Prey (Copper Mesa Eagles Book 2)

by Roxie Noir

  Something deep inside Zach stirred again, some kind of awakening that rumbled.

  “That all depends,” he said, trying to keep his voice light. “Can you make a good casserole?”

  “Is baklava a casserole?” Katrina asked.

  Zach just looked at her, raising his eyebrows a little, letting Katrina figure out the answer to her own question.

  “Probably not,” Katrina admitted. “Then no. No good casseroles. Only baklava.”

  “Only baklava?”

  “Well, baklava and, like, grilled cheese. I can make okay omelets, sometimes.”

  “You’re really not selling me on this fourth wife thing,” Zach teased.

  Katrina just laughed and kicked her feet out in front of her. One found Zach’s foot just for a moment, then retreated.

  “Who said I was trying?” she said. “Besides, I’ve got other skills.”

  Zach’s mind went there, right away: Katrina, pressed up against the back of the booth, her skirt around her hips as he leaned into her, his body between her soft thighs. Burying himself in her, listening to her panting as her fingernails raked down his back...

  “Also,” she said, taking a nacho and pointing it at him, “You’re avoiding the topic.”

  “What’s the topic?”

  “Why you’re in college at twenty-eight,” she said. “Don’t act like you forgot.”

  “Right,” he said. His erection deflated immediately, and he was glad that she couldn’t see through the table where they were sitting.

  “Well?”

  Zach ate another nacho and frowned. He’d never found a good way into his story about himself.

  “Well, my parents died in a car crash when I was thirteen,” he said, looking at the table and not at Katrina.

  She covered her mouth with both hands.

  “Oh my god,” she said, her voice muffled. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring that up, I had no idea.”

  “It’s fine,” Zach said, shaking his head. “Believe me, I got used to explaining it.”

  “Was it a drunk driver?” Katrina asked.

  “Just bad weather,” he said. “They were coming back from the city, a couple hours away, and they took a bad shortcut in a rainstorm. Skidded right off a mountain.”

  “Jesus,” Katrina whispered. “Did you go into foster care? What happened?”

  “I got lucky,” Zach said. “My oldest brother was a couple months shy of eighteen and talked a judge into giving him custody of me and my middle brother. So he had to raise the two of us monsters and deal with losing our parents.”

  “Is he okay?”

  Zach laughed.

  “Seth’s fine. He got married about a year ago. Still lives in Obsidian.”

  “What about the other one?”

  Zach paused. He never knew how to answer when people asked him about Garrett. The truth was, he had no idea.

  “He moved,” Zach told her. “I haven’t heard from him in a little while, but I think he’s doing okay.”

  A little while meaning nine years, he thought. I don’t think those fucking postcards count, beyond telling us he’s still alive.

  Katrina just nodded, her face serious as she leaned across the table again.

  “We did give Seth hell, though,” Zach said. “You’d think we’d behave a little better, knowing that our parents just died and our teenage brother was responsible for us, but instead I failed out of high school, and then spent a whole year not doing much except smoking on the roof and watching cartoons while he worked his fingers to the bone, trying to feed us.”

  “How’d you afford the cigarettes?” she asked. Now she was leaning her chin in one hand, her bright blue eyes locked onto Zach’s.

  He couldn’t look away, and felt himself opening up to her in a way he’d never opened to anyone before.

  Zach glanced over his shoulder quickly, then hunched forward. Their margaritas were empty, the nachos just crumbs on the plate.

  “I’ve never told this to anyone before,” he said, his voice low.

  Katrina leaned in, and he got a whiff of her scent: floral and citrusy, utterly intoxicating.

  “Why are you telling me?” she asked, her voice just above a whisper.

  “I dunno,” he said. He looked over his shoulder again at the waitress taking the order from the next table, and Katrina followed his gaze.

  Because I can’t stop myself when I’m around you, he thought. Because I feel this pull toward you that I’ve never felt toward anyone before, not ever.

  “I fell in with a bad crowd,” he started.

  “In Obsidian?”

  The waitress appeared next to their table, looming over them.

  “You guys need anything else?” she asked, her purple-lipsticked mouth smiling at them.

  Both of them shook their heads.

  “Here you go, then!” she said, leaving the check on the table and walking away.

  Katrina reached for it, but Zach snatched it away before she could get it.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let me at least split it. I make engineering money, you know.”

  “Nope,” said Zach.

  “Please?”

  “I already suffered the indignity of you seeing my car,” he said, pulling out his wallet. “I’m not suffering the indignity of you paying for my drinks.”

  “That’s not very equality-minded of you,” Katrina teased.

  “I guess I’m old-fashioned,” Zach said, grinning at her. He pulled out thirty-five dollars and left it on the table, anchoring it with the empty nacho plate. That thirty-five would have bought him rice, beans, and ramen for half a week, but he’d gladly have starved if he got to spend more time with her.

  “Do you also put your cape over mud puddles so ladies can cross them?” Katrina asked, her eyes sparkling.

  “I would if I owned a cape,” Zach said, very seriously.

  “You don’t even have a cape?” Katrina asked. She pretended to be shocked.

  “I’ve got student loans to pay off,” Zach said.

  “And you still won’t let me buy you drinks,” she said. “Men.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, grinning. “We’re a bunch of stubborn pigs.”

  He stood, offering his hand to her as she stood from the booth as well. When she was on her feet, he didn’t let go and laced their fingers together, his heart beating wildly.

  Chapter Four

  Katrina

  “You still haven’t told me your wild secret,” Katrina said once they were outside. It was a surprisingly warm night, and for once, she didn’t even need a jacket. “Is it because I’m too curious?”

  She didn’t know why she wanted to know so much, but there was something tantalizing and secret about him, something that was begging her to uncover it.

  Like his dick? she thought.

  Oh my god. Stop it. STOP. You’re drunk on one margarita.

  “It’s because we got interrupted,” Zach said. He squeezed her hand, and something fluttered in Katrina’s chest. “And now, I’m not sure this isn’t entrapment.”

  “If it were entrapment, anything you said would be inadmissible in court,” Katrina shot back. His car was up ahead, the bleached-out patches of white paint practically glowing under the streetlights.

  “I thought you were an engineer.”

  “I’m an engineer who watches plenty of Law and Order.”

  Katrina stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, looking at the car. An idea was fizzling in the back of her brain, and she looked up at him, thoughtfully.

  “How do you feel about light trespassing?” she asked, tilting her head to one side.

  “As long as it’s light,” Zach said, a smile spreading across his handsome face.

  * * *

  “I used to come here as a teenager too,” Katrina said.

  They weren’t far outside of Salt Lake, but it had gotten deserted fast. Katrina and Zach stood in front of a chain link fence that was easily eight feet high and looked at the bro
wn hulk of a building.

  “It used to be some kind of resort,” she said. “When I was a kid, there were waterslides and stuff, and after they shut it down we used to come out here at night, smoke pot at the top, and then slide down on cardboard box tops.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Someone finally got hurt doing that and the slides got torn down,” Katrina said. “I wasn’t there when it happened, I was in college already. But a slide fell apart with someone on it, and some kid broke his pelvis in three places and crushed a disc in his spine.”

  An involuntary shiver went through her, along with the same thought as always: It could have been me.

  God knows I wasn’t any smarter, just luckier.

  “What’s here now?” Zach asked.

  They still held hands, and he put his other hand on the fence, hooking his fingers through.

  “Just the hotel itself and an empty swimming pool around the back,” she said. “If you go to the top floor, there’s a great view of the lake.”

  “Is that where we’re going?”

  Katrina didn’t answer. She looked up at Zach and he looked down at her, and then, for no reason at all, she winked at him.

  “Come on,” she said, and pulled him along. “You’ll see.”

  It had been years since she’d visited the old resort on the lake — seven, maybe even eight. Since she’d gone to college, and especially since she’d gotten her own place, sneaking off to a spooky abandoned building to get up to no good had become a lot less tempting.

  Why risk tetanus when you could do it in your own apartment?

  But there was something about Zach that made her want to show him all her secrets, take him back through her life up to that point. She wanted to give him access to parts of herself that she didn’t give to anyone else.

  Katrina blushed, thinking of exactly which parts she wanted to give him access to. That was one reason she’d brought him here — she’d been moments away from inviting him back to her apartment instead, and that was no good.

  For starters, there was a more-than-decent chance that her scummy boss was going to want to interview him for a summer internship. But besides that, Katrina had never gone there with someone on a first date. She’d never really wanted to before this, but there was something about Zach, something wild and rugged and teasing, something that made her feel like warmth was trickling down the inside of her skin.

  In short, he turned her on, a lot, and she didn’t quite trust herself to make good decisions when they were alone.

  Katrina stopped in front of a patch of fence, examining it for a few moments. Then she nodded.

  “This is it,” she declared, and unhooked her hand from Zach’s.

  “This is what?” he asked, but Katrina was already running her fingers along the back of the steel fence pole, finding the metal hooks that held the fence together. After a couple of good yanks, she’d undone them and pushed the fence inward. Zach stepped after her, and she pushed the section of fence back into place.

  “Ta-da,” she said, waving her arm at the abandoned resort.

  It looked exactly like she remembered it, minus the waterslides. A big, hulking tan building, the blank windows staring out at them. Most of them were still intact and unbroken, and it made the place feel like it had just shut down for the season, rather than permanently.

  Between the two of them and the main building lay a parking lot, and that had seen much better days. In the eight years since the last car had driven off, weeds had sprung up in every tiny crack, widening them and working their way through the pavement until it was more plant than asphalt.

  Around the big, dark building, Katrina could just barely see the metal skeletons of two pool cabanas. Their roofs and sides, made of canvas, were long gone, but some of the structures still stood.

  Katrina took Zach’s hand again and nudged him toward an overgrown hedge that ran the length of the parking lot. When this place was open, it had only been waist-high, but it flourished in the absence of gardeners and now it was even taller than Zach.

  “Stick close to the trees,” Katrina said. “You’re less likely to get seen.”

  Together, they crept to the building and then walked around the side, careful not to step on anything that looked too sharp. The resort had been about half an hour outside Salt Lake City, just far enough that it didn’t have any squatters or junkies living there.

  She stepped around the corner to the back of the hotel, and suddenly, the Great Salt Lake was there, just beyond the empty swimming pool. It lay flat and glossy in front of them, the nearly-full moon backlighting the mountains far on the other side.

  Zach whistled.

  “It looks different from here,” he said.

  “Right?” said Katrina. “It could be a totally different lake.”

  The sky to the east glowed a pale orange with the lights of Salt Lake City, but that didn’t spoil the effect at all. Katrina felt like there was no one else anywhere in the entire world, just the two of them.

  She leaned her head against his shoulder. He unfurled his hand from hers and put his arm around her shoulders instead.

  “Thanks,” he said, simply.

  They spent a long time standing there, looking at the lake, before Katrina stepped away and grabbed his hand again.

  “Come on,” she said. “That’s just the first view.”

  Letting Zach follow her, she stepped to the broken automatic doors that had once led into the hotel. They were padlocked, but someone had smashed through them long ago, leaving the old building open. Rain, snow, and wind had trashed the back part of the lobby, but further inside still looked like it might have been a hotel once: a bank of elevators, big round columns dotted here and there.

  The furniture had been sold at auction long ago, but the front desk still stood, the space behind it blank and foreboding. Katrina pulled out her phone and flipped on the flashlight, walking into the deep darkness of the elevator bank and pushing on an unmarked door at the end.

  “Elevator’s out,” she said to Zach. Behind her, he’d pulled out his own phone and turned on the flashlight. “You mind taking the stairs?”

  “Not at all,” he said.

  She paused.

  “Sometimes there are bats in here,” she warned. “Though usually they’re gone by this time of night.”

  Zach just raised his eyebrows and aimed his flashlight at the ceiling of the stairwell. Katrina didn’t see anything there, but felt like one couldn’t be too careful of bats.

  By the time they reached the door to the roof, eight stories up, Katrina was breathing hard and she could feel the sweat starting to trickle from her hairline and down her back. There had only been one bat, hanging from the handrail. It opened its eyes and glared at Katrina and Zach as they puffed past, but it hadn’t done anything.

  On top of the roof, facing the lake, were two camping chairs. Their canvas seats looked a little worse for the wear, but it was obvious they were new additions, brought there by someone else who enjoyed looking at the lake in the moonlight.

  “Why did this place shut down?” Zach asked, looking around at the view.

  From up there, Katrina felt like she could see all of Utah: the lake, the mountains, Salt Lake City, the vast inky blackness off in the south, dotted by the lights of occasional towns.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “There was some big scandal, I remember that much. Everyone thought that it was doing okay, and then one day, it just shut down. Something with shell companies and bankruptcy, that kind of thing.”

  Zach nodded.

  “The usual,” he said.

  “Right.”

  They sat in the chairs and Katrina perched her feet on the raised edge of the roof.

  “You didn’t tell me what happened after you fell in with Obsidian’s bad crowd,” she said. “I’m imagining that you rode ATVs through the desert and mouthed off to old people sometimes.”

  Zach made a face that was half-grimace, half-smile
.

  “Sort of,” he said. “There were ATVs. That part’s true.”

  “But?”

  “But,” he said, and paused for a moment, gazing at the lake. Katrina wondered if she was prodding at something that he didn’t like talking about.

  I’m just being nosy, she thought. Quit it.

  “The middle of the desert is a pretty great place to make meth,” he said.

  “Shit,” said Katrina.

  Meth?!

  “Hard to find the lab, and if it blows up, it’s totally possible no one else will ever even know about it,” he said. Then he looked over at her.

  “I barely made meth,” he said.

  He sounded like he was trying to reassure her.

  “Okay,” she said, eyes narrowing.

  He’s clearly doing fine now, she reminded herself. He gets straight A’s in a hard major. Chill out.

  “I had a friend who knew a guy, pretty much,” he said. “And I met this friend-of-a-friend once, and for whatever reason, he took a shine to me. He knew I wasn’t doing anything besides making life hard for my brothers and being a totally useless waste of space, so he asked if I wanted to make some money.”

  “And of course you did.”

  “Exactly. Part of the problem in Obsidian is there’s no jobs. Seth worked in construction, but even that job took him six months to get. Someone practically had to die before there was an opening, and I had no way out of that place.”

  Katrina looked out over the lake, trying to imagine what that must have been like for Zach. To be stuck in a place where there were hardly any prospects, unable to get out to somewhere better.

  I’d end up cooking meth too, she thought. Just for something to do.

  “Anyway, I was only in the meth kitchen for maybe a month. One day, I’m walking out of this old concrete bunker in the middle of nowhere, and there’s a Jeep parked next to it, a guy leaning against the side of it, and I just freeze, because I’m no good at danger.”

  Katrina held her breath, eyes wide. Zach squeezed her hand and grinned.

  “Not the cops,” he said. “The boss man, in from Denver. They just called him ‘La Cabeza.’ The Head.”