by Lara Adrian
“Brock?”
The small, feminine voice—so unexpected, so distantly familiar—stopped him dead in his tracks. Something clicked in his brain. A spark of disbelief.
A grinding jolt of recognition.
“Brock … is it really you?”
Slowly, he pivoted around to face a diminutive, dark-haired female who was paused in the driveway, just off the steps of the porch. He hadn’t noticed her when he’d passed her a moment ago. Good Christ, he wasn’t sure he would have recognized her if she’d come right up to him in the street.
But he knew her voice.
Beneath the grime of her captivity and the neglect that had made her cheeks sallow, her alabaster skin marred with dirt and scratches, he realized that he did, in fact, know her face, as well.
“Oh, my God.” He felt winded, as if someone had kicked all the air out of his lungs. “Corinne?”
“It is you,” she whispered. “I never thought I’d see you again.”
Her face crumpled, and then she was sobbing. She ran to him, throwing her thin arms around his waist and weeping hard into his chest.
He held her, unsure what to do.
Unsure what to even think.
“You were dead,” he murmured. “You vanished without a trace, and then they pulled your body from the river. I saw it. You were dead, Corinne.”
“No.” She vigorously shook her head, still sobbing, her small body heaving with soul-racking gasps. “They took me away.”
Fury flared in him, burning through the shock and disbelief. “Who took you?”
She hiccuped, drawing in a shaky breath. “I don’t know. They took me away and they kept me prisoner all this time. They did … things to me. They did horrible things, Brock.”
She buried herself in his embrace, clinging to him like she never wanted to let go. Brock held her, struck stupid by all he was hearing.
He didn’t know what to tell her. He had no idea how what she was saying could possibly be true.
But it was.
She was alive.
After many long years—decade after decade of blaming himself for her death—Corinne was suddenly living and breathing, wrapped in his arms.
Jenna climbed the cellar stairs behind the last of the captives. She could hardly believe it was over, that she and Renata, Dylan, and Alex had actually located the women and managed to set them free.
Her heart was still pounding hard in her chest, her pulse still racing with adrenaline and a profound sense of accomplishment—of relief, that the ordeal for these nearly twenty helpless women was finally ended. She guided her last charge around the slain Minions in the parlor and led her outside to the veranda. Dusk was gathering now, washing over the crowded yard in placid shades of blue.
Jenna breathed in the crisp, twilight air as she stepped onto the porch behind the shuffling Breedmate. She glanced over toward the driveway, where Renata and Niko were helping some of the females into the Rover. Rio and Dylan, Kade and Alex were busy on the snowy front lawn, walking still more released women into another of the Order’s SUVs.
But it was the sight of Brock that made her freeze in place where she stood.
Her feet simply stopped moving, her heart cracking open as she saw him locked in a tender embrace with a petite, dark-haired female.
Jenna didn’t need to see her face to know that it would match the sketch Claire had provided. Or that the fragile beauty wrapped so gently in Brock’s strong arms was the same young woman in the photograph he’d kept with him all the years after he’d thought her dead.
Corinne.
By some miracle of fate, Brock’s past love had been returned to him. Jenna choked back her bittersweet sob, realizing that he’d just been granted the impossible: the gift of love resurrected.
As much as it tore at her own heart to witness it, she couldn’t help but be moved by their tender reunion.
And she couldn’t bear to interrupt it, no matter how desperately she yearned to be the one in his sheltering arms at that moment.
Steeling herself, she took a quiet step off the porch and headed past them to continue the evacuation of the other freed captives.
CHAPTER
Thirty-two
Brock glanced up and saw Jenna walking away from him, toward the ongoing activity in the driveway.
She was safe.
Thank God.
His heart leapt in his chest, jolting with such relief to see her, he thought it might burst out of his rib cage.
“Jenna!”
She pivoted slowly toward him and the relief he’d felt a moment ago drained into his heels. Her face was stricken and pale. The front of her coat was torn in places and stained a garish, deep scarlet.
“Oh, Jesus.” He broke away from Corinne and raced over to where Jenna had now paused. Grabbing her by the shoulders, he took her in from head to toe, his Breed senses overwhelmed at the presence of so much coppery spilled blood. “Ah, Christ … Jenna, what happened to you?”
Her face pinched a bit as she shook her head and drew away from him. “I’m okay. The blood isn’t mine. One of the Minions came at me in the cellar. I shot him.”
Brock hissed, racked with worry even though she was standing in front of him now, assuring him that she wasn’t harmed. “When I heard something had gone wrong here—” His voice choked off on a dark curse. “Jenna, I was so damned scared that you might be hurt.”
She shook her head, her hazel eyes seeming sad but steady. “I’m fine.”
“And Corinne,” he blurted, glancing across the way to where she still stood, looking small and forlorn, a dim shadow of the vibrant girl who’d vanished from Detroit all those decades ago. “She’s alive, Jenna. She was being held here with the others.”
Jenna nodded. “I know.”
“You do?” He stared at her, confused now.
“One of the new sketches Claire Reichen had provided,” she explained. “I only saw it as we arrived here, but I recognized Corinne’s face from the picture you have of her back in your quarters.”
“I can’t believe it,” he murmured, still stunned as hell by all he’d just heard. “She told me someone took her that night. She doesn’t know who. I have no idea whose body I saw, or why it was staged to look like hers. My God … I’m not sure what to think about the whole thing now.”
Jenna listened to him ramble on, her expression patient and understanding. Far calmer than he was. True to form, she stayed in rock-steady control, the cool professional, even though she’d just been through a hell of an ordeal herself.
Emotion swamped him, his respect for her immeasurable in that moment.
As was his love for her.
“Do you realize what you’ve accomplished here?” he asked her, reaching out to smooth his fingers along her blood-splattered cheek. “My God, Jenna. I couldn’t be more proud of you.”
He kissed her and pulled her against him, ready to tell her right there and then how grateful he was to have her in his life. He wanted to shout his love for her, but the depth of his feelings had devoured his voice.
Then all too soon, Jenna withdrew from his arms, both of them alerted to the sound of footsteps approaching from nearby. Brock turned to face Nikolai and Renata. Dylan walked past them to retrieve Corinne and gently led her to the open passenger-side door of the Rover in the driveway.
Niko awkwardly cleared his throat. “Sorry to interrupt, man, but we need to get moving. The Rover is almost full, and Rio’s called the compound for a couple more vehicles to pick up the rest of the females. Chase and Hunter are already en route with additional transport.”
Brock nodded. “They’re going to need shelter somewhere.”
“Andreas and Claire have offered to open their house in Newport for all of the captives,” Renata replied. “Rio’s going to drive the other SUV down there now.”
“Right,” Niko added. “Kade and I will stay here with Renata and Alex to clean up the scene and wait for Chase and Hunter to arrive with an extra ve
hicle for the remaining women and one for our return to the compound.”
“We need someone to drive the Rover to Newport,” Renata said.
Brock was ready to volunteer, but he could hardly stand the thought of being taken away from Jenna, even for a few hours to make the run.
Torn, he glanced at her.
“Go on,” she said softly.
He wanted to drag her into his arms and never let her go again. “Will you be all right until I get back?”
“Yes. I’m going to be fine, Brock.” Her smile was somehow sorrowful. Her hands trembled as she reached out to take light hold of his. She kissed him, a fleeting graze of her lips across his. “You don’t have to worry about me now. Do what you need to do.”
“We have to get rolling,” Niko pressed. “This place needs to be cleared before any curious humans start sniffing around.”
Brock reluctantly agreed, stepping back from Jenna. She gave him a faint nod as he drew away another step.
He turned and strode toward the waiting Rover. As he got behind the wheel and started backing out to follow Rio in the other vehicle, part of him couldn’t help feeling as though the chaste kiss Jenna had given him was something more than good-bye.
It took Jenna and the others better than an hour to dispatch the dead Minions and clear the big old house of all traces of the battle that had occurred there. Hunter and Chase had since come and gone with the last of the rescued captives, leaving one of the Order’s SUVs for the cleanup team to drive back to the compound.
Jenna had worked in heavy silence, feeling tired and exhausted—emotionally drained—as she helped Alex roll up one of the bloodstained rugs and carry it out to the back of the Order’s vehicle.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Brock. Couldn’t stop dreading that she’d made a terrible mistake in letting him go to Newport with Corinne.
She wanted desperately to call him and urge him to come back.
But as much as she wanted to claim him for herself, she couldn’t be that unfair to him.
He had been granted a miracle tonight, and she would never dream of trying to take that away from him.
How often had she prayed for a second chance with Mitch and Libby after she’d lost them? How often had she wished their deaths had just been a cosmic mistake that could somehow be righted? How many times had she hoped beyond all hope for some impossible twist of fate that would bring back the love she’d lost?
She wondered now if she would still be able to make those prayers and wishes. She knew she couldn’t. To do so would be to negate all she felt for Brock, something that seemed even more impossible to her than a miraculous reversal of death.
But at the same time, she couldn’t ask Brock to make that kind of choice.
Even if it shattered her heart to let him go.
A wave of sadness rushed over her with the thought. She grabbed for the side of the Rover, her legs all but swept out from beneath her.
Alex was at her side in an instant. “Jen, are you okay?”
She nodded weakly, feeling suddenly more than empty inside. Her head spun, vision beginning to blur.
“Jenna?” Alex moved in front of her and sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh, my God. Jenna, you’re wounded.”
Dazed, she glanced down to where Alex was now unfastening her bloodstained coat. As the thick wool parted, she saw the terrible truth of what had her friend’s face turning white as a sheet.
Jenna’s mind flashed back to the Minion who’d crashed into her from out of the shadows in the cellar. She recalled the glint of something metallic in his hand. A knife, she guessed now, staring at the slick red blood that soaked her shirt and ran all the way down the side of her leg, dripping a dark pool in the snow beneath her feet.
“Kade, hurry!” Alex shouted, panic climbing into her voice. “Renata, Niko—somebody, please. Jenna’s been hurt!”
As the others rushed out of the house in response, Jenna’s world began to fade around her. She heard her friends speaking anxiously around her, but she couldn’t keep her eyes open. Couldn’t keep her legs from crumpling beneath her.
She let go of the vehicle and the heavy darkness pulled her under.
CHAPTER
Thirty-three
Andreas and Claire Reichen’s house in Newport was a hive of anxious activity as the rescued Breedmates arrived that evening and began to settle into the large estate on Narragansett Bay. Brock and Rio had been the first to get there. Hunter and Chase had arrived moments ago with the rest of the former captives and were in the process of bringing them inside.
“Unbelievable,” Reichen said, standing with Brock in the second-floor hallway of the seaside mansion. The German vampire and his New England–born Breedmate had been living in the house for only a few months, the newly mated couple having relocated to the States after surviving their own ordeal at the hands of Dragos and his dangerous allies. “Claire’s been haunted all this time by what she glimpsed during her dreamwalk through Dragos’s laboratory, but to actually see these women now, alive and out of danger after all this time … Christ, it’s overwhelming.”
Brock nodded, still in disbelief himself. “It was good of you and Claire to take them in.”
“We wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Both males turned as Claire came out of a bedroom carrying an armload of folded towels. Petite and beautiful, the dark-haired female had a glow about her as she strode into the hallway and met the approving gaze of her mate.
“I’ve been praying this day would come for a long time,” she said, her deep brown eyes shifting from Reichen to Brock. “I almost didn’t dare hope that we might actually succeed.”
“The work you and the rest of the Order’s women have done is beyond admirable,” he replied, certain that he would never forget the image of Jenna and the others guiding the freed captives out of the cheery-looking house that had been their most recent prison.
God, Jenna, he thought. She’d been on his mind the entire time. The only place he wanted to be right now was with her—to feel her safe and warm in his arms.
She’d been the reason he’d driven in silence from Gloucester to Rhode Island, tormented by the fact that Corinne had been dozing in the passenger seat beside him—impossibly alive, after so many years—yet every fiber of his being felt pulled inextricably back toward Boston.
Back to Jenna.
But he couldn’t just walk away from Corinne. He owed her more than that. Because of him, because of his carelessness in protecting her, she’d been yanked away from everything she knew, forced to endure unspeakable torture at Dragos’s hands. Because of him, her life had been shattered.
How could he simply ignore all of that and go back to the happiness he’d found with Jenna?
As if conjured by the weight of his dark thoughts alone, he felt Corinne’s presence behind him.
Reichen and Claire said nothing as they both glanced past him, then turned to walk away together, leaving him alone to face the ghost of his past failures.
She was bathed and dressed in clean clothing. But God, she was still so small and fragile. The long-sleeved fleece top and yoga pants hung loosely off her tiny frame. Her cheeks were pale and gaunt. Dark circles rose beneath her once-sparkling, almond-shaped eyes.
With her raven hair pulled back in a long ponytail, he could see that she had aged since he’d last seen her at eighteen. Although the passage of years would put her in her nineties now, Corinne looked closer to thirty. Only the regular ingestion of Breed blood would have preserved her youth, and Brock was appalled to imagine the circumstances of how those feedings might have occurred while she was in Dragos’s terrible labs.
“Jesus, Corinne,” he murmured, moving toward her when she remained frozen and silent a few feet away from him in the upstairs hall. “I don’t even know where to begin.”
Small nicks and scars blemished the face that had been so flawless in his memory. Her eyes were still exotic, still bold enough that they didn’t flinch—not
even under his stricken scrutiny—but there was an edge to her gaze now. Gone was the playful imp, the sweet innocent. In her place stood a quiet, calculating survivor.
He reached out to touch her, but she backed away with a small shake of her head. He let his hand drop, fist hanging at his side. “Ah, Christ, Corinne. Can you ever forgive me?”
Her slim brows knitted slightly. “No …”
Her softly voiced denial blasted him deeply. He deserved it, he knew, and he could hardly say a word in his own defense. He’d failed her. Perhaps more than if she had died all those years ago. Death would have been better than what she’d likely endured while imprisoned by a sick bastard like Dragos.
“I am sorry,” he murmured, determined to get the words out even though she was mutely shaking her head, her frown deepening. “I know my apology doesn’t mean anything now. It doesn’t change a damned thing for you, Corinne … but I want you to know that a day hasn’t gone by that I didn’t think about you and wish that I had been there. I wish I could have traded places with you, my life instead of yours—”
“No,” she said, her voice stronger than before. “No, Brock. Is that what you thought? That I blamed you for what happened to me?”
He stared, astounded by the lack of anger in her eyes. “You have every right to blame me. I was supposed to protect you.”
Her dark gaze went a little sad now. “You did. No matter how impossible I was, you always kept me safe.”
“Not that night,” he reminded her grimly.
“That night, I don’t know what happened,” she murmured. “I don’t know who took me, but there was nothing you could do, Brock. You were never to blame. I never wanted you to think that.”
“I looked everywhere for you, Corinne. For weeks, months … years after they pulled the body from the river—your body, I thought—I kept looking for you.” He sucked in a sharp breath. “I never should have let you out of my sight that night, not even for a second. I failed—”