by Lilly Black
The very thought made her anxious because she hadn't talked to Reid in two days. They had agreed that he would turn on his satellite phone and call her for two minutes every morning then turn it back off to save the charge. When she talked to him last, he still had 72% battery life, but her phone hadn't rung yesterday or today. She was terrified that it meant he was dead, and she hated herself because she turned to Alek for comfort, lying in his arms last night as she fought back the tears. If it hadn't been for that stupid spell, she wouldn't feel so guilty about it. Her need for a connection was human nature, and though it didn't mean she didn't love Reid with every fiber of her being, the fact that she had wanted Alek before all this happened was threatening to tear her apart at the seams.
"Oblivia!" Liana shouted, snapping her fingers in her face. "Are you okay?"
"Huh? Yeah, I'm fine. Sorry. Do you and Aiden want to move to a cabin?" she asked, forcing a smile as she tried to push the anxiety of out her mind, but Liana was about to chase it away for her with a surprising distraction.
"Yeah...and I heard through the grapevine that there are cabins that have..." she leaned in close and dropped her voice low "...certain BDSM accoutrements?"
"Really?" Olivia asked, not sure which she was more curious about: How Liana knew about the BDSM cabins or why she wanted one.
"Really," she confirmed, biting her lip. According to the internet research she had done when she found out that her friend owned these vacation rentals, there were only two that had been outfitted thusly, and she wanted to make sure she got one of them. She had not yet brought up the idea with Aiden, but she was ready to move their sexual relationship to the next level. And BDSM was the way she traditionally did that.
Olivia keyed the cards, then she led her up the hill to the cabin to show her the secret room that was only made available to guests who wanted the option. To others, it was dismissed as a storage closet, but the locked door in the bedroom actually led to a small, secret chamber in the center of the cabin with a bondage table, a St. Andrew's Cross, and a few other fun surprises - whips, cuffs, and chains not included.
"So do you have something you want to tell me?" Olivia asked Liana with a raised eyebrow.
"Actually, since you're the one with the BDSM cabins, I was wondering if you had something you might want to tell me," she countered.
"Nah," Olivia said. "Reid and I tried it out and thought it would be a nice option to offer guests who are into it, but it's not our thing. What about you?"
"It's just something I dabble in." It was all Liana was willing to admit.
"Well, if you need anything to go along with it," she said, pointing to a drawer built into the wall, "There's a catalog in there of the items we kept on hand in case guests forgot something. I have a small stockroom in the lodge."
"Really?" Liana asked, grinning. She thanked her friend as she headed toward the door, but then called out to her before she could leave. "Hey! One more thing. Please don't tell anyone about this. I don't want Dani to tease me or June to shame me."
"You got it," she said with a laugh, but as soon as she closed the door behind her, she ran into Dani, who had no intention of teasing Liana. She had been scouting out the cabins when she saw them go into this one, and spying through the bedroom window, she got a slight glimpse of the secret room.
"Got anymore of those?" she asked.
"I may have one," Olivia said with a smirk. "But who's chaining who to the wall?"
"Girl, I don't even care. Jax is just all I want to do all the time any way possible," she said, and Olivia realized it had to be true because she'd hardly seen either of them since they got there. They would come out of their room, do whatever work was assigned to them, then disappear.
"I'm happy for you," she said.
"What about you? Are you and Alek..."
"Reid's still out there, Dani. He's coming home to me."
"I hope he does, but what about Alek then?"
"He promised me he'd step aside," she said with a sad smile, and Dani winced. "I know it's wrong. I should just stay the hell away from him for everyone's sake, but I can't. I keep thinking what if Reid's dead? What if I push Alek away, he finds someone else, then Reid never comes home?"
"I feel you, but you can't just keep him on a back burner. It's not fair. He's out there every day risking his life for this community. He should at least be getting laid."
"Well, you're welcome to try," Olivia said with a snide glare.
"I don't think Jax would like that very much. He's really possessive."
"That's funny for a guy who used to fuck a different woman every night."
Olivia just blurted it out. She knew it was a shitty thing to say, but she felt like Dani was judging her. Dani had no business judging her. None of them did. They didn't know what it was like to love someone like she loved Reid, and being without him was torture, not knowing where he was, what was happening to him, if he was even alive. As for Alek, she needed him, and besides, he was a grown man. If he didn't like their arrangement, he was perfectly capable of saying so. Of course none of that gave Olivia the right to be cruel to Dani, and even though, as a therapist, she understood, it still stung.
"People change, Olivia," she said. "Jax has changed."
"Yeah, maybe he just needed the right woman," Olivia said rather than reminding her that Jax already found the right woman. Her name was Mrs. Bonham, and she was probably safely at home in their Redondo Beach mansion at that very moment. Jax's open marriage was common knowledge, but even though Olivia was pissed and looking for someone to lash out at, she couldn't bring herself to do it. Dani had suffered in a bad marriage for so long. She deserved some happiness.
Olivia gave her the other "couples only" cabin, then she spent the afternoon assigning the rest of them and trying to keep herself distracted from thinking about Reid or Alek. Both were in danger today. Reid would be in danger in her mind every day until she saw him again, and Alek had gone to Princeton this morning with a half a dozen others. He had decided they needed electric cars because they were quiet and would eliminate the need to find gas.
Many of the stations in the area had already been sucked dry. There was another group that might have been bigger and more organized than Olivia's, and two days ago, Alek had been out scavenging and watched them pull a tanker up and completely empty an entire gas station. If Olivia's group didn't do something soon, they would be forced to go car to car siphoning, and they needed to conserve what gas they could find to move the stone for the wall and operate the equipment.
The problem was that the closest electric car lot was more than twenty miles away in Princeton. Not only was there the distance issue, Princeton's population was six times that of the small town of Pipestem, and it was right off interstate 77. But Alek insisted, so Olivia spent all day worrying about him and kicking herself for not insisting that they wait until they had some means of long range communication. They used to have the spare satellite phone, but now that was in the pocket of a dead man in the parking lot of a brickyard. Only Olivia's remained as far as she knew. Savannah claimed hers was missing, but it wasn't the truth. She was afraid Olivia would take it away from her to send on scavenging missions, and she just knew that if her dad was going to call her, it would happen while the phone was out of her possession. At least her lie kept Olivia from having to make the decision because the same concern would have tormented her like not being able to contact Alek was tormenting her now.
With no sign of him, day turned into evening and evening into night. Around 1:00 AM when everyone was already in bed - and comfortably so now that they didn't have to sleep on cots in the lodge - the only people awake other than Olivia were on watch. She sat in her panic room with Evil at her side staring at the monitor fed by the camera at the first gate, aching to see headlights. Alek should have been back by now.
At 2:00 AM, she could no longer sit still.
"You want to go for a walk, Evie?" she asked, and the cat, who had been stretched out
on the floor, perked up immediately. With so many people around, she didn't have the opportunity to even roam the private residence like she used to, and she was eager to go outside and walk with the human she thought gave birth to her. Olivia put on a jacket, checked the guns in her ankle and shoulder holsters to make sure they were full, slung a loaded AR-15 across her back, and led Evil out the door. When they came to the inner ring gate, Jax and Dani were on watch.
"Uh-uh," Dani said when she saw Olivia headed for the door beside the gate. She stepped in front of it.
"Funny. Now get out of my way," Olivia demanded.
"You're fucking nuts if you think I'm letting you go out there alone," she protested.
"I need to do something, Dani. I'm just pacing the floor, driving myself crazy," Olivia said.
"So you're going to go prowl around in a forest full of crunchy, fallen leaves in the middle of the damn night when there's nothing for the dead to do but listen for shit like crunchy, fallen leaves?" Dani argued.
"Let me use the door, or I'll open the gate," Olivia threatened, indicating the remote control on her belt loop. She was being good-natured about it, but she wasn't going to take no for an answer.
"Damn it!" Dani complained as she stepped out of the way and let Olivia and Evil pass. On the other side, they headed toward the wooden planks over the trench, which would eventually retract like a drawbridge. For now, it had to be raised and lowered manually, but it was already in place tonight anticipating the return of the scavenging party.
"Thank you," Olivia called back, and Dani shouted at her through the open window of the guard station.
"You know, we take this watch because nothing ever happens at 2:00 am, but now we have to sit up here and worry about your dumb ass getting eaten out there. I hope you're happy."
"Thrilled," Olivia said with a laugh as she and Evil walked over the bridge. On the way down the mountain, she stuck to the road to avoid all those crunchy, fallen leaves, and the cat stayed right by her side. At the middle gate, which was eight feet high now with the intent to later build up the fence to match, Olivia climbed over while Evil reached the top in a single jump.
"Show off," she said as the cat leapt to the ground on the other side. When they made it to the lower gate, it was easier to scale because it was still the same one as always. Until the upper and middle rings were better protected, they didn't want the lower gate to give anyone on the main road the impression that there was anything interesting up this gravel drive.
Right now, it just looked like a dozen other gates along that stretch of road. With trees growing right beside the posts on either side, Olivia grabbed a thick limb, hoisting herself up and climbing about ten feet off the ground where she found a vantage point to watch the main road. Facing toward Princeton, she made herself comfortable, then Evil dug her claws into the trunk and followed her up. With her head in Olivia's lap, she issued the low, rumbling purr-like sound she made to show her contentment as she urged Olivia to relax and scratch her behind the ears like she liked.
Olivia had never set out to make such a domesticated pet of the great cat. They took her in because they were able to provide the good, safe home she deserved, but even though they knew they could never return her to the wild, they had not expected to have such a deep, familial bond. They thought when she grew up, she would be a beauty to look at but not necessarily to cuddle with. Maybe it would have been like that if someone else had raised her, but Olivia had a way with animals. She had rehabbed and released dozens of local species on this mountaintop from birds to raccoons to a pair of abandoned black bear cubs, and even though she did her best to prepare them for life in the wild rather than making pets of them, many maintained the attachment they had to her when they were handfed babies. She had birds who came to see her every spring when they returned from the south, squirrels who nested in the inner ring that would eat right out of her hand, and a raccoon who would knock on her door in the winter months looking for food and sometimes spend a few minutes inside the lodge by the fire.
There were no hunting signs posted all over the property, and all guests were made aware of the potential of the animals within the fence to have no fear of humans. They always did their best to protect all wildlife on their property, and no one had been a greater challenge to this approach than Evil. Luckily, she eventually accepted that a animals were off limits. She even learned not to try to eat the livestock in the barn, though it didn't preclude her from terrorizing the chickens. She always enjoyed climbing the henhouse fence and watching them freak out and scatter, but the worst she ever did was steal a few eggs for herself. Aside from that and fishing in the stocked pond, the cat really had been no trouble, and even though she had to spend much of her time sequestered in the private residence with only her enclosure exposing her to the outside world, she never ran wild when Olivia let her out. She was just a member of the Anders family, who was sitting in a tree snuggling like a kitten in Olivia's lap until her ears suddenly started twitching. She raised her head, sniffing the air, then she let out a soft, low rumbling deep in her throat.
"What is it, Evie?" Olivia asked in a whisper as she looked around, and though the road below them was hard to make out in the dark through the tree branches, after a few seconds, she saw movement. There was a dead man ambling up the private drive from the main road. She grabbed her knife, planning to climb down and take it out, but first she wanted to watch and make sure more weren't coming. Evil didn't share her patience, and the cat's superior hearing had already told her that this was a loner.
She jumped down out of the tree, tore out his throat, then turned to climb back up, unaware that the tactic she had used to protect Savannah from her attacker weeks earlier would not be effective on the dead. The corpse stood back up and grabbed at her hind leg as she dug her claws into the tree, and Olivia felt a jolt of anxiety. While there was no evidence to suggest that animals could succumb to whatever was causing the dead to resurrect, there was also no evidence to suggest that the cat could survive a bite.
"Come on, Evie," she urged, trying to get her to climb back up, but Evil would not accept defeat, she whipped her head around, growling at the dead-eyed corpse that gnashed its teeth and tried to get a hold on her. Then Evil gnashed her own teeth, pouncing and knocking it to the ground. She took a bite, ripping the entire face off, but it just kept struggling, trying to bite back. She sank her teeth in again, deeper this time, and she only grew more frustrated as the foul smelling interloper continued to fight her. Finally, she opened her mouth wide and came down for a kill bite, her fangs sinking into the brain, and all movement ceased.
Satisfied, Evil dismounted her kill, shook her head vigorously, and climbed back up the tree beside Olivia where she sat cleaning herself, and as Olivia looked down on her handiwork, she saw that the cat didn't eat the flesh she tore away as it was all piled beside the ruined head. She wondered if it was because of the stench of death on it, but considering that she didn't eat the man she killed to protect Savannah, Olivia surmised that she knew what she was doing. She was protecting her family, which was good. The last thing they needed was a jungle cat with a taste for human flesh.
"Good job, Evie," she said as she stroked her fur, staring longingly at the road, praying for headlights. She checked her watch, which she did frequently over the course of the next hour, and though she was inclined to give up when she saw that it was already 3:30 AM, she kept telling herself just a few more minutes. Besides, the cat had drifted off with her head in Olivia's lap, and even though her legs were falling asleep as they dangled from the tree, she didn't want to disturb Evie.
For another fifteen minutes, Olivia sat in silence, the cat sleeping peacefully until she was suddenly jolted awake. She sat upright on the tree limb and stared in the direction of the main road, her ears perked, but Olivia heard nothing. She still didn't hear anything when she started to see lights in the distance, lights that got closer until she could tell that they were in pairs - headlights! But there was n
o sound.
Then it hit her!
Electric cars. There was an entire caravan of them coming up the main road, and she and Evil hurried down out of the tree to open the gate as she desperately hoped that Alek would be in one of them. When the first car turned onto the gravel, she watched it drive past her with the passenger and back seats filled with looted items, which might have explained why they took so long, but Alek was all she cared about in that moment. Then in the fifth car, she saw his blue eyes reflecting the lights from the dashboard, and a tidal wave of relief washed over her.
He slowed down as he passed her, but with no room for her in the car, she gave him a wink then ran through the woods to the top of the mountain. Though she wasn't able to beat him, she wasn't too far behind when the last car drove through the gate. As Olivia entered the compound, Alek was already out of his car and rushing toward her, and when he threw his arms around her, she held him tight, never wanting to let go. But she had to because a jealous 157-pound jaguar was trying to worm her way in between them. When they parted, Evil stood up on her hind legs and licked Alek's face. It was the first time she'd ever shown him affection, and though it scared him a little, he understood what high praise it was. She didn't accept just anyone into her family.
"Well," he said once she had gone back down on all fours, "at least the cat wants to kiss me."
"Don't start," Olivia said. "I've spent my whole evening freaking out, thinking you were dead."
"All the more reason to kiss me," he teased, and when she narrowed her eyes, he asked, "Would it make it all better if I told you I brought you a gift?"
"That depends on what it is."
"It's two gifts actually. We looted an entire Radio Shack for you, so maybe the next time I'm away, we'll be able to communicate. We also have drones now, and more surveillance equipment. I know you like surveillance equipment," he said.