“Not exactly. I’ll shift. It will be easier for me to sniff out any foreign presence when I’m the wolf. Meanwhile, I’ll know you’re armed.”
Darn her traitorous heart. Skipping a beat at the thought of him being hurt, and again with the knowledge that he wanted to keep her safe. Even though she accused him of terrible things, he still cared whether or not she was protected. She guessed that said something for him, for his character, but she wasn’t exactly in the mood to give him credit.
“Okay. Just, you know, don’t take any chances.”
“Believe me, I have no intention of taking chances.” There was an edge to his voice, a threat. Not for the first time did she think she wouldn’t want to be the person on the other end of that growl, the one who inspired him to sound that way. It wouldn’t end well for them, whoever they were.
They turned off the road, the truck climbing increasingly steep ground. She held onto the door handle as they bounced around, but Logan seemed familiar enough with the terrain that he managed to navigate without getting them into an accident. What was he thinking? She could feel the tremendous surge of energy coming from him.
“There it is.” Up ahead, there was what she guessed could be called a cabin, but it was hardly what she’d had in mind. The cabin in her imagination was quaint, something out of a wintry landscape with stone walls and a wood-shingled roof, smoke rising from the chimney.
At least she got the chimney part right and the shingles. But the house was anything but quaint. No wonder he’d said there was plenty of room. It was magnificent, big enough to be a lodge rather than a private cabin.
Anything could’ve happened in there. There were so many places for a person to hide.
At least there were lights coming from the first floor. She let out a sigh of relief which she knew was probably premature, but she couldn’t help it. She’d imagined the power being cut the way Red had cut the power at the Douglas home before the attempted break-in.
“Okay.” Logan cut the engine, casting them in darkness. There were no more high beams to illuminate the cabin, nothing to give her an idea of what was around them. “I’m going to shift, and I want to lead the way up to the porch. You can open the door, but let me go in the first. Please, I know you’re unhappy with me right now, but I need you to follow my orders on this. Okay? Can you do that for me?”
“Yeah, I don’t see why not.” As much as she knew how unhelpful it was, she wanted to prove him wrong. She wanted so desperately taking pleasure in being right.
“Jenna. Listen to me. I can only say this once. Then we need to get started.”
She turned to him, begrudgingly. “What?”
The tenderness in his eyes and voice took her breath away. “I just wanted to tell you the time we’ve spent together has been the best time of my life. I didn’t think I could ever feel about anybody else the way I felt about Beth, but you woke me back up. I didn’t even know I was going through life like a sleepwalker until you slammed your way into my world. I can’t be anything but grateful to you for that. I had to tell you I love you before we go in there. No matter what happens, you’ll know that. Please, don’t take any unnecessary chances.”
He was out of the truck, taking off his clothes before she even remembered to breathe. He loved her? Did he really? How did she feel about it? There she was, hating his guts, and he went and said something like that. That was the last thing she’d ever expected to hear.
And the one thing her heart needed more than anything. She wanted to reach for him, to tell him she loved him too, that she just didn’t understand anything that was happening.
There was no time. She watched as he shifted, leaving in his place a supersized, black-furred wolf. He was sleek, but there was so much power beneath that shining fur. It was almost enough to make her want to shift too, but she had her orders. Besides, she wouldn’t know what to do with herself in her wolf form.
She got out of the truck, walking up a dirt path to the front door. It was unlocked. She looked to the wolf at her side, who came up past her hip, and while Logan couldn’t give her any signal, she knew what had to be done.
She closed her hand over the knob, twisted and pushed the door open before jumping to the side, her back to the wall. Logan went in first, just the way he said he would, and when she didn’t hear any fighting, she followed with the gun at the ready.
The living room was enormous, the ceiling stretching two floors overhead. It would’ve been breathtaking, absolutely astonishing if she had the time or the wherewithal to enjoy it.
All that mattered just then was the fact that her father was sitting in a chair in front of the TV, just the way he always was.
She let out a long sigh of relief, her muscles going slack. “Dad. Thank God.”
At the same time, Logan growled. The growl got louder, stretching out, his hackles standing up. Only then did she realize who he was concerned with, and she looked around herself.
“Where are Jace and Braxton?” she asked, knowing she couldn’t expect an answer. It was more habit than anything else, talking to her father like he understood and could reply.
Suddenly, a voice she hadn’t heard in years rang out from across the room. “They’re sleeping.”
She stopped her dead in her tracks, rooting her feet to the floor. Those two words brought everything together, sharpening her focus.
Everything Logan said was true. It had to be true.
“Dad?” she whispered. He hadn’t moved, still sitting exactly the way she’d found him. “Dad, what did you do?”
How many times had she wished for this? To see him get out of his chair, to stand straight and tall, not like the hunched over, shuffling, lost little man he’d been ever since that terrible day when somebody had tried to kill him but as the man he used to be, a man with an erect, military bearing. A man with tremendous strength and discipline.
Well, he must’ve still been extremely disciplined because he’d managed to fool her for years.
There was understanding in his eyes and love. “Honey. It’s finally over, or it will be soon. But they’re all gone now. All except for these people, who you found for me. Once they’re silenced, you’ll be safe.”
Logan growled louder than ever, positioning himself between her and her father. She couldn’t see, but she guessed he was snarling, his teeth bared.
Her father only scoffed at him. “Please. I created you. Do you think you frighten me? Your friends tried to shift, as well. It didn’t go so well for them.”
All she could do was her best to try to catch up with everything going on, but it was such a mess. “Where are they? What happened to them?”
“They’re upstairs. In bed. Separately, mind you,” he snickered. “I had to duct tape their hands and feet together. I couldn’t run the risk of them waking up and trying to attack.”
It didn’t make any sense. How could he overpower two wolf shifters? “But how? If they shift, they can break out of just about anything.”
He reached into the pocket of his robe and pulled out a familiar bottle. “A few of these sneaked into every meal, and they’re as helpless as babies. They relied on their shifter strength for too long. They didn’t even know I was doing it to them. I almost felt sorry for them, really, when they tried to shift and realized they couldn’t. If anything, I would think they’d be glad.”
Logan took off up the stairs, searching for them. “I left the door open!” Her father called out, chuckling. “They shouldn’t be difficult to find.”
She blinked hard, trying to keep her tears at bay. “Oh, Dad. What happened? You were behind this all along? But how?”
“Here. Have a seat.” He pulled another chair closer to his, in front of the TV with a little table between them, the way she’d set things up at home so they could sit together and watch if only that much. Never in her life had she ever imagined hesitating before sitting next to her father.
She took her time, eyeing him warily all the while. He shot a pointed lo
ok at the gun in her hand, and she left it on the table—but never out of her line of vision. “I guess I deserve that,” he sighed, taking note of her hesitation. “I haven’t exactly been honest with you.”
“Why would you do this? All this time, I thought—”
“You thought what I needed you to think,” he said. “It was safer for you to think I was nothing but a shell of who you used to know. Granted, I was for a long time. This hasn’t always been an act. I only started coming back to myself after a year, maybe more than that.”
“And you didn’t tell me right away? Why didn’t you tell me? I just don’t understand.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” he assured her, gentle and calm. “If anyone was to ask questions, if they were to find us and cast suspicion our way, I had to make sure you were protected from that. And I didn’t want you to doubt me either. I didn’t like you to think badly of me.”
Logan came back downstairs, stalking through the living room. She met his eyes and wondered how much of his human consciousness was still in there. Could he understand her if she tried to get through to him? Would he even care what she wanted to say, how she thought things should go? After all, she’d been the one swearing her father was incapable of this sort of thing, yet there they were in the middle of the mess he’d created.
“All this time. And for what? So nobody would know who I am, what I am?”
“Of course. What do you think this was all about?” He smiled like she was the one who had something wrong with her rather than the other way around. She may as well have been looking at a stranger.
“Help me understand this.” She searched his face, hoping to find some semblance of the man she used to know. Someone she’d respected. “The hotshot. That actually happened?”
“Oh, yes. Lydia’s doing. I’m glad she got what was coming to her—truly, I never could have imagined her daughter doing the job for me, but that’s the way it works out sometimes. I will say, what she did, she did for her daughter. It’s difficult being a parent. You have to make the tough decisions to do what’s best for them.”
Her head was splitting from the enormity of it, the amount of planning it must’ve taken. “How did you contact anybody? You don’t have a phone!”
He held up a finger, smiling. From his pocket, the one not holding the pills, came a cell phone. “They never stopped paying the bill, the powers that be. This was issued through work. One of those many bureaucratic slip-ups. I’ve been using it right under their noses all this time. Even you didn’t know about it.”
“No, I knew it existed, I just never imagined… I didn’t think…”
He looked at her with pity. “Of course you didn’t. Why would you? The whole purpose of this was for you to be unaware of what went on. At first, it was Lydia behind this—she was the person I was most concerned with. She was the one pulling the strings. I knew I had to take charge. The rest of them, a bunch of brainless fools. Spineless too. None of them had the slightest idea what was going on, all of them too afraid to stand up and do what needed doing. Lydia wanted everyone silenced, wanted to clean everything up. I agreed, not for the same reason she did. I wanted you protected. I wanted all other evidence of this project erased except for you so there would be no one to know the shameful truth about what they did to you.”
“Were you the one who put all those files together? The information about Lydia?”
“You had a tendency to do your work right in front of me, assuming I didn’t understand. I learned your password that way. Yes, I located those articles and put them together, then left a trail of breadcrumbs for you to find them online. It was as simple as that.”
He looked at Logan, sneering like Logan was beneath him, beneath contempt. “You found them for me too. I appreciate that. It’s only a matter of time before they are eliminated as well.”
“Dad. I can’t let you do that. They’ve suffered enough.”
“Then, by all means, why not put them out of their misery?” He turned to her, shaking his head like he was amazed. “Jenna, sweetheart. Think about it. They could expose you, and then what would happen? Everyone would know what you’ve become. You would be a freak. Shunned by society.”
“Dad, I’ve shunned society myself because of you for all these years! Do you know how much of my life I’ve sacrificed? For you?” Her voice rang out louder and louder, increasing in pitch. She was practically shrieking by the time she finished. “I devoted my whole life to you!”
“No less so than I devoted mine to you, daughter,” he snapped in reply. “Do you believe it was easy for me to sit back and pretend to be something I wasn’t? To play the mute idiot? Whenever you left the house, I at least had the chance to move about freely, to be myself. Those are the opportunities I took to search online, to look through the work you’d done, to see if you’d come any closer to finding the men who escaped the lab.”
It was all sickening. She’d made it so easy for him—they might as well have been working together. “You used me,” she whispered, tears rolling down her cheeks. “How could you use me like that? You even sent somebody to our house! What if I’d been hurt or killed?”
“I would never have allowed that.” He shook his head, completely convinced his word was law. Just like the father she’d remembered, one she’d looked back on fondly, the man she’d missed for so long. “I’m proud you handled it the way you did, though.”
“Yeah, sure.” She looked to Logan again. “What about now? What about the people who died recently? You used my work to track them down?”
“Of course.” Like it meant nothing, like it was common sense.
“What about these last few days? How—"
“Those two.” He looked up toward the rooms, the doors visible the thanks to the railed-off corridor overlooking the living room. “They were constantly comparing notes, reporting back and forth to each other on where you were. Just like you did, they assumed I wouldn’t take notice. The name of your hotel, the diner you’d been to. Really, their communication was quite impressive. The fact that everyone checked in with each other regularly came in handy. But I only wanted him.” He looked to Logan. “You were to be left unharmed.”
“And you used Peter George as your fall guy.”
“Oh, certainly. I made sure he was compensated for everything he did, and I hope he took care of that miserable cretin who did the dirty work. I told him to request our little friend’s presence at his home, promising a bonus.”
“Peter George is dead. So is your so-called little friend. I’m sure the police are at the house by now.”
He blanched but recovered quickly. “Well, that’s one less person I have to worry about. I admit I’ve been concerned over what to do with Peter. He knew far too much. It was only the fact that I guaranteed his family’s safety that he even agreed to join up with me.”
There was far too much for her to ever understand, and she didn’t think she wanted to. Some things were best left alone. “What now, Dad? What do you expect to happen now? I can never trust you again. I don’t even know you.”
“Now there is an ungrateful child for you.” He stood, scowling down at her. “I did all of this for you. All of it to undo the damage they did. And what do I get for it? Your scorn. You believe yourself to be so much better than me? I did what I did to erase the damage. I made a lot of difficult decisions. And yet you still want to be angry with me. You want to hate me. Me! Everything I did, I did for you!”
She didn’t know this man at all. “All this time, Dad, I told myself you were better than them. I hated them more and more because of what they did to you, all because you had a change of heart. And what they did was wrong, but what you’ve done is worse. I can’t believe you don’t see it.”
“Worse!” he shouted before breaking out in braying laughter. “How is what I did any worse? I did it to protect you!”
“You did it to protect yourself. You could’ve been honest with me. You could’ve told me you got better, and we cou
ld’ve stopped Lydia together. But you couldn’t even stop there either. You had to get revenge on everyone.”
“How many times do I have to tell you? It had nothing to do with revenge. It had everything to do with erasing evidence so you wouldn’t be held back. So you could live a normal life.”
“At the expense of the life I’ve lost so far? All those years? Thanks so much.”
“You’ll understand with time.” And the thing was, he sounded like he believed it. “We’ll get past this. We’ll go somewhere else, anywhere you want to go. I’ve been collecting my pension all this time. We can go anywhere, do anything. You can be your own person.”
“I already am my own person.” She stood, standing face to face with him. “And I like who I am. I’m not afraid of who I am. But that’s not because of anything you did. It’s because of them, the team, these men you’ve been trying to kill. All they’ve ever tried to do is make the best of what was done to them, but that wasn’t good enough for you. At least I’ve had them to help me. I have Logan. He’s done more for me in the last week that you’ve done in a decade.”
He was too quick. She had underestimated him again. In a swift move, he picked up the gun from the table between the chairs and held it out, aiming it at Logan’s head. “He won’t be a problem for long,” her father whispered, a maniacal gleam in his eye. “Then, we’ll take care of the other two. Only two left after that and those two girls. That’s all. That’s all that stands between you and freedom.”
“Dad. I love you.” She could barely see for the tears blurring her vision. “Please, know that I’ve loved you so much.”
The hand that held the gun lowered as confusion creased his brow. “Why are you saying that now?”
She turned away, holding her ears as gunfire erupted. Braxton and Jace stood at the railing on the second floor, one or the other having fired the fatal shot which brought an end to her father’s sad, twisted life.
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