by Amelia Jade
“Heard that,” came the call from the other room.
Erika expelled air from her nose in something not quite a snort, not quite a sigh.
“Anyway,” she continued. “You need to talk to Gray. Alone. Explain everything. Tell him that nothing happened with Jacen, that he was just visiting. Don’t hold anything back, tell him the whole truth, and let him decide for himself what he wants to do.”
Kelly looked away. “What if he decides he still doesn’t want anything?”
Erika gave her a “are you stupid?” look. “Well if that’s the case, is he really the type of man that A, you thought he was, and B, that you would want to be with?”
She rocked back in the seat. “I…I honestly hadn’t ever thought of it that way to be honest,” she said. “But I guess that makes a hell of a lot of sense, doesn’t it? If he won’t believe me, then why would I want to pursue things with him into more serious territory?”
“Exactly,” Erika said. “Which is why talking to him straight is probably your best bet, as much as it pains me to admit it.”
“Oh come on, I’m not that terrible,” Harden complained from the other room. “I can give good advice too, you know. You don’t have a monopoly on that.”
Erika grinned. “It’s true. He does give good advice, and he knows male shifters better than we do as well. If he says straight-up talk to him is the best thing to do, then that’s what I’d do.”
Kelly sighed. “Yeah. I suppose that’s the next step then, isn’t it?” She nodded mostly to herself. “Go home, shower and get my bearings, then hunt his ass down and drop some truth on his ass. See how he handles it.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Erika said.
“Yeah, me too,” she agreed.
Neither of them moved.
“I really wish I could have a glass of wine right now,” she complained a minute later.
Erika smiled. “Want some apple juice?”
The two women laughed.
***
Kelly got out of the cab, pocketing the change the driver had given her and heading down the pathway. The winding pathway that served as a road between the buildings of the complex that housed the women’s units had a single entry and exit point, and her building was near the end. It was much faster to get dropped off on the side of one of the more “main” streets and walk through the buildings and cut across the complex. The fact that it was cheaper as well played a huge factor. Kelly didn’t have much money to spare, so she needed to be careful how she spent what she did have.
Eating several days straight at Harden’s place had given her the extra money to afford the cab ride back without really affecting her budget, which was nice. Kelly spent a moment envying her friend’s newfound life, and the relative wealth it had given her. She knew Harden had come from his homeland of Kronum with next to nothing to his name, but the Koche brothers had banded together to provide him enough to buy his property and build a house on it. In fact, they were doing that for the other shifters that Gray had rescued as well, providing them all with funds to start off a life in Cloud Lake.
There was a dark part of her that hoped Gray would understand her situation and let her back into his life, because she knew if things worked out between them, that he would be able to help provide her with a much nicer life than the one she was living just then. Kelly didn’t often let that part of her mind out, instead keeping it locked deeply away, but she wouldn’t have been human if she didn’t admit it was a nice thing to think about.
She walked between two of the buildings, the two-story-high walls closing in around her. The little paths between the rear of buildings weren’t much more than five feet wide, giving a very narrow, almost claustrophobic feel to her journey. Kelly normally tried to avoid taking them, but she was ready to do what needed to be done now, and she was afraid if she delayed any longer than necessary, her courage would begin to fade. So it was home to shower and change into some fresh clothes, and then make her way over to the embassy, which would use up even more of her meager funds.
Still, it couldn’t be helped either way, so she resolved to spend the money and walk through the maze of pathways to get to her own building as fast as she could. Not long after she entered the huge complex, a feeling settled between her shoulder blades. An uncomfortable sort of pressure, as if someone were digging two fingers into the muscles on either side of her spine and pressing. Not hard enough to hurt, but enough to feel an odd discomfort. It was something she’d experienced before.
Someone was watching her.
Glancing over her shoulder, Kelly looked around, trying to see what it was. Perhaps it was just another one of the women who lived there making their way through the paths. That would be her most hoped for resolution.
There was nobody in sight, however, so she kept walking, trying to increase her pace as much as the extra added weight in her stomach would allow. Speedwalking had never been Kelly’s thing, and even now she strained to gain more speed in a desperate attempt to make it home. All she wanted was to have the door close behind her and feel secure in her own home once more.
Somewhere nearby, something scraped on stone.
Chapter Twenty
Gray
Two days.
That’s how long he’d been standing on guard for. Patrolling the complex.
We really need a name for this, he thought. Something better than “the complex” or “the women’s buildings.” Most designed places like this have names for them, don’t they? Little miniature neighborhoods all to themselves. We’ll have to come up with something.
He added it to his to-do list, though it was pretty close to the bottom. A lot of things had priority just then. Like finding this creeper that Kelly knew.
Or talking to Kelly.
Even the thought of her made his heart ache, his stomach turn inside out, and his limbs quiver with pain. Gray wanted nothing more than to sit down and speak with her, to figure out what had gone wrong, why she’d felt the need to see someone else besides him. And most importantly, to figure out why she hadn’t told him.
That was perhaps the worst of it all. The betrayal. If Kelly had decided she didn’t want to see him, then there would have been nothing Gray could do about it. The news would have been devastating, but he knew it was something he would have had to accept. To deal with. To get over, in time. She was a grown woman, and human at that, which meant she didn’t feel the call of a mate the way he did.
It hadn’t been a simple case of a breakup, however. Instead, she’d simply been seeing another man, without telling him. One who had been in her house late at night, without any signs of forced entry. In other words, he’d been invited inside. Only Gray’s arrival had stopped things from progressing any further, but he knew it was unlikely that had been the first time. The other shifter’s reaction had not been one of unease. He’d felt comfortable around Kelly, and that meant they’d interacted before in the past.
None of which was helping him feel any better.
Nor was the fact that he’d barely eaten in the past two days either. Most of his time had been spent patrolling the pathways between buildings, observing the surrounding streets, and even taking his bear on repeated strolls through the nearby wilderness, both to alleviate some of his stress, but also in an attempt to catch the scent of his quarry.
It irked Gray that he’d been so blinded by Kelly’s actions that he hadn’t put everything together. For close to a year now he’d been Andrew’s right-hand man, helping to oversee the rebuilding of Cloud Lake from the damage it had suffered during the Cadian war with its former rival shifter territory Fenris. After that, he’d helped to plan and build the complex within which he now stalked. Despite all that, he’d still managed to stay atop all the arrivals to Cadia, of all the faces of the few dozen shifters who’d been allowed to visit.
He hadn’t attempted to do so with all the construction crews. Hundreds of faces were beyond him, and besides, there had been other men appointed to do that
. Gray supposed that this could just be a rogue shifter from one of those crews, who had been eking out a living in the town, only to reveal himself recently to Kelly. It was possible of course, but he doubted that was the truth.
There was no doubt in his mind that it was the runaway, the shifter who had escaped Armen Cardiff’s facility. It just fit too well. Unfortunately, Andrew had destroyed the folder of information he’d procured, part of his agreement for getting it in the first place. Gray had the picture of the man memorized, but the shifter he’d battled had longer hair and a beard, obscuring many of his features. It was close enough that he was fairly positive it was the same one, however.
“Hey!”
He spun at the shout, to see a woman standing at the back of her little unit, leaning against the wall. His upper lip curled back in a sneer as he saw her holding a lit cigarette in one hand, the other resting a can of what he dearly hoped was soda on her protruding stomach.
“Can I help you?” he asked as politely as possible.
“Yeah. You can go away. You aren’t allowed to be here!” she shouted at him imperiously, as if she were an officer of the law.
Gray gave her a long, flat look. “How do you know that?”
His look, stance, and tone had all been designed to provoke a response. It wasn’t right, he knew that. Gray was supposed to be the bigger man in this sort of situation. It wouldn’t have been hard at all for him to describe what he was doing there and who he was. Instead, he’d done all he could to piss her off.
The woman blinked several times in response. “You can’t be here! I’m calling the embassy. They’ll come and deport your ass back to whatever place you came from.”
“Deport?” he asked, speaking the question out loud more from surprise than anything.
“Yeah, back to that shifter territory,” she said, pointing in the opposite direction of Cadia. “Acadia or whatever.”
Gray carefully closed his eyelids before rolling his eyes. “Oh, I see.”
“Yep. They have guards who will come hunt you down and take you away,” she threatened.
“I’m so glad this is what my money is going to support,” he said dryly, just quiet enough she couldn’t hear.
“What’s that? Are you talking back to me?” she snapped.
“Oh for…” He growled. “Listen, lady. I am allowed to be here. But if you don’t like it, you go ahead and call the embassy. Ask them who they’ll send to stop me. I guarantee it’ll be a shifter named Gray. Then, after that, you can tell them who the person they’re coming to stop is.”
She stared at him for a moment, unsure of how to respond. “Oh yeah?” she said at last. “And who are you?”
Gray started to walk away, passing her on her right. “My name is Gray,” he said, then strode away, fighting the urge to break something. Anything, really.
The woman didn’t respond. Part of him hoped she had gone to call the embassy. That way they could deal with her dumb ass. Seriously, smoking and drinking while pregnant? Didn’t she know how bad it was for her? The answer was probably “Yes, but she doesn’t care, or doesn’t know how to stop.” The unfortunate part of the Institute’s plan was that to get the number of women necessary to see their plan through till the end, they’d had to round up a lot of women who came from poor areas, areas of low education and high crime rate. Women who either didn’t know better, or just didn’t care.
She wasn’t the first woman he’d seen smoking, though to his knowledge she was the first to be drinking. And at such an early hour too. Gray didn’t have much hope for that woman’s baby, but he wasn’t sure what he could do about it either. Intervening in her life wasn’t his right. She hadn’t reached out to him for help, so who was he to go and tell her that she was ruining her child’s life? All it would have earned him was a slap in the face. Some people were, unfortunately, not helpable.
Nor was she the first person to accost him, to threaten him with calling the authorities. For the most part the other women had believed him when he’d told them who he was. Then again, he also hadn’t been a dick to most of them either, so that had probably helped. Oops. But his patience was reaching its end.
After nearly two days of hunting the grounds, he hadn’t found a single sign of his quarry, and was beginning to feel hopeless. He’d screwed up, and now the man had gotten away. Perhaps he wasn’t sticking around; maybe he and Kelly had left town, headed off to who knows where. After all, he hadn’t seen her around either, hadn’t caught her scent when he’d gone by her unit. Either she hadn’t left it in over two days, or she just wasn’t there anymore.
He passed by the stairs leading up to her unit one more time, still without any new trace of her scent. His eyes saw where repair work had hastily been done to the lower unit to fix the damage done during his brief fight with the other shifter. Gray felt a twinge of regret for the other occupants, who must have been terrified.
His stomach grumbled. Gray hadn’t eaten much in those two days, and his system was telling him that needed to change, and now. There was a little sandwich shop that had opened up nearby, to service the newfound population of the area, as well as the other visitors to the complex who might be hungry. He headed there now, knowing he was likely to make a large dent in their supplies.
It hit him when he crossed between two buildings near the outskirts of the complex, cutting through the back pathway between them. A scent that he recognized. It was strong, and fresh. He whirled, testing the air repeatedly to determine which way it was going. Once he had it locked in Gray took off, lunch all but forgotten about.
After two days, he’d finally gotten a hit. He wasn’t about to let them get away.
Not this time!
Chapter Twenty-One
Kelly
The noise came from behind her, and she spun to face it, taking a deep breath in and preparing to scream if need be.
There was nothing there. Again. Just empty space, the buildings and a sky that was filled with dreary gray clouds. It was nearing the end of September, and though the weather had been phenomenal until then, it was starting to turn rapidly. Snow and winter would be there soon enough.
Exasperated at her imagination for making her hear things, Kelly turned back around and promptly screamed.
“Dammit!” she snapped a moment later as her brain caught up to her reaction, cutting the noise off abruptly. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she spat out. “Sneaking up on me like that?”
A pair of windows nearby popped open, heads sticking out.
“It’s fine!” she shouted, waving back at them. “He just startled me, that’s all.”
Whether it truly was fine was yet to be determined, but Kelly had never thought she would be in any danger from Gray.
“Seriously, I’m pregnant. Big surprises like that are not welcome,” she finished crossly, glaring at him.
Gray held up his hands. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to do that. That’s why I ran around to get in front of you, so that I wouldn’t walk up on you from behind and scare you.” He sort of deflated. “I was trying to make sure I didn’t.”
Kelly immediately felt bad. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Gray just sort of nodded. Neither of them said anything as they stood there, just sort of staring at one another, but not doing anything. It was awkward. Teenage-first-love-on-a-TV-show awkward. Cringey to the point where someone changed the channel. It was the only way she could describe the feeling between the two of them.
Both of them wanted to speak, to say how they were feeling, but neither of them was willing to be the first to speak up. Kelly, for her part, was caught off guard. She hadn’t expected to see Gray there. She’d been ready to confront him in a bit at his embassy. Now that he was in front of her though, having tracked her down, she felt off guard and unprepared.
Gray looked thoroughly unhappy with the situation as well. Like a dog that had caught up to its first porcupine, only to realize that it was in way over its head. He just stood
there, and if he had been younger, she could have imagined him toeing the dirt with one foot.
Which meant that it would be up to her then, to sort things out. A beast in a fight Gray might be, but when it came to her, he seemed to lose some of his edge. That was probably a good thing overall, but just then it meant that she had the uncomfortable job of starting this all off. So she did. In the easiest, most cop-out manner she could.
“We should probably talk,” she said, then fell silent.
There. Now the ball was in his court. He had to respond to her, to be the one to take the next step. No matter what it was, for just a moment, the pressure had been taken off her. Maybe it would spur him into movement, into action.
“Yes,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I think we should.”
Kelly felt her gut tighten around her child at the tone of his voice. Her heart wept at the pain in his eyes, the way his easy grin and the sparkle to his blue eyes had disappeared, brought low by her actions and his perceived meaning behind them. It hurt to see, and she longed to just tell him. To say what had truly been going on.
So why don’t you?
It was a good question. They were here, now. They needed to talk.
“Look, Gray, about what happened…” she began, but stopped as he shook his head and raised one hand, palm outward, to indicate she should stop.
“Not here,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere a little more private, and then we can discuss it all.”
“Of course,” she said. “I guess my place, if that’s going to be okay?”
Gray hesitated, and it looked for a moment that he was going to suggest somewhere else, but in the end he just shrugged and said, “Okay.”
They set off, walking side by side through the maze of units as they approached hers. Neither of them spoke a word to each other, making the moment even more uncomfortable than it had to be. It wasn’t helped by the way their hands seemed to just sway close toward each other, as if something deep inside both of them was trying to get them to hold hands. On more than one occasion she had to forcibly pull her hand back to her side, lest it brush against his and start something that maybe it shouldn’t.