The door opening.
“Goddammit, Lee,” Flynn’s grating voice boomed. “What the fuck were you thinking—”
A hot mist rose in Lee’s mind when he heard Flynn’s voice. The prick. The fucking prick. Every cell in his body pulsed with raw, red hatred.
Lee flew across the room, grabbing something shiny off his desk, hand punching forward. Flynn’s eyes bugged as he looked down at himself, at the very small shiny handle sticking out from his chest. The handle belonged to a pure titanium letter opener that was deeply embedded in his heart.
He was dead but he didn’t know it yet.
Flynn stood, staggered, righted himself, watching as a big red flower blossomed out from the handle, covering his pristine white Armani shirt. He staggered again, fell to one knee, head hanging. Straining sounds came from his throat, though he wasn’t able to formulate any words.
Good. Flynn talked too much anyway.
Part of Lee admired the fact that from six feet away, having had to turn around, pass by his desk to pick up the letter opener, he’d still instinctively been able to punch it straight between the ribs and bury it directly into Flynn’s heart.
Lee stood above the man, watching as the other knee gave out and he fell prone onto the floor. Flynn’s heart continued pumping blood for another two minutes, then the flow slowed then stopped.
Lee looked at his reflection in the window, brightly lit against the snowy night sky as darkness descended in his mind. His eyes were wide, a slight smile on his lips. He watched for a moment, his ability to recognize the creature in the reflection draining away as quickly as Flynn’s blood had drained from his body.
Lee looked around, not recognizing anything familiar in his surroundings. He moved into a slight crouch, hands pulling up toward his chest, hands open like claws. Walls . . . he had to get out. Move. His body craved movement, craved blood. It was sheer chance that he moved toward the wall with the door and not to one of the other three walls. He walked forward and the door, biomorphic and primed to recognize his profile, opened.
He didn’t question that. There was very little reasoning ability left in him, just enough to recognize a door with an image of stairs and to realize that it led to an exit. The stairs led to the outside world, a world that awaited him.
He started loping for the stairs.
A woman stepped out from a door. Her eyes widened when she saw Lee, a binder dropping from her nerveless fingers. “Dr. Lee—” The tone was a question, but it was never answered. Lee jumped to her, hands out to hold her shoulders still as he sank his teeth into her neck. In two strong bites he’d chewed her ear off, then dropped her at his feet, bleeding and twitching.
Out. He wanted to be out. He was strong and he wanted—no he needed—to hunt. To kill.
He scrambled down the stairs while he still recognized the concept of stairs. By the time he reached the lobby teeming with people he’d lost the concept. But it didn’t matter because there was plenty of meat here.
He still recognized the concept of prey.
In the hallway, the woman slowly rose. She raised a hand to the side of her head and frowned. Pain, wet . . . She had no words for the sensations she could only feel. Her hands drew up to her chest, formed claws. Kill. She wanted to kill. There was prey around, she could smell it. Unsteady but unyielding, she loped down the corridor where two creatures had appeared.
Prey.
Mount Blue
Eat,” Stella Cummings said, pushing a plate of potato gratin across to Lucius. A very small portion, since he’d only begun to tolerate food. She looked across at him, tortured, suffering yet upright and determined. Any other man would have died a hundred times with what had been done to him. What had been done to her by her stalker was a fraction of what had been done to him, and it had almost destroyed her.
He was an extraordinary man.
“That’s all you ever say to me. Eat,” he replied, dark eyes fixed on her. “You’d think I was five years old.”
Even in his weakened and emaciated state, Lucius Ward was a man to be reckoned with. She definitely didn’t think he was five years old.
“Eat,” she repeated and smiled at him.
His face suddenly sharpened. His huge hand covered hers. “God, Stella. You are so beautiful.”
You are so beautiful. She’d heard versions of that phrase all her life. The word had been pretty when she was a child actress but turned into beautiful right about puberty. Through some accident of bones and hormones, she hadn’t gone through an awkward pubescent phase at all. She’d continued working as an actress all the way through. By the time she was thirty-five, she’d made 120 films and had been considered one of the most beautiful women in the world.
What had that gotten her? Not much, besides more work. And more work. The men who’d courted her had courted the face, not the person behind it. When they discovered that her life was work, work, work, and very little play, the infatuation disappeared.
It certainly hadn’t brought her love.
And now the face was gone.
“Not so beautiful anymore, Lucius,” she said without any sadness. Crazily, her lost beauty had freed something up in her. Everyone in her life now liked her, not her face. Liked Stella, the member of an underground community and not Stella the remote movie star.
She was no movie star now. She could never be in the business again. The stalker had sliced her up too badly. Ninety-seven slashes all over, fourteen to her face. One slice had gone right through her cheek, making it impossible to smile on the right side of her face. She looked like someone had put her into a kaleidoscope and shaken it.
His hand tightened on hers. “Beautiful,” he repeated forcefully.
Oh God.
Sex, love—those were things that had completely fled her life after the stalker. There’d been lots of sex before, though not love. But afterward, both had been out of the question. She’d taken refuge in anonymity while her scars had healed as much as they ever would, cooking near Mount Blue in a small diner belonging to the cousin of her former housekeeper. She’d needed to do something, something tangible, with her hands, the way she’d needed to breathe. And Elena had sent her to her cousin, where she’d buried herself in the kitchen in the back and started creating. The greasy spoon became a diner and was on its way to becoming a restaurant when the news told her that her stalker had escaped.
She’d been on a break, chatting with a customer, a good-looking, mysterious guy who showed up from time to time and who never told her his name. If there was one thing Stella had learned in her life to respect it was privacy. “Don’t ask don’t tell” covered a lot of things, not just one’s sexuality. She didn’t want to talk about herself and he didn’t want to talk about himself, and that suited them both.
And then the news flash—Steve Gardiner, stalker, slasher, and all-around psycho, who’d convinced the judge to put him in a mental institution instead of the deepest darkest cell on earth, had escaped.
She’d been talking to Jon when she heard. Suddenly she began to shake all over, the trembles coming from deep in her core. A fear so great she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.
He’d taken one look at her, seen how terrified and broken she was, and simply brought her up to Mount Blue, to Haven, where she’d joined the community of misfits and runaways and had been happy ever since.
Here in Haven she’d found companionship and purp
ose. But love? It hadn’t even occurred to her that she might find it here, of all places.
She looked down at the large hand covering hers. She remembered well that terrible night three months ago when Lucius and Miguel Romero, Larry Lundquist, and Bob Pelton had been rescued from a lab that had been like something out of a Nazi concentration camp and brought to Haven. The four men had been starved, full of surgical scars, so weak they couldn’t walk. It had taken Catherine a week of IVs just to get them to be able to sit up in bed.
That’s when Stella had taken over, making it her personal mission to get them to eat as much good nourishing food as they could hold down.
Particularly their leader. Lucius Ward. Captain as Mac, Nick, and Jon called him.
Their respect for him had been evident in every line of their bodies, and once she got to know him, even the terrible tortured version of him, a strong man who had been rendered down to bedrock, she understood why. This was a formidable man in every sense.
She’d seen him put himself together inch by agonizing inch. If Catherine said to walk ten steps, he’d walk fifty. Grimacing with pain every inch of the way.
And though he never smiled and the lines in his face clearly showed he’d never been a smiling kind of man, his face lit up when she entered a room.
So, yes, wow, sex seemed to be on the table.
But something needed to be said first. “You don’t have to call me beautiful, Lucius,” Stella said gently. “I know I’m not beautiful, not any longer. And if you don’t care, I sure don’t.”
While she talked his dark eyes roamed over her face, over every inch of it. It was something she was used to. When she’d been beautiful, men had stared openly at her, as if she were something rare and different, belonging to a different species. After she’d been sliced open, people had stared for a different reason, the way you’d stare at a train wreck.
One of the many things she loved about Haven was that no one seemed even to notice her scars.
Lucius smiled, pulling at the burn scar on his right cheekbone. He brought her hand to his mouth and placed his lips in the palm of her hand. He kept it there for a long time, so long that she moved the tips of her fingers over the skin around his mouth, feeling a few scars, feeling the small bite of his heavy beard.
He finally lowered her hand to the table, but kept it in his.
“I never missed a movie of yours. I think I’ve seen every one since you were a kid. You had a rare beauty and a rare talent. But I find you more beautiful now and your talent is one that everyone here appreciates.”
“I know they appreciate it.” She smiled at him. The compliments on her cooking were frequent and fervent and she understood completely. Before she arrived and reorganized the communal kitchen, Mac had cooked. Every person who told her that had winced.
He was searching her eyes again, a look so penetrating it was as if he were walking around inside her head. “You don’t believe me when I say I find you more beautiful than before.”
She kept an easy smile on her face. “Lucius, it’s not necessary for you to say that. I don’t need it.”
“I know you don’t. But I need to say it. Stella—” he stopped. Licked his lips. Swallowed. Looked down at their linked hands, then back up at her.
If Stella didn’t know better, she’d say he was nervous. But that was impossible of course. Mac, Nick, and Jon were three of the toughest men on the face of the earth. Capable and brave and determined. They had defied—were still defying—the U.S. government and the entire military. They were unbreakable men and this man, this man holding her hand, was their commanding officer. Had led them into battle. That kind of man didn’t do embarrassment.
And yet . . .
“Stella, I have something to say.” His voice, already hoarse, had roughened. “And I’m finding it . . . I’m finding it hard.”
“I’m listening, Lucius.” She couldn’t imagine it hard for Lucius to say anything.
He drew in a deep breath. “I’m falling in love with you. No, scratch that. I am in love with you. Since the moment I saw you when we were brought into Haven.”
Oh God. Tears pricked her eyes. Lucius and the three others had been carried into Haven because they’d been unable to walk. All four of them had been on the verge of death. She remembered Lucius clearly lying on the gurney in the infirmary, a wounded and broken man. It had hurt to look at him, a clearly once-strong man who’d been tortured almost to death. Catherine had had a near-death experience herself and was in a coma, so it had been up to Stella and their two nurses, Pat and Salvatore, to take care of everyone.
After the attack, Stella had had four surgeries and had spent months in the hospital. With nothing else to do, she’d observed the nurses and had a pretty good handle on what to do.
Lucius had opened his eyes briefly when she approached him on the gurney. “We’ll take care of you,” she whispered. He’d nodded and passed out.
That was the first time he set eyes on her.
Since then, she’d looked after him. Not out of pity, oh no. Partly out of rage. She’d been subjected to insane violence too, just as he had. The violence of the cruel and cowardly. She knew exactly what that was like and the idea of a man like this, a combat hero, who’d dedicated his life to his country, being tied down like an animal and tormented—it drove her half crazy.
But the real reason she’d looked after him was that she’d seen right through the naked, half-dead man who’d arrived in Haven and saw, very clearly, the extraordinary, strong man he’d been. His courage and strength had been clear to her from the start. He’d been smart and strong and brave. Handsome, even, as she’d been beautiful. And then they’d fallen into the hands of monsters. But she came out of it and he was coming out of it, and in watching him put himself back together, she’d lost her heart to him.
He reached out a hand to her face, finger trying to trace the worst scar of all, running from her left eyebrow down to the right jaw. The one that had taken sixty-four stitches to close. She was lucky to have a functioning eye.
Instinctively Stella reared back. No one had touched it since the surgeon had taken out the stitches.
“No, no,” he whispered. “No, darling. Shhh. Let me touch.” His finger, slightly rough, traced the deep white scar over and over again, slowly, from end to end.
That had been the first slash, the stalker having taken her completely by surprise. Her entourage had known for years that she had a violent stalker. Nobody told her, the idea being that she’d “lose her focus.” And they’d lose their gravy train. The stalker had sent her menacing letters, horrific gifts, had made threatening phone calls. All intercepted. The man she’d considered her personal assistant was a bodyguard. His dead body had been found just outside her bedroom door, lying in a pool of blood.
It was the cut that had hurt the most, slicing her face and her life in two.
Lucius’s touch was so gentle, his eyes so understanding. They just sat there in the quiet room, his finger tracing her worst nightmare from temple to chin. His thumb wiped away the fat tears that welled from her eyes.
His eyes—they knew her somehow. No one had known her. Her fame had been like a stone wall between her and the rest of humanity. Even her lovers pleasured her body without ever touching her heart. They didn’t want to touch her heart, anyway. That had always been very clear.
This man, with the ruined face and broken body, this man touched her heart.
&n
bsp; A sob escaped her, quickly stifled. She never cried, ever. The tears were . . . a mistake.
“Hush, darling,” he said, that deep voice so tender. “I haven’t finished talking yet.”
She nodded, throat too tight for words.
“I love you, Stella. I know I have nothing to offer you, not even myself. I can barely stand upright. I have no career, no place to call my own but here. I am a hunted man, together with the others. Should we be caught, we’d be court-martialed, but I don’t think we’d make it to a tribunal. They’d shoot us first. I don’t have anything resembling a future. I’m not even fully a man again. But I swear no one else could ever love you like I do. Someday I’ll be whole. I believe that completely. It won’t be today and it won’t be tomorrow. But, do you think—do you think you could wait for me?”
That strong, scarred beloved face was open for her to read, to see his anxiety. Those dark eyes were locked onto hers.
The tears were falling freely now, catching on her upturned lips. She cupped his face with her free hand.
“I’m not going to wait for you, Lucius.” He flinched and she clutched his hand harder. “I don’t have to wait. I’m already yours.”
Do you think Jon will find a clue in Elle’s house?” Catherine came out of the bathroom with perfumed steam billowing behind her, like some goddess coming out of the mists of time.
Billowing steam, goddesses, mists of time. Christ. Mac didn’t recognize the thoughts in his head these days. They were totally unlike the thoughts of Mac BC—Before Catherine. He seemed to be having a lot of those thoughts nowadays, though.
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