by Dean Murray
"That's a good cause as causes go, but there are those who would argue that there are better ways to spend your money, other things you could support that would be better causes..."
Russ shrugged. "It actually pays back, so it helps me preserve my working capital, but honestly, I still have more money than I know what to do with. I support Alicia's show because it fosters talent. I'm not interested in just giving people handouts. I've seen what that does. It could have destroyed me, and I'm not going to do that to other people. I'll foster talent almost wherever I find it, because I think that ultimately it will help make the world a better place."
I checked with Dom again and got another nod, this one more emphatic than the last one. He believed what he was telling me, and strongly. I took another bite of my lasagna and shrugged.
"I can't argue with your aim. What did you do in Iraq?"
Russ looked a little like he wished I hadn't asked the question, but I was realizing that he wasn't going to lie to me. It was impossible to know for sure if he was just that honest with everyone, or if he felt like he needed to make a good impression with me because of my mom, but I was prepared to take shameful advantage either way.
"I was a sniper, Adri. I killed people from incredible distances without any kind of warning. I saw things I hope you never have to see, but the point I kept coming back to was that war was about destroying investments. Roads and bridges, factories and refineries, but even more than that, it was about destroying human capital. I think that's part of what brought me back after I inherited all that money. An incredible, almost incalculable, amount of time, money and effort goes into raising a child. They are tiny little universes of possibility, and I extinguished them one after another."
Russ looked up at me almost like he was surfacing from a deep hole and shrugged. "I don't regret what I did, not really. I was killing according to clear rules of engagement, rules the people there knew, but it still seemed like a senseless loss on both sides. I now have the ability to help people realize that potential. I'm going to do that to the best of my ability."
"How do you decide who gets help and who doesn't?"
"I'm a pretty good judge of character. It's not that hard once you know what to look for; it's all about observation. I learned that while I was in the armed forces. It took a while to learn a new theater of operation, but I expected that when I started this."
There was a challenging glint to his eye, but it was a challenge I was willing to pick up. I didn't want to like Russ. If he couldn't back up what he'd just said then I'd be able to write him off as a lame poser.
"Fine, read Dom and me then."
Russ leaned back in his chair with a satisfied smile. He knew he was in the middle of an audition and seemed to welcome my stubbornness.
"I can do that, but before I do you, I need a promise from you, Adri, that you won't react negatively to what I'm about to say."
"You don't need a promise from Dom? Are you only going to say mean things about me?"
"No, but the promise from you is the most important. It will actually bind her better than her own promise."
A wave of alarm washed through me, but I tried very hard to keep it off of my face. "Do you have any idea how ludicrous that sounds?"
"Probably, but that doesn't change the fact that it's true. Do I have your promise, Adri?"
"Okay, you have my promise. Let's hear it."
Dom let out a hiss of frustration but I held a hand up, silencing her.
Russ nodded and pointed at Dom. "Your friend, Dominic, is one of the more dangerous people I've met recently. I can't explain it, but it's the truth. From a thousand yards away with a high-powered rifle I could take her down in a heartbeat, even as rusty as I am right now. In close quarters, I suspect she'd tear through me before I could even blink."
My mouth dropped open. "How can you possibly know that?"
I got a shrug in response, but after several seconds of silence he decided to humor me. "She moves like she's dangerous. She's got the kind of situational awareness I usually only see inside a combat zone. What's more, she seems to feel like she needs to defer...no, to protect you. Generally that would mean someone like her would be packing all kinds of hardware, but I'm pretty sure she doesn't have anything bigger than a two-inch knife on her. That could just mean she has something secreted nearby, but I suspect it means she's just that good with her hands."
I sat back in my chair and shook my head like I was trying to clear it.
"Am I wrong?"
"No, you're mostly right. Dom is dangerous, and she's here to keep an eye on me."
"Are you going to fill me in on the parts where I'm wrong?"
I looked at Dom for half a second and then shook my head. "No, you're just going to have to live with not knowing. It's not my secret to tell. It's not even just Dom's secret to tell. Okay, what have you observed about me?"
Russ tapped his fingers on the table for a couple of seconds before continuing. "You're both harder and easier to understand. I came here expecting to ask you what your passion is, what it is that you want to pursue. With your mom it's blindingly obvious. She wants to be a world-class photographer. She'd love for it to be in a different area than fashion, but she'll take fashion if that's all she can get. You're different."
"How so?"
"You don't have a passion. Only that's not quite right. You had a passion but now it's gone. There's a listlessness to you that isn't the way you would normally move. I think your passion is to find someone you can believe in more than anything else and then to back their passion."
It didn't seem very flattering, especially not from someone who was in the business of finding stuff people were passionate about and then helping them develop their gifts. In his world there probably wasn't a worse insult to apply to someone.
Russ held his hand up, stopping me before I could take off on my rant. "That's not a bad thing, Adri. In some ways, you're more like me than you realize. You're what I think of as an enabler, but not in a bad way. If you believed in your mom with everything you had, then she'd be Anne Geddes famous in a matter of years. Don't feel guilty that you haven't gotten behind her and pushed though. That's a huge sacrifice, and you should never feel guilty for not pouring yourself into someone else's dreams. When you find the right person, it will flow naturally. The key is to either find someone who won't use you up and discard you, or to learn to limit just how far you go for people."
It was like he'd held a mirror up for me and I'd seen myself for the first time. It was more disturbing than I'd expected it to be. I'd just opened my mouth, I think to thank him for his insights, when the phone rang. Nobody ever used our landline. I was pretty sure Mom had gotten it more out of habit than anything else. I let it ring a couple more times and then the machine picked up.
"Adri, it's Ben. I need you to pick up if you're there!"
Dom moved even faster than I did. She made it to the phone and tossed it my way while Russ and I were still turning towards it, him in curiosity, me in shock.
"I'm here, Ben. What's going on?"
"I can't leave. My boss showed up a couple of seconds after I finished talking to Dominic and he did something to me. I physically can't make myself leave, and they've been really careful not to leave a telephone around since then. I was going to call Dominic's guy, but I can't remember his name. I can't remember anything. It's like they wiped the memories away."
I made it over to the answering machine and managed to kill it. Dom was back at my side with her hand out for the phone.
"Ben, I'm going to give Dom the phone."
"No! I...I can't seem to talk to her. Every time I think of calling her, something odd happens. Adri, I don't know what they did to my mind, but it's not right anymore."
I looked at Dom, completely at a loss for what to do next. She bit her lip for a second, looked at Russ, and then nodded.
"Put it on speaker, Adri, and ask Ben if he gets the same kind of panicked feeling at the thought of overh
earing me talk to you."
"Ben, what about if you listen to Dom talk to me, and you only talk to me? How does that feel?"
"I...I think I can do that."
I knew there was a chance this would all come back to bite me, that Russ might turn me in, but I still hit the speaker button. Ben probably didn't have much time, and this was the only way to get him and Dom talking.
"Okay, go."
Dom took a deep breath and began talking very quickly. "It would be very useful to know Ben's address. The shop, and anywhere else he thinks they might take him."
I looked around for a notepad and a pencil, but Russ had already grabbed one off of the kitchen counter, and he started quickly writing as Ben started telling 'me' where the shop was.
"They haven't taken me anywhere else so far. I just work the shop during the day and then sleep in the apartment in the back at night. Can you guys get me out?"
Dom was chewing on her lip again. She looked more worried than I'd seen her in a long while.
"I don't think I could get him out by myself. It's at least a two-person job and he's just undone all the work we did to try and keep you safe from his...bosses."
"What about James?"
Another headshake. "Alec will never allow both James and me in the city. He'll be worried that we'll leave and never come back. James might really do it, too. He's mostly recovered from the last fight, but he's really, really mad at Alec right now."
I bit my lip and then told Ben what I knew was the last thing he wanted to hear. "Ben, we might be able to get you out, but Jasmin is going to have to be involved."
There was a hitch in his breathing. "I don't want to see her again."
"I know, but I don't have any other way to get you out. If Jasmin flies out and brings Isaac, then they might be able to do it. Alec might be willing to come help, but I'm not sure he can just disappear like that right now. If I can come up with another option then I'll take it, but I think you need to start adjusting to the idea that the cavalry might include Jasmin."
Ben sighed and then he cleared his throat. "Okay, do what you have to do. I believe Dom now. Every word. If I don't get out soon, I'm worried that I won't make it much longer."
Dom already had her phone out, but she paused for just a second to reassure Ben. "We'll work as fast as we can. You should hang up now. We can't risk someone walking in and seeing him talking to you."
"I heard. Bye, Adri. If I don't...well, just tell Jasmin I'm sorry I didn't wait around so that we could've talked things through."
Ben hung up, and I sat there for a couple of seconds holding the phone while Dom dialed Ash. "Yeah, it's me again. Look, we've got a problem."
Dom disappeared into my room talking quietly enough that I couldn't catch more than a word here or there. There wasn't anything left to do but face the music. I turned and met Russ' eyes as he held out the notepad with the piece of paper on it.
"That sounds like some pretty dangerous stuff that you're involved in, Adri."
"Yeah, it is. I actually thought I'd left it all behind in Utah, but I guess you can't really go back. Once you know the world is a certain way, you're always going to notice the bits that don't add up, even if nobody else notices them."
Russ nodded. "And the very act of noticing can sometimes drag you back into that world. I understand, at least a little. That still leaves me in a bit of a difficult position, Adri. Your mom would be pretty pissed at me if she found out all of this and then realized I knew and didn't tell her. More importantly, I'm not sure you're ready to be doing the things that I suspect you're about to go do."
I almost laughed. He seemed to think I was going to mount up as part of the supernatural SWAT team Dom was busy organizing. His powers of observation had obviously failed him there.
"I'm not going to go charging into the middle of a rescue mission, Russ. I'll stay safely on the sidelines. Dom and the rest of the...group will take care of things. Normally, I wouldn't worry too much about them, but they are under a lot of pressure right now. It would be bad if they went in unprepared and understrength."
Considered my statement for several seconds before sighing. "I might be able to help out. I know a couple of guys who turned mercenary after they finished up their tours. They might be able to put something together, but it would have to be discreet. We can't launch a full-scale firefight in Brooklyn."
"We can ask Dom when she gets back out, but I expect that the Sanctuary crew will want to deal with it themselves. The guys you know might do the trick, but this is the kind of thing Dom and the rest have been doing their entire lives. They have...advantages that your friends aren't going to have."
I got another very considering look. "What have you gotten yourself into, Adri?"
"To be honest, some days I'm not really sure. I'll stay out of the direct line of danger, though, if at all possible. Is that enough for you to agree not to tell my mom?"
Russ nodded, and I realized what it was that I liked about him so much. He treated me like an adult.
"Just try not to make me regret it, Adri. I really do like your mom."
Chapter 15
Alec Graves
Graves Estate
Sanctuary, Utah
Tasha found me in my studio again, but this time she came with a different kind of proposition.
We'd more or less recovered from the challenger who had almost killed James and me. James was still pissed at me, but Jaclyn had agreed to leave her people here for another few days to give me time to try and bring James around. Dominic was actively trying to calm him down too, but unfortunately even that was backfiring this time around. Because she'd been the leverage I'd used against him, her efforts to smooth things out were just making him angrier.
Isaac was fully healed and seemed resigned to the fact that we were going to have to deal with another challenger fairly soon. He seemed to have bought into Ash's philosophy with a vengeance. As a dominant, Isaac's life would be better in another pack than Ash's life would be, but it would still represent a rough, potentially fatal, transition period while he worked his way into the pecking order of the new pack.
Jess was still pretty much a non-asset when it came to a fight, but it seemed like she was trying harder than before. She'd started out scared of fighting, but after dealing with first the batch of vampires and then the werewolves, she seemed to have realized that being scared and ignorant wasn't any kind of protection when something bigger and meaner than you came calling.
Jasmin was a bigger concern than she'd been before. Whatever had gone after her, Dominic and Rachel seemed to have gone at least slightly into remission, but she hardly even looked at me these days. I'd been trying to catch her alone and figure out what was going on, but she'd been doing a masterful job of avoiding me so far. I could always force the issue, but that wasn't likely to help her open up once I finally had her in front of me. I second-guessed the decision on a regular basis, but she couldn't avoid me forever. Eventually I'd get a chance to talk to her, and it would be less confrontational this way than the alternative.
All in all, I was just glad to have made it to the end of another week. Getting everyone back to school would go a long ways towards alleviating some of the pressures inside the pack. It was a Friday afternoon, and even sitting in my studio pretending to paint was better than dealing with everyone's issues.
"So when are you going to paint me, Alec?"
She'd caught me woolgathering again. "Sorry, Tasha. You've never evidenced any kind of interest in painting before now. What changed?"
"I never asked before because I'm not interested in painting, I'm interested in you. Now that I've been here a few weeks though, I'm realizing that this is where you spend most of your time. This seems like a good compromise. I'll sit for you, you'll paint me, and we'll get to spend some more time together."
I started to shake my head, but she looked up at me with such earnestness that I couldn't bring myself to say no. I'd kept her here for weeks, cooling her heels
while she waited for me to work through my issues and either say 'yes' or 'no' to her marriage proposal.
"Okay. If you want to sit for me then I'll try to paint you. No promises that what comes out the other end will be even half decent, but I'm willing to try."
"Here, or somewhere else?"
I considered for a second or two, but there was really only one answer if I wanted to preserve at least a shred of the privacy I'd come to crave so badly over the last few weeks.
"Let's do it here. I can arrange you on a stool and then come back and put the background in after the fact."
She lifted up the bottom of her tank top and raised an eyebrow questioningly. It wasn't a very long tank top, so even that minute action left a long expanse of firm, tan stomach exposed. The invitation was perfectly clear, and I couldn't deny her substantial beauty. I'd already gotten some pretty extended glimpses both before and after the fight with the four werewolves, but I found myself shaking my head almost before I'd had a chance to consider the suggestion.
It would have felt wrong on several levels, but it wasn't just that I was old-fashioned. I knew Adri wasn't coming back. I knew I'd already lost her respect, but there was a tiny part of me that was screaming not to do something that would further disappoint her.
It was a dangerous thing to be courting. A hopeless kind of hope that was threatening not just the pack, but also any future chance I might have of being happy. It was ludicrous. I probably wasn't going to have much of a future if I didn't seal the alliance with Tasha and her mother soon, but I just couldn't seem to let go of that last sliver of hope. My mind knew better, but I was finally seeing just how much stronger my heart was than my head.
"No, let's keep your clothes on. There's no telling how frequently we'll get interrupted."