by J. R. Ward
There was a polished table in the center of the space and she took one of its four chairs. As Isaac sat across from her, it was hard not to remember meeting him at the jail: It had been just like this, the two of them facing off with each other.
Except now, in spite of the fact that neither was in cuffs, she couldn’t lose the feeling that they were both tied up together . . . and that the foiled corks of all the bottles were a firing squad on the verge of getting the let-loose signal.
God, when he’d been brought in to meet with her that first time, she’d had no idea what she was getting into.
Then again did you ever? As people went through their daily lives, off-the-cuff choices and random events could sometimes spiral into a kind of centrifugal force that sucked you in and then spun you out into a different zip code altogether.
Even if you never left your own house.
Her father sat closest to the door and linked his hands together as he put his elbows on top of the table.
“We’re safe down here,” he said, nodding to an air vent up by the short ceiling that had two little red flags trembling on its breeze. “The HVAC system draws blocks away from here, so there’s no worry of a contamination. There’s also a tunnel out and a radio-wave transmitter that will scramble our voices if we’re being recorded.”
The tunnel was a news flash and Grier looked around. As far as she could tell, all the shelving was bolted in and the floor was solid stone, but given the other little tricks in the house, she couldn’t say she was surprised.
Isaac spoke up. “If I was to go to someone and talk, who would it be?”
“That depends on how—”
“What about Mother.” As Grier cut in, cut off, derailed, she stared at her father’s face, looking for subtle twitches around his eyes and mouth. “What about when she died. Was that really cancer?”
Although it had been seven years ago, those horrible final days were still so vivid and she sifted through them, looking for cracks in the walls of the events, searching for places where things that seemed one way were really another.
“Yes,” her father said. “Yes . . . she . . . Yes, that was the cancer. I swear.”
Grier exhaled and found it hard to imagine that she was actually relieved by that dreadful disease. But far better for Mother Nature to have been the culprit. Far better that that tragedy didn’t need rewriting. One was more than enough.
She cleared her throat. Nodded. “Okay, then. Okay.”
A warm palm covered her own and squeezed. As her father’s hands were both on the table, she realized it was Isaac. When she looked over at him, he broke the connection, his touch lingering just long enough so that she knew he was with her, but not so much that she felt restrained.
God, the contradiction of him. Brutal. Sexual. Protective.
With a mental slap, she refocused on her father. “You were in the middle of saying something?”
He nodded and pulled himself together before glancing back at Isaac. “How far are you willing to go?”
“I won’t comment on other operatives,” Isaac said, “but when it comes to my assignments, I’ll go all the way. The things I did for Matthias. What I know about him and his second in command. Where the two of them sent me. The trouble is, it’s a patchwork—there’s a lot that I only know part of.”
“Let me show you something.”
Her father got up from the table, and before she could see what he did, a section of shelving came forward and wheeled left, exposing a safe set into the stone walls. The sturdy door was opened by his handprint on a panel and the inside was not very big—little more than the dimensions of a legal pad horizontally and no greater than six inches high.
He came back to the table with a thick folder. “This is everything I’ve been able to piece together. Names. Dates. People. Places. Pehaps this will help jog your memory.” He tapped the front cover. “And I’ll figure out who to go to. There’s no way of knowing for sure who’s involved in Matthias’s inner circle—government conspiracies have thick roots, but also tendrils you can’t see. The White House is not an option, and it’s a federal issue, so state contacts won’t help us. But here’s what I think. . . .”
Her father’s voice grew more powerful with each word, the gathering strength of purpose turning him into the pillar she had always believed him to be. And as he spelled out plans, she felt a shift in the center of her heart.
Although that was just as much because of something Isaac had said. None of us know what we’re getting into until it’s too late. . . .
Her brother had been a beloved junkie, an addict of the first order who likely would have died by his own hand at some point—although that was not a justification for what had been done to him, simply the reality of what the situation had been. And she had been surprised, at the time, with how upset her father had been at the loss. He and Daniel had had no contact for at least a year before that horrid night: after the latest stint at yet another high-priced rehab facility had fallen by the wayside, her father had hit the wall as a lot of parents and family members did. He’d given all he could to his son, limped through a decade of patches of recovery that gave treacherous hope, but were inevitably followed by long, dark months in which no one knew where Daniel was, or even whether he was alive.
Her father had been inconsolable at the death, however. To the point where he had spent a week sitting in a chair with nothing but a bottle of gin by his elbow.
And now she knew why. He believed he was wholly responsible.
As she watched him speak, she noted the age on his face . . . the wrinkling around the far corners of the eyes and the mouth, the slight droop of the jawline. He was still a handsome man and yet he’d never remarried. Was it because of the mess he was in? Probably.
Definitely.
Those signs of aging on him were not just a matter of time passing. It was stress and heartache and . . .
Shifting her focus to Isaac, his narrow and laserlike stare was intense, his pale irises positively glowing with a go-to-war light. Funny, he was nothing at all like her father in terms of background, education, exposure, experience. And yet they were identical in so many ways.
Especially united in the common mission to do right.
“Grier?”
Shaking herself, she glanced at her father. He was holding something out to her . . . a handkerchief? But why—
When she felt something hit her forearm, she looked down. A silver tear was collecting itself after the fall from her eye, coalescing into a little shimmering circle on her skin.
Another one dropped and messed up all its effort—but then the pair joined forces and the critical mass doubled.
She took the handkerchief and dried her tears.
“I’m so sorry,” her father said.
She mopped her face and refolded the fine linen, remembering him doing exactly the same when upstairs in the kitchen.
“You know what,” she murmured. “Apologies don’t mean a thing.” She laid her hand on the file he’d put on the table. “This . . . what you two are doing . . . this is everything.”
The only thing that could have made any of it right.
To cut off the conversation, she cracked open the cover. . . .
She frowned and leaned in. The first page was a printout of four mug shots. All men. All of whom looked like different ethnic versions of Isaac. Underneath the pictures, in her father’s handwriting, there were names, dates of birth, social security numbers, last sightings—although not every one was complete. And three of them had DECEASED across the bottom.
She flipped to the next page and the next. All the same. So many faces.
“I want to bring Jim Heron in on this,” Isaac said. “The more who come forward, the better—”
“Jim Heron?” her father said. “You mean Zacharias?”
“Yeah. I saw him earlier tonight and the night before. I thought he’d been sent to kill me, but it turns out, he wants to help me—or so he says.”
“You saw him?”
“He was with two guys. I don’t recognize them, but they look like they could be XOps.”
“But—”
“Oh, my God,” Grier whispered, moving one of the sheets closer. “That’s him.”
As she pointed to one of the pictures, she heard her father say, “Jim Heron is dead. He was shot in Caldwell, New York. Four nights ago.”
“That’s him,” she repeated, tapping at the picture.
Isaac’s voice sounded confused. “How did you know? Grier . . . how did you know?”
She looked up. “Know what?”
“That’s Jim Heron.”
Moving her finger aside, she saw the name Zacharias below the picture. “Well, I don’t know who he is, but that’s the man who showed up in my bedroom last night. As an angel.”
CHAPTER 32
This was not working.
Deep down in the anus of Hell, where her captured souls were kept in flypaper walls, and the still air echoed with the oily moans of her servants, Devina was suffering from a serious case of buzz kill.
Which was why she’d sent everyone away.
Hanging back, she regarded the piece of meat wired to her table. In the candlelight, Jim Heron was Jackson Pollocked with blood and black wax and other liquids of various descriptions, and he was having trouble breathing through his swollen, cracked lips. On his stomach, there was a road map of carvings she’d done with her own claws, and his thighs were marked as well with her name and her symbols.
His cock had been used until it was as raw as the rest of him.
And yet he hadn’t cried out or begged or even opened his eyes. No curses, no tears. Nothing.
She wasn’t sure whether to be pissed off at herself and her minions for not working him hard enough . . . or to fall in love with the bastard.
Either way, she was determined to get a piece of him. The question was how.
She was well aware that there were two ways of breaking someone. The first was from the outside in: You whittled away at the individual’s skin and bones and sex until the physical pain and exhaustion and shame annihilated their inner mental core. The second was the inverse: Find the fissure inside and tap it with a proverbial hammer until everything crumbled.
For her, usually the first was enough, given all the tools at her disposal—and it was also more fun and therefore always where she started. The second was trickier, although no less satisfying in its own right. All people had keys to open their interior doors; she just needed to sort through and find the one that got her inside a given individual’s head and heart.
In Jim Heron’s case . . . well, it was clear he was going to make her work for it. And didn’t that give her Adrian some competition for Favorite Toy.
What to choose, what to choose . . .
His mother. His mother was a good one, but Devina wouldn’t be able to get ahold of the real thing, and he might just be smart enough to figure out she was faking it.
Fortunately, there was another solution that happened to be under her control.
Outside of the pools of candlelight, trapped in her viscous walls, the souls of those she’d captured writhed. Hands and limbs and feet and heads made undulating appearances that never quite broke the surface of the suspension, the tortured ever searching for a way out.
The satisfaction of seeing her collection distracted her, but also made her hungry: She had to have Jim in and among her trophies. Was desperate to get him into her. At first it had been merely a case of the game; now, after this session, it was so much more than that.
She wanted to own him.
Refocusing on his face, she found his calm expression nearly impossible to comprehend. How a man could have gone through so much . . . and there wasn’t even a grimace. And no fear of what was to come, either.
She would fix that, however.
And she liked to think this power in him came from that portion of his makeup that was hers. Those bleeding-heart angels with their holier-than-thou morals and strictures—weak, so weak. To the point where she didn’t want to lose the game against Nigel not only because she could rule the earth and the heavens and all that was betwixt the sun and moon . . . but because what an ass slap to be bested by that bunch of pussies.
Jim, however . . . he was better than that. He was more like her at his core.
What a tragedy that he had to be sent back up to Earth soon; but play, after all, had to be resumed. Before he went, though, she was determined to make an imprint on him, give him more of a taste of what their Hell Ever After was going to be like. After all, the cuts in his skin were relatively shallow. Marks on the mind, however, went far, far deeper.
And immortals were especially satisfying in this regard because, as the brain persisted, so did memory—and that meant she could leave eternal scars in her wake.
Glancing at her wall, which stretched upward for miles, Devina thought of her therapist and the work they were doing together. This was one domain that was off-limits to her “recovery” and this situation with Jim was proof yet again of how her little hoarding problem came in handy.
You never knew what you’d need.
Extending her hand, she pulled down from the upper reaches one of the more slender shapes, moving it in and around the other souls, calling it to her. When it was by the floor, she summoned forth the soul and clothed it in the corporeal form it had worn on Earth.
Devina smiled at it. So much utility in such a bland and forgettable little package.
Turning to her table, she said, “Jim? I have someone here who you’ll want to see.”
As Jim lay on Devina’s table, he doubted that. Very sincerely doubted that.
Besides, at this point, vision was probably a no-go.
Nothing hurt anymore, which made shit so much easier. The trade-off for that blissful numbness, however, was that his consciousness had receded into a dim corner of his inner house. It hadn’t quite put its head down for a nap, but it was getting there: Hearing had hit the cotton-wool stage where everything was muffled, and things were pretty fucking cold inside his skin.
The classic signs of shock made him wonder if she did in fact have the ability to kill him.
She hadn’t finished off Adrian, but had that been a whim of affection?
“I’ll just leave you two to get acquainted.”
Devina’s satisfaction was not good news, considering she’d done everything inhumanly possible to break him down for the last . . . how long? Hours? Had to be.
Footfalls. Retreating.
A door. Shut.
Silence.
Something was with him, though. He could sense the presence to the left of him.
From behind his closed lids, he knew two things for sure: Devina couldn’t have gone far, and whatever she’d locked him in with was close by.
The breathing was the first thing he noticed. Soft, hitched. The kind you drew when you were in recovery mode. Maybe it was his breath?
Nope. Rhythm was different.
He turned his head carefully toward the thing and drooled, his mouth clearing of what he couldn’t swallow because of the wire around his neck.
Whatever was with him let out another hitch of breath. And then he heard a subtle clicking.
What the fuck was that?
Curiosity eventually got the best of him and he cracked one of his lids . . . or gave that a shot, as it were. Took two tries and he had to push his eyebrows all the way up into his forehead before the fucker opened—
At first, Jim couldn’t fathom what he was looking at. But the blond hair couldn’t be denied . . . that long blond hair that fell to fragile shoulders.
Last time he’d seen it had been just days ago. In Devina’s bathroom.
It had been streaked with blood.
The girl who had been sacrificed to protect Devina’s mirror was dressed in a stained sheath, her thin arms covering her breasts, a small hand protecting the juncture of her thighs. She appeared to be miraculously u
nmarked, but the trauma was there: Her eyes were wide and horrified. . . .
Except they were not on the room. They were on him . . . on his body and the glossy, sticky remnants of everything that had been done to him.
“Don’t . . .” His voice was too damn weak, so he forced more air through that wire roadblock at his throat. “Don’t look . . . at me. Turn away . . . for God’s sake, turn away. . . .”
Shit, he needed more oxygen. He needed to make her—
Her eyes met his. The shock and terror on her face told him more than he needed to know, not just about what had been done to her by Devina, but what the sight of him was doing to the poor girl.
“Don’t look at me!”
As she flinched and cringed away, he reeled his temper in. Not that there was much to throw reins on—he’d used all the strength he had on that yell.
“Cover your face,” he said hoarsely. “Turn away and just . . . cover your face.”
The girl put her hands up and pivoted around, her delicate spine standing out against the sheath as she trembled.
Jim had pulled at his binds involuntarily during Devina’s little exercise session. Now he yanked.
“You’re hurting yourself,” she said as he grunted. “Please . . . stop.”
Pain cut off his capacity for speech and it was a while before he could say anything. “Where . . . where does she keep you? Down here?”
“In . . . in the . . .” Her voice was so very reedy, and in between the words, her teeth chattered—which explained the clicking he’d heard. “In the wall . . .”
His eyes shot toward the darkness, but the candlelight formed a luminous blockade his eyes couldn’t get through.
“How does she do that?” Not chains, he hoped.
And fuckin’ A, he was so going to get Devina for this one.
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “Where am I?”
Hell. But he kept that to himself. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
“My mom and dad . . .” She choked on tears. “They don’t know where I am.”
“I’ll tell them.”
“How will—” As she glanced over her shoulder, her eyes locked on his degraded body and she paled.