Cold Hard Secret (Secret McQueen)

by Sierra Dean

  “You think calling me names will solve your problems?” Her voice seemed to shift with every other word, ricocheting from surface to surface so quickly I couldn’t get a read on her location.

  “Speakers,” Desmond grumbled. He must have been trying to pinpoint her as well. The speakers were in pretty damned fine condition for her to sound like she was right next to us and not talking through a radio.

  “I think hiding behind your victims makes you a coward,” I shouted back, trying to match her volume.

  “Do you know what they call a room like this?” she inquired.

  Hell?

  I refused to answer, but she went on anyway. “It’s a killing floor. Isn’t that a marvelous phrase? Usually it’s where they bring the animals to die, but in your case I think it’s almost the same thing. Not quite human, are you? No. And I hear Secret’s secret is out now. Loose lips.” She laughed, though it wasn’t as maniacal as I had imagined it might be. At a different stage of life—and if she wasn’t plotting to kill me and those I loved—it might even be a nice laugh.

  “First of all, I’ve read Fast Food Nation, or at least parts of it, and it’s called a kill floor, not a killing floor. Second, stop playing your stupid mind games, Mercy, I’ve had enough.” I’d read precisely two chapters of Fast Food Nation before finding it too boring to continue. There’s not much that can shock me about food, considering I don’t eat human meals. Poop in the ground beef? No big deal, I don’t eat burgers. Once the sensationalized aspects of the book proved less than titillating, I stopped reading.

  Who knew the few pages I’d flipped through would ever give me ammunition for a sassy quip?

  “I see your attitude problem hasn’t diminished since our last encounter,” Mercy said.

  “It’s probably gotten worse,” Holden muttered.

  Nice. Thanks for the support, peanut gallery.

  “You mentioned my so-called idiot henchmen earlier. I guess that was your way of saying you’d like to get to know them.” Two doors at the front end of the barn opened, and the silhouetted figures of six men filled the doorway.

  That was it? This was all the men she had with her? Once we beat them down, we only had to find Mercy, get Grandmere and this whole ordeal would be over. Three against six wasn’t so bad.

  Then the back door slid open. Ten more men stood there, the two wolves on choke-chain leashes. I’d been joking when I suggested tying them up.

  A whistle sounded from overhead, and I looked up. At least six more men were positioned in the loft above us, and one of them had a sniper rifle aimed right at me. The handy red laser sight told me he was gunning for my heart.

  I recalculated.

  Three against twenty-two. Plus two wolves.

  Yeah.

  Our odds were great.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “Okay. This looks bad,” I announced.

  “You think?” Holden replied.

  “We’re not even considering if there are more outside.” Desmond might have been trying to help, but I didn’t like to imagine that we might survive the frying pan only to end up crisped by the fire.

  “Fuck.” I had too many target options, and none seemed like the best place to start.

  The group from the front of the barn advanced forward and the ten at the back fanned out, making sure we were trapped from all sides with no obvious exit path.

  I’d have thought about fleeing through the loft if it wasn’t for the guys with guns waiting up there.

  “Isn’t the sniper rifle overkill?” I asked the guy who was putting a little red dot on me. “I mean, honestly. You’re like fifteen feet away from me, and you need a scope and a laser sight? That’s pretty pathetic. I hate to use an apt cliché here, but I’m betting you couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn without those bells and whistles.”

  “Shut up,” he growled.

  “Oh, touchy subject? Sorry. Maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe you like all the fancy gadgets on your gun because of how small your dick is.”

  “Secret,” Desmond hissed. “Is that really the best plan?”

  “Probably not, but this might be.” I lifted my pistol and fired one round right between the sniper’s eyes. With his attention more focused on snarling at me, he’d looked away from the sight to trade barbs. Amateur move. If you can’t be sarcastic and fire a weapon at the same time, you’re not ready for one-liners.

  The rifle plummeted from the loft with a rain of hay, and I holstered my gun and tossed my sword to Holden, ducking into a roll so I landed beneath the weapon right before it hit the floor.

  I raised the rifle and took aim at the smallest group I could easily find.

  For all my teasing about lasers and scopes, the honest-to-God truth was it made it a cakewalk for me to take down four of the six men at the front of the barn. The rest stood shocked for a moment as the body of the sniper fell from the loft, crunching onto the concrete floor beside me, and the men around them began to crumple where they stood.

  Once they realized the kill floor was suddenly a shooting gallery, they scattered.

  “Keep the wolves alive,” I instructed. “Everyone else is fair game.”

  Holden gave the sword in his hand a perplexed look, then darted forward with a lightning-fast speed, quickly severing one running man’s head. The dude’s lower body kept going, so his head ended up on the floor ten feet behind his corpse.

  Desmond fired a shotgun blast into the large group who had come through the back door. He was targeting the men on the outside edges to avoid the pair of Mercy’s lackeys who were holding Ben and Fairfax. Still, the shotgun was an imprecise weapon at best, and pellets were flying everywhere, pinging loudly off the metal bars of the pig stalls. I swung the rifle back around and targeted a man running towards a tack room on the far side of the barn. One shot to the head and he changed direction, smacking into a wall before collapsing into a heap on the floor. The rifle’s bullets could be silver—that was a consideration Mercy might make—but it didn’t matter. A headshot will take most things down in a way they won’t get up from.

  A pair of her men near the front stopped running, and one lifted his hands up in a pathetic gesture of surrender. Part of me wanted to take the easy kill, but I couldn’t. It might have become simple for me to end lives, something I’d struggled with in the past, but I hadn’t reached the point where I could off someone who was giving up.

  Another blast from the shotgun echoed behind me, and from overhead a man screamed, tumbling to the floor where he landed on his neck with a sickening thwack.

  I glanced up to discover Holden had found a way into the loft and was dispatching the men up there. Gunfire sounded, but I couldn’t stop to worry about the vampire because Desmond’s suggestion of the men having backup had apparently been accurate. Every man we took down seemed to be replaced instantly, making it feel as if we were barely putting a dent in their numbers.

  “Where the hell did she find a goddamn army of gullible idiots?” I asked to no one in particular.

  Mercy had been known to convince people to follow her asinine path in the past, but this was different. She hadn’t had this kind of firepower at her disposal since she’d bedded down with Marcus Sullivan in his insane power play for Lucas’s throne. That was how she and Peyton had come to be acquainted, as well.

  There was no chance Marcus was involved in helping her recruitment campaign because he was good and dead. Peyton, too, had been crossed off Mercy’s list of allies by my discriminating red pen.

  But he might have helped her before I killed him. He was the most likely candidate for getting the werewolf drug to her. Was there a chance he had hooked Mercy up with Arturo? I hadn’t given up on my notion that the West Coast Tribunal Leader was the rat in the henhouse.

  Was that why Sutherland had been targeted? Did his death factor into Mercy’s plan, or was that all coincidence?

  I thought of what I knew about Mercy McQueen and tried to suss out what her motivations might be. Thi
s proved to be more difficult than it might be normally because I was trying to make perfect headshots as I did it.

  I used to believe it was her heartbreak over losing Sutherland that made her hate me. She’d lost the love of her life because of me—or so she believed. And I’d stolen another lover from her when I killed Marcus. She’d never forgiven me for either, and it fed into her hatred. Fine. But then it wouldn’t make sense for her to want Sutherland dead, if he truly was her beloved.

  Unless she wanted that version of him dead.

  And my mother wasn’t exactly the queen of sensible thinking. Hadn’t she dosed Ben—her own son—with a drug to turn him into a thoughtless killing machine?

  Did she love any of her children?

  I became distantly aware of a pain in my midsection, but I ignored it and continued to fire at the reinforcements.

  “Keep the girl alive,” Mercy’s voice boomed through the speakers. “Can’t you fools do anything right? The men are fair game, but the girl is mine.”

  I took aim at another man who was racing towards me, and pulled the trigger. It should have misted his head, but the click sound was that of the chamber coming up empty.

  “Shit.” I reached for my SIG and was thankful I hadn’t bothered to reactivate the safety.

  The guy knocked me off my feet, sending us both to the floor, where we slid a good two or three feet before slamming into the big butcher’s table in the middle of the room. Beside me the metal bars of the cage hummed from all the vibrations in the air.

  He grabbed me by my hair and lifted my head, bringing it up then smashing it hard into the concrete. My vision blanked, and a groggy, drunk feeling overtook my mind. I struggled to remember what it was I was doing before he’d concussed me.

  My skin was damp around the butt of the gun.

  Oh, right.

  I angled the gun up under his chin as he focused on cracking my skull open. In the same moment he went to hit my head on the floor a second time, I turned him into a convertible.

  His dead weight slumped on top of me, and my head smacked the hard floor again anyway, making the dizziness work. I tried to push the body off me but couldn’t get a good grip. My fingers felt like cooked noodles, and I couldn’t shove him.

  The body was yanked off, and Desmond dragged me to my feet. “You okay?”

  “Great.”

  He gave me a once-over and then pulled my jacket free from my waist. His eyes widened, and his gaze darted back to my face. I didn’t love the bare worry I saw in his eyes. “You’ve been shot,” he announced.

  Oh.

  I pulled my jacket closed again and lifted my gun, firing a shot into the throat of a guy who was about to stick a knife in Desmond’s back.

  “We can worry about it later,” I told him.

  “Secret…”

  “Later.” If I got distracted by something like a bullet wound, I wouldn’t be able to focus on the task at hand—not dying.

  Grabbing Desmond by the shirt, I yanked him towards me and spun both of us towards the metal table, rolling across the surface as another body fell from the loft. Even though I landed on top of him, my bullet wound shrieked in protest. Given how it was burning, I knew Mercy had opted for silver bullets.

  If the bullet was still inside me, it would be poisoning me steadily.

  This kept getting better and better.

  Dipping low, I laid a kiss on Desmond’s lips and rubbed my hand against his stubbled jaw. “Stay alive for me.”

  “Marry me,” he replied.

  Great. The silver was going to my brain. I thought he’d said—

  “Marry me.” The look on his face was panicked, and I couldn’t tell if it was because he’d just proposed or because we were about to die. For that matter I couldn’t decide if our imminent demise was what motivated the proposal to begin with.

  “I—”

  “God, woman, don’t think so hard. Just say yes.”

  I thought about Calliope, and I thought about what she’d told me. She’d asked who I wanted to be with, and she’d said the first to come to mind was my way of announcing I’d already made my decision.

  And Desmond had been the one.

  Desmond was the one.

  “Okay,” I said, without consideration for consequence. After all, we might die in the next ten seconds, what could be worse than that? “Yes.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  I had a wedding I needed to live to see.

  I had motivation now towards something other than killing my mother.

  Yes, Mercy’s death was still my primary purpose, especially now with bullet-shell casings raining down on us and about a dozen men attempting to dispatch us from the mortal world.

  But for the first time in a long time I felt…good. I felt like I had something to look forward to. A purpose to drive me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I felt happy, because it was hard to be jubilant in a situation like this, but I didn’t feel nearly as dark as I had these last months.

  For a few seconds, at least, the ghosts were held at bay and there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

  “All clear,” Holden called from the loft.

  Rolling off Desmond, I called, “Toss me the sword.” I lowered my gun and raised my hand to catch the sword. The metal was slick with blood, and I almost dropped it, but the weapon seemed to recognize my grip, and I was able to hold tight.

  Like the blade, Holden was going to take a lot of skillful handling.

  All my warm, fuzzy feelings swam away. I loved Desmond, and I did want to marry him. We’d known this moment would come eventually, where I had to make my decision. But I didn’t realize how painful it would be to know I was going to lose one of them.

  Holden had demanded I choose between them. He’d told me it wasn’t fair for me to keep both men, and now…how would he feel knowing the choice wasn’t him?

  I loved him.

  Oh God, what if I picked the wrong one?

  There is no wrong choice except making no choice. The truth of it filled me, and I knew I was doing the right thing. Had I decided on Holden, he too would be right in his own way. That’s when I knew there wasn’t a right choice, truly. I was a vampire, and the vampire loved Holden. I was a werewolf, and the wolf loved Desmond.

  If I could be split into two women, both would have a perfect man.

  But there was only one of me, and the decision was made.

  I swallowed hard.

  Survive first. Juggle drama later.

  I could worry about breaking hearts and planning weddings once this melee was over, my grandmere was safe and my mother was dead.

  That would certainly help with putting together the seating charts.

  Aiming my SIG at a man running for the door, I took him out at the knee, sending him in a face plant to the floor. “That’s enough,” I screamed, climbing on top of the table.

  Most of the men had been unarmed, and I was already shot. With Holden overhead and Desmond beside me I felt secure. Not to mention my mother had demanded her stooges leave me alive.

  The gathered men stopped moving and watched me. One with an old hunting rifle whose barrel was dangerously rusted leveled his weapon at me, but his finger was nowhere near the trigger.

  Across the floor was a tapestry of fallen bodies, a few groaning in pain, but most lying in pools of their own brain matter or missing their heads entirely. We’d made a pretty messy display, considering how outmatched we were meant to be.

  “No one else has to die,” I said. “I don’t know what promises she’s made you, but she’s lying. The only crown she was ever heir to is the one Callum McQueen now sits on. She can’t give you power, and if you keep following her, you will end up like them.” I pointed to the bodies on the floor. “Or worse. Don’t be fools. I am a queen, and I can tell you that punishment for a coup is not pleasant. Anyone who surrenders now I will extend a pardon to.”

  The dozen or so remaining men exchanged worried glances. The guy with the rifle didn�
�t flinch. His hair was cut low to his scalp, and he had a nasty scar across his cheek, something that must have come from silver for it not to have healed. He looked like the perfect maniacal poster child of an ex-military man from every Nicholas Cage movie.

  I doubted he was going to jump at my offer, so I kept my gun aimed at him in case things got bad fast.

  The first guy to yield was an older man near the door. “Fuck this, man. I’m out.”

  He turned for the exit, sidestepping a corpse. He’d almost reached the door when a shot rang out. At first I thought he’d been assassinated, until I saw the dart sticking out of his neck.

  “Shit,” Desmond said.

  The guy crumpled to all fours and let out a pitiful wail. The shriek soon converted from a human cry of pain to the sound of an injured animal keening. His shirt ripped along the back, and I began to see the horrible process of a shift being brought on unnaturally.

  His bones moved under the skin but seemed to fight the process, sliding forwards and backwards as if they couldn’t decide which position was best. Each time they adjusted he cried out. Claws burst from the tips of his fingers before retracting and bursting forth again. I was grateful I couldn’t see his face. I could only imagine the awful images that would burn into my brain.

  Desmond winced.

  “That’s what happened to you?” I asked.

  “I didn’t get to watch it, but yeah.”

  That meant the drug, or serum, or whatever they were using, had been loaded into tranq darts. If it wasn’t so awful, I might think it was clever. It also explained how they’d managed to get the drop on Desmond, Ben and Fairfax. If someone was able to take them down from a distance, they got to avoid the fight altogether. Smart.

  The shift didn’t take long. Soon the man was a wolf and shaking off the tattered ribbons of his clothing. But Mercy hadn’t banked on his response to the change, because the first thing he did was leap at the person nearest him, sinking his razor-sharp canines into the throat of his former coworker.