the mug down on the kitchen counter and paced the tiny apartment, head down in thought. “This isn’t as bad as it seems. You work for them for a little while, gain their trust, wait for your opening, then turn one of their little prophesies against them.”
“I can’t do that. I can’t work for them.”
“Yes, you can.” He looked at her and sneered, “What, Eleanor sever your spine, too?”
He wanted her to get angry, but an overwhelming sense of hopelessness stifled every other emotion. She dropped her head in her hands. “I can’t do this.”
“Yes, you can. You’d be surprised how much shit a person can put up with when properly motivated.”
“I think I’d rather die.”
“It’s really not that bad.”
“Yes it is.” She picked up the half-empty bottle of whiskey from the floor and took a long drink. “Yes it is.”
Sten rolled his eyes. “Here we go with your goddamn hysterics again.”
She ignored him to concentrate on drinking the liquor as quickly as possible. If she focused on breathing through her nose, she could shotgun it—
Sten grabbed her arm and yanked the bottle from her lips. “Stop it. It’s not that bad.”
“Maybe you can live like a slave, but I can’t.”
She must have hit a nerve, because anger flared behind his eyes. His grip around her wrist tightened until the pain became too much and the whiskey bottle dropped from her hand, thudding against the stained carpet at their feet. She whimpered but refused to ask him to stop. She’d let him kill her if he wanted. She almost wished he would.
He seized her other wrist and slammed her down on the bed, the mattress groaning underneath the force. Pain from her many injuries jolted through her body.
“I never took you for a quitter, Shepherd,” he said, his mouth an inch from hers. “There are ways to resist. At the very least I thought you’d want to have one more quality meeting with your mother. Your efforts so far have been frankly pathetic.”
Angry tears leaked down her cheeks. She wanted to spit in his face, but she wanted release more.
Show me where they are, she would say to him, begging for a vision he could focus like no one else, not even her own husband. The words were on the tip of her tongue, ready to slide into the world as she’d foretold and lead the way to them having angry, desperate sex. Maybe Sten would show her where Dani took her children, and she could go there and rescue them. All she had to do was give her body to him.
But she couldn’t do it. She loved Max too much to let it happen. There had to be another way.
“Stop,” she said, summoning the last threads of her willpower. “Get off me.”
His black eyes stared hard at her, his anger replaced with something else—hunger. For a scary second, she thought he might take her anyway. Instead, he stood, backed up, and collapsed onto the couch.
He bellowed, “What can you do then, Val?” His smarmy, self-confident mask crumbled under the weight of his anger and frustration, revealing his own bald desperation, a surprising match for her own. “Because I can’t live like this anymore either. You have to do something! Make a fucking decision!”
She sat up and clutched the sides of her head. Think, Val, think. Come on. There’s got to be another way.
“What…what are the chances Northwalk is nearby?” she asked.
With his eyes closed, Sten rubbed the bridge of his nose as if trying to calm his passion down. “High. They wouldn’t trust anyone else with their Alpha—or multiple Alphas now—for more time than absolutely necessary. They would insist your mom come straight back to them with the kids.”
“Their Alpha…does that mean Cassandra’s with them?”
“Most likely, yeah.”
“I saw her in a vision a few days ago. She was in a big room in a house surrounded by a forest. And Stacey mentioned Northwalk is hiding out in a forest mansion that’s been beefed up with extra security.” She looked at Sten and sat up straight, her mental strength returning. “You can’t just buy a fortress like that from Century 21. They must have hired a company to do extensive renovations—work they’d want kept off the books so it couldn’t be traced back to them. They’d need to hire a construction company with no problem working without permits and breaking the law.”
“The place will be a hard target,” Sten said. “Getting in will be a challenge.” But not impossible.
Val stood, nearly naked but finally energized, her mind sharpening like a keen knife. “Good thing I know someone with connections to a shady construction company who owes me a favor.”
Sten met her gaze with an eagerness for vengeance that mirrored her own. The black thread that bound them together felt tighter than ever.
“Do you have weapons?” she asked.
He scoffed. “Do I.” He walked to the kitchen and pushed the refrigerator out of the way, then popped open a panel embedded in the wall. In a secret compartment, he’d stashed at least a dozen guns—rifles, shotguns, and a few pistols, along with hundreds of ammo rounds.
“You never know when there’ll be a zombie apocalypse,” he said, “or when people who can see the future steal your kids.”
“That’ll work.” She began pulling on her clothes with a new sense of purpose, fueled by a burning, insatiable desire to hurt those who’d hurt her as quickly as possible.
“I lied when I told Dani I’d kill them all if they touched my children,” she said. “No matter what happens, I’m going to kill them all anyway.”