by Amelia Jade
“Is that supposed to scare me?” she said, her head bobbing slightly with sarcasm as she snapped at him.
“No,” he replied, his voice losing some of its tension. “I wouldn’t try to intimidate you. I’m angry, and I think you’re being stubborn beyond what’s reasonable simply because you’re desperate to know who you are, but I would never try to scare you.”
Peyton looked at him and her arms fell to her sides.
“Maybe I am,” she acknowledged. “I don’t know. But Kiefer, something tells me that this is the right thing to do. That going out there is what I need to do. Have you never felt that before? That you just knew something, even if you couldn’t explain it.”
Like how I know you’re my mate, but I can’t tell you because I’m terrified you’ll run away? And, you know, because neither of us know who you truly are. That you might someday recall your memories, and realize you want absolutely nothing to do with me? Yes, Peyton Raine, I know exactly what you mean.
Kiefer heaved a sigh and sat down on the bed, rubbing his palm on the comforter next to him, indicating she should sit.
“I do,” he said unhappily. “I understand completely.”
“Then you know that I need to do this.”
His teeth ground together. “Peyton, you have to remember, you were just contacted by a group that sounded very much like they wanted to do harm to the Green Bearets. That is a huge issue, and one that puts you very much in a gray zone when it comes to legalities.”
Her head turned to face. “Legalities?” she asked quietly.
“Yes.” He frowned. “Captain Korver has expressed a distrust of you.”
She nodded. “I can understand that. I’m not filled with a lot of trust for myself right now either.” Her face scrunched up and he saw her eyes fill with tears, but she blinked them back rapidly. “After all, why would I ever do something that might hurt you guys? That’s not a very nice thing to do.”
Kiefer put an arm around her and pulled her close so she could rest her head on his shoulder, once again impressed at the strength this woman had within her. She had no idea who she was, or what she’d done in her past life, but it was clear that here and now, Peyton knew exactly what it was she wanted, and what she thought was right.
To be able to accept that, and to criticize her former self’s motives with such ease and disdain was…hard, he was sure. Kiefer wasn’t positive that it was something he’d be able to do. Not without a lot more thought, at least.
“The captain has asked me to keep you here at the motel for the evening,” Kiefer said into the silence, finally giving up his reasoning, even if she hadn’t actually been pressing him for it.
Part of him was coming to the conclusion that he didn’t want to keep things from Peyton. The less that was hidden, the more that they opened up to each other, the better and stronger any relationship they might have would be. Kiefer knew that if she’d asked him about it, he’d probably have told her anyway. But he liked just being straightforward with her.
“Is that why you’re putting up such a fight?” Peyton asked in a gentle tone.
“Partially,” he admitted. “But I also truly do believe that you’re driving yourself to the edge with a desire to find out more about yourself.” He shrugged, forgetting for a moment that her head was resting on his shoulder.
Peyton straightened and he let his arm fall to her lower back, giving it a soft scratch as he did.
“Am I being that bad?” she asked.
Kiefer made a so-so motion with his hand. “I mean, I’m not going to argue that you’ve got some skills that could help you out in a jam. We both know that. But what if they don’t play fair? If they bring a gun, maybe? Then what?”
Her eyes, a bright reddish-brown in the motel room’s lighting, looked over at him. “What about you?”
“What about me?” he asked, tilting his head to the side a little.
“You could stop them.”
“Ah,” he said, understanding what she meant. “There’s just one little problem with that,” he told her, leaning forward to plant a soft kiss on her lips, to reinforce the fact that he wasn’t actually mad at her.
“Which is?”
“I kind of stick out like a sore thumb,” he said, his lips twisting upward in a smile.
Peyton looked at him, and then he saw her press her lips together firmly. She seemed to begin to shake, and it was only when she could no longer keep it in that Kiefer realized she was laughing at him.
“Yeah, I suppose you do!” she exclaimed through the giggles, reaching a hand up to squeeze his bicep good-naturedly.
“So I can’t come along as your backup,” he said. “At least, not within close range.”
And idea occurred to him, however. Something he’d seen on Captain Korver’s desk, attached to his schedule. A notification of arrival of certain parties.
The others were going to hate him.
“I still think I need to do this,” Peyton said. “We can work out a signal, so that I’ll be able to let you know if I need help.”
His mind was racing though. “If we do, we need to give it a few more hours to cool off,” he said. “After all, you did just beat one of their agents up. They might behave nicer if you came back later, said you were being tailed by a Green Bearet earlier or something, and that you couldn’t slip away again so soon.”
Peyton mulled that over, and then nodded. “Okay, I can work with that. What’s another few hours after two weeks of knowing nothing, right?”
Kiefer grinned. That was perfect; it would give him time to set up what he needed to.
“So,” Peyton asked, her eyes turning bright and flirty. “Any ideas how to occupy that time?”
He bit his lip. “I think I have a few you aren’t aware of,” he growled, and pushed her back down onto the bed.
Chapter Nineteen
Peyton
She sat at the bar itself, disdaining tables and booths.
“Another?” the bartender asked as he came by, running a clean cloth along the granite countertop.
“Yeah,” she replied, pushing her empty glass toward him. He snagged it without pausing.
“Do you think they’re coming?”
She looked up at him sharply.
The older man just shrugged. “You’ve been casting looks at the door every thirty seconds like clockwork since you walked in here. It’s pretty obvious,” he said in the slow drawl of someone unconcerned by the world as it passed them by.
“Have I really?” she said with a curse, leaning into the low-backed bar-stool as best she could. “Damn.”
“Were they supposed to be here by now?” the bartender asked, pushing another alcoholic cider in front of her.
“We didn’t set an exact time,” she replied.
“Ah,” he said, as if that made complete sense. “Well, I hope they show. Lovely lady like you don’t deserve to be treated that way.”
Peyton couldn’t help but smile as he moved on down the bar.
The place was fairly busy, but the servers were taking care of the bulk of the customers. Besides her there were only three other people at the bar, and the bartender didn’t seem overly taxed by them.
“No, they don’t,” a voice agreed. “But then again, sometimes we all get treatment we don’t deserve, isn’t that right?”
Peyton looked to her left as a man sat down next to her. She froze at the sight of his bloodied and bruised face.
It was the same man from earlier.
She swallowed hard, but upon further inspection, she noted that his eyes weren’t holding any hostility at all. Or if they were, they were disguising the fact extremely well.
“Yeah,” she muttered, unsure what else to say. “Sorry about your nose.”
It made her nearly sick to her stomach to try and pretend to be polite to him, knowing what she did about his true motives and feelings.
Perhaps I was mistaken, she thought. Maybe he’s not as bad as he says.
“So
, you came back out,” he said conversationally. “Alone.”
The last word was added after a significant pause, to let her know that he was aware she had no backup in the bar. Nobody that could come to her aid if she were to need it. Suddenly Peyton felt vulnerable and afraid. Perhaps she’d made an error in judgment by coming back out.
“I did,” she agreed, trying to keep her voice from trembling. “It wasn’t easy. Your bumbling attempt at contact earlier certainly didn’t make it very easy for me to convince them I had no idea what was going on.” Her voice had just enough snarl in it to hopefully convince him that she was serious.
How did I get so good at acting, and knowing what to say to keep other people from guessing my true intentions?
Peyton didn’t like what that said about herself, and why she might need skills like that. It seemed more and more likely that she hadn’t been a particularly good person in her previous life. It was tempting to abort things right then and there. Kiefer was waiting nearby for her signal, and he would be here in seconds. Not that she had any intentions of letting her buddy here know about it.
She could do that. Call him in, and hope that the short man knew enough about her to jog her memory. Getting him to talk could be difficult, especially without breaking any of his bones, but Peyton felt she could use whatever knowledge was buried in her subconscious to make him speak.
Learning what he knew about her in a controlled environment might be for the best. What it wouldn’t do, however, was expose to the Green Bearets whatever the Institute was, and what it was up to. If she stopped now, they would be just as in the dark as before. No, Peyton had to keep going.
“Those pig-headed shifters wouldn’t know if someone was lying to them if you wore a big sign around your neck,” the man said with a nasty laugh. “They’re so convinced that people are willing to do the right thing, and just speak their mind. It’s pathetic.”
Okay, I definitely wasn’t mistaken about him. He’s just as bad as I thought.
Not to mention, rather blinded to the reality of the shifter world. Peyton knew what he meant, about wanting to do good, and to stay on the right course. Most of the shifters in the Green Bearets she’d met were like that. But not all of them. Kiefer had told her about the Koche brothers. They definitely did not fall under that heading, that was for sure. She wondered what a group like them could accomplish if they were unleashed against a human organization that thought shifters couldn’t lie. It would be…interesting.
“Yeah, well. I got away for the time being,” she said. “The big one has a crush on me, and I made him go do something for me with a promise of sex after. The idiot,” she said, trying to make her voice sound as unimpressed as his had been.
The bland-featured man smiled at her. “It’s good to have you back.”
“It’s good to be back.”
Wherever I’m back to.
“Are you ready to come in then?” he asked.
“Yes. I think I have a few tidbits of information that could be put to good use,” she said, letting her face turn up in a grin that was utterly devoid of humor.
“Excellent. Let’s go then,” he said.
Peyton rose from her chair, casually tossing some bills down on the counter to cover her drinks.
The bartender came by and swept them up, but she waved off the change. “Thanks for the chat,” she said, and this time her smile was genuine.
But her brief moment of good cheer ended abruptly when the man gestured toward the back.
“Where are we going?” she asked, but her feet were already following him, so as not to show too much outward hesitation.
Internally was a different matter. Alarm bells were ringing incessantly in her head as all sorts of warnings flashed up in front of her. Peyton tried to get them under control, in order to think carefully.
She was heading out through the rear, through a door she didn’t know was there. It led into a parking lot.
Fuck. Oh fuck. This is not good. How am I supposed to let Kiefer know that I’m leaving?
As she passed the last table, one of the women at it looked up at her, and their eyes met.
Peyton frowned. She knew that woman. Didn’t she? Her mind was trying to remember where she’d seen her when she passed through the exit and outside. With the frame of reference gone she couldn’t exactly recall.
It sat there on the edge of her brain, tantalizing her. Peyton knew that woman. But was it someone she’d seen in the past two weeks? Or someone that she knew in the memories she couldn’t access? It was impossible to tell, and she needed to maintain her conversation with the man.
He guided her across the street, through an alleyway and down the next street with practiced ease. Her mind noted the confidence of his steps. This was a route he’d taken before, she realized. He knew exactly where he was taking her. That was good. It meant it wasn’t just some sort of temporary setup. This could be the base of the Institute in town.
Now if only she could find a way to signal Kiefer, and to have him come rushing in with the cavalry, they could potentially end the threat to his people, and question the people behind it, to find out what they knew about her.
“So, was the mission itself successful?” he asked casually.
Peyton snorted. “If they wanted you to know that, you’d know it already.”
The man smiled. “Hey, can’t blame me for trying though, right?”
She shrugged but didn’t reply, feeling that silence was the best answer this time. It irked her, knowing things without actually knowing them. Like, how did she know that she wasn’t supposed to report to this man? Earlier in the day was the first time she could recall ever having met him, even though they’d clearly worked together before her memory left her.
Could he have been responsible for that? The thought felt wrong to her, and Peyton dismissed it. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was getting closer to figuring out what had happened to her, and who she truly was.
But the closer she got, the more she became unsure she truly wanted to find out.
Chapter Twenty
Peyton
Their journey wasn’t an overly long one, which was odd.
In an attempt to replicate her motions from earlier that day, Peyton had looked at a layout of Cloud Lake and picked a bar nearly at random. Her only prerequisite for it was that the path from the motel to the bar had to wander through the section of town where she’d been approached. So to have their final destination nearby was either an odd coincidence, or once again her subconscious had been telling her things without her realizing it.
If I never recall my memories, living with that sort of thing could become real tiresome, real quick.
“In here,” her escort said, opening the door to a rundown-looking dry cleaner. The sign on the front said Closed, and it didn’t look like it had been opened in some time either, judging by the layer of dust starting to accumulate.
She followed him in. The little bell above the door jingled as it shut behind them, its polite noisemaking sounding nearly like a raucous alarm in the deafening silence that was the rest of the room.
She looked around. To her left, along the windows at the front of the shop, were a row of chairs, as were to the right along that wall, extending back into the store until it met the front counter. The man ignored all that and headed toward the back left of the store, where he pushed through a swinging door without looking back to see if she was following.
Peyton frowned and followed him back, against her better judgment. She was now completely out of contact with Kiefer, and if she didn’t stay in the front of the store, it was unlikely he’d be able to find her. Going back there, into whatever setup there was, did not constitute a good idea.
What choice did she have though? She’d been over it in her mind, time and time again. This served two purposes. One, it revealed, or at least helped to reveal, whoever she was. Or had been, if she had the choice to abandon that life.
Secondly, it
helped reveal the so-far hidden threat to the Green Bearets, and perhaps even Cadia as a whole. That was worth a lot. She’d only spent two weeks amongst them, but those two weeks had taught Peyton much about their lifestyle, and shown her that they were definitely not the bad guys. They didn’t need to be brought down; they weren’t hurting anyone. In fact, they were putting themselves on the line to protect the humans of Cloud Lake from other shifters.
Steeling herself, she pushed through the door and past the empty racks that would normally hold the items to be cleaned.
Or perhaps the newly cleaned items.
Peyton had no idea how a dry cleaner normally functioned, never having been in one before that she could remember. But she knew what it did.
So frustrating.
Another door was up ahead. It was steel, and looked much newer, and likely much stronger, than anything a dry cleaner was supposed to have. The walls themselves looked to be made of concrete as well, a much tougher deterrent than old drywall.
After seeing some of the careless acts of strength from Kiefer and some of the other shifters though, she didn’t think it would provide much in the way of defense if one of them truly decided they wanted into whatever was beyond. Curious as to what they were hiding, Peyton walked through the door.
And stopped dead in her tracks.
The steel door clanged closed heavily behind her as she looked around the room.
It was two-tiered. The first tier in front of her held a bunch of computer screens, and behind them she could see two techs working away. They barely looked up as she entered, since they were so intent on their tasks.
The man who had led her there was standing off to her left, and he had just finished speaking, she realized, as her attention was drawn up to the second tier. There a woman stood, looking down on Peyton with a sense of smug satisfaction that made Peyton’s blood boil. She immediately wanted nothing more than to march up there and drop the unknown woman with a hard right to the jaw.
Apparently I have some latent feelings regarding her, Peyton thought wryly to herself, positively reveling in the mental image of the prim blonde collapsing to the floor in a tangle of unresponsive limbs.