“The man’s been pining over you for forever. He looks like a damn puppy dog every time he sees you. Hell, when he danced with you at Jace’s wedding I thought he was one kneel shy of a proposal himself.”
“Is this string of babbling nonsense going somewhere?”
“Yeah. What the hell did you do to make him act like that?”
“Nothing. Random and I are not involved, Meredith. We never have been, and we never will be.” The roar of an arriving, armored SUV was music to Valkyrie’s ears, and she set off down the steps to talk to the security team’s leader. “Have a good night, Meredith. Or don’t. I don’t really give a damn.”
“You know, one day you’re going to wake up and realize it sucks not having any real friends. Trust me, I know. When that day comes, you know where to find me.”
“If I’m your best option for a real friend,” Valkyrie called back, “then you’re more pathetic than I am.”
“Oh, fuck you, Val.”
“Right back at you, Mer.” For good measure, she flipped her off.
Valkyrie had friends. She did. She had her brother, Jace. His wife, Siren. She couldn’t possibly need more than two.
2
Valkyrie’s empty kitchen greeted her when she stumbled into it, peeling off clothes tacky with drying blood, leaving a trail from the door to the kitchen. The blood had ceased bothering her a long time ago, and it wasn’t what bothered her now, wasn’t the reason she just stopped in the middle of the kitchen in her underwear and stared at the stove.
The skillet sat atop it, spatula resting against its side, gathering dust. She might as well throw them in the trash. Random was never coming back to use them, and goddess knew she couldn’t cook worth a damn.
Her chest constricted, a painful tightening that stole her breath. Here, alone, she could admit that the way Random had walked past her earlier without acknowledgment had hurt. Even if it was her fault. Because she’d lied to Meredith. She hadn’t done nothing to make him treat her like that.
It had been two weeks. Two weeks since Jace’s wedding, two weeks since she’d told Random—
She shook her head. There was no point in reliving it. She had carefully curated the words she’d spoken that day to achieve precisely this result: an empty kitchen. She pulled a Dos Equis from the fridge and pointedly ignored the stove. If she didn’t look at it she could almost see him there, bronze skin and dark hair, those chocolate brown eyes with their perpetual undercurrent of laughter.
If she saw Random, she didn’t have to think about the man she’d killed tonight. If she heard Random whistling, she didn’t have to think about the fact that she wasn’t any closer to finding Danvers or her father.
Now that Random was gone, now that he was never coming back, she could admit how much she’d liked having him here. She came home with the dawn most mornings, and in the safety of the garage she could smile at Random’s motorcycle, lounging in the space next to hers as if it had every right to be there, despite the fact she’d never invited him and he didn’t have a remote to her garage.
But then, Random didn’t need anything as mundane as a remote. Unlike the power that ran in her veins and every other Aspecter’s, Random’s Aspect was just that: random. He was an anomaly, and no one really understood how his Aspect worked. When he’d been a child, his guardian had point-blank refused to allow anyone to, “Study him like some test subject.” No one argued with the Queen of Death. No one called Random’s great aunt that to her face, either. Not if they wanted to keep breathing.
If Random himself understood how his power worked, he’d never shared the secret. So it had been nice to find him here every morning and pretend it was because no ward or lock could ever keep him out of somewhere he wanted to be. Nice, to pretend he actually wanted to be here when she knew he’d shown up each morning out of a misplaced sense of guilt.
She’d let it go on for far too long, might have let it go on even longer if he hadn’t pushed her at the wedding. Thank the goddess he’d pushed her. She’d snapped and pushed back and now he was gone. No more mornings making her breakfast, no more texts, no more contact.
He was gone, he was away from her, so he was safe.
She would need to find someone to scrub her records with the phone company, of course, erase any traceable evidence of his contact with her just in case all her plans went sideways. Just in case she failed.
And where the hell was she going to find the money to do that, now she didn’t have a job? If the mortgage didn’t pull directly out of her father’s accounts, she’d be homeless by now.
She supposed she could always start pawning off the family antiques. Her father would beat her bloody for it, but what did it matter? A year out from under his control had given her perspective. It was time to plan. Her brother’s decision to sell his place in Portland and stay in Seclusion permanently had cemented matters. If her father came back, he would use Jace against her. He’d done it once before, and she was never living like that again. She was going to solve the problem of Elijah Winters once and for all. She just had to find the damn man first.
But her father was proving to be just as elusive as the mysterious Danvers.
She pulled a frozen lasagna dinner from the freezer and popped it into the toaster oven, thinking longingly of one of Random’s omelets. The man was an artist in the kitchen. She left the lasagna to heat, nursing the beer in the shower while she scrubbed blood off her skin. It swirled down the drain in mud-red eddies, but even once the water ran clear, she didn’t think she would ever be clean.
If she’d believed in souls she would have said hers was stained with blood—her own, other peoples’, other things’. In the end, she was as much a made creature as any Dark Aspect construct she’d ever hunted.
She drained the last of the beer and contemplated the empty bottle. Her father had never allowed her to drink, except at formal functions. Alcohol interfered with training. Alcohol made a person slow and lazy and weak.
He’d been gone for three months before she’d had the guts to break that rule. That first sip had set her entire body to trembling, her blood racing through her on a wave of fear-spiked adrenaline.
Twenty-nine years old and still doing what her father told her. Twenty-nine years old and still living in her father’s house. She knew what everyone thought of her—that she’d never grown out of being Daddy’s Little Girl. They liked to whisper it behind her back at Society functions—there goes poor, pathetic Valkyrie, no life of her own and trying so hard to please Elijah, thinking one day it might make up for the fact she isn’t her father’s biological daughter.
Her own brother thought it, though Jace likely left out poor and pathetic even in his internal thoughts. He didn’t have a cruel bone in his body. So she had let him think it, because so long as he kept thinking it, he was safe.
She walked back into the kitchen just as the toaster oven dinged. She pulled the cardboard tray out to reveal the unappetizing lump of soggy noodles and tomato sauce passing itself off as food. She’d never minded the frozen dinners before. She’d never noticed them before.
Damn Random for getting her used to things she had known wouldn’t last. She still wasn’t sure why he’d tried so hard to convince her that he wanted something more than the one night they’d had together. Well, she did know the reason, and it was stupid. Which was why, when he’d shown up in her kitchen months ago and told her he was going to make her breakfast every day until she agreed to marry him, she’d known it was bullshit.
Random wasn’t the marrying type. He wasn’t even the dating type. He was the thanks-for-a-good-time type. Valkyrie had no interest in trying to make a person go against their nature, but when he’d kept showing up, morning after morning, a tiny, stupid part of her had liked it. Liked that for a few minutes she wasn’t alone in this obscenely large house. Liked that it was him making her feel not alone.
She poked at her soggy lasagna. The overheated sauce hissed as a trapped air bubble escaped, sending a
splatter of red to land on a gold envelope lying on the kitchen island. A gold envelope that hadn’t been there when she’d gone to shower.
She stiffened and dropped her fork, trading it for her dagger even though her instincts whispered that the kitchen, the house, was empty.
Instincts could lie as easily as people.
She swept the kitchen and the surrounding rooms, found them empty. Sweeping the entire house was pointless. It was enormous, and it would be all too easy for an intruder to slip through rooms one step ahead of her. The wards that were sunk into every inch of the house, into the grounds, whispered that everything was fine, fine, fine.
Everything was not fine. She took the envelope—she recognized it as one of the ones she’d sent the Gathering Ball invitations in months ago—and pulled out the very short note inside.
You want your father. I want something too. Meet me at Savado’s at ten tonight. You’ll recognize me.
Danvers, she thought. It has to be Danvers.
Her obsession with finding the Illusion Aspecter who liked to run human experiments had its roots sunk into so many portions of her life it bordered on the absurd. Danvers had altered her sister-in-law Siren’s Aspect and nearly killed her, but long before that, his first experiment had been Valkyrie’s mother, Evelyn. He had kidnapped Evelyn, tortured her, broken her, and when Elijah Winters had rescued her—the only good thing, in Valkyrie’s opinion, that Elijah had ever done—she had been pregnant. With Valkyrie.
The dots connected all too easily, and Valkyrie did her best not to think about them. To make sure that when she thought the words, my father, she thought of Elijah. A missing father who, according to Siren, was in Danvers’ captivity. She needed to track him down, deal with him before he found a way out of Danvers’ clutches and unleashed himself on the world, on her, again. She needed to take Danvers out at the same time.
Because the nightmare had to stop. She had to be able to make a decision without jumping at every shadow. She needed freedom. And the only way she was ever going to have it was if her fathers, biological and adoptive, were finally dead.
She stared at the letter, not quite daring to believe it was in her hands. She’d been hunting Danvers for months, and now he was hand-delivering messages to her kitchen and then slinking off without a trace?
Why not simply confront her here? Sure, she would be at an advantage in her home territory, with the property’s wards to bolster her. Except this letter was proof that he could circumnavigate her wards, without her knowledge, and that—that didn’t make any sense.
If Danvers really did have Elijah then maybe, maybe, Elijah had given him a way to slip through the wards. But Valkyrie doubted it. Elijah wasn’t the type of man who broke. He was the type that did the breaking.
Which left only one person who could enter her home without her knowing about it. She couldn’t imagine Random doing this, didn’t know what the point would be. If he’d wanted to talk to her, he could have done that last night.
If this was some sort of emotional revenge, hitting her where he knew it would hurt, well, she couldn’t see him doing that either. It was petty, and the Random she knew wasn’t petty. But she had to be sure. Because the consequences of her being wrong were too monumental to leave the matter to chance.
Random loosened his tie. His Aspect snugged it back up. He loosened it again and dared his power to do something about it. Some days, he wished he had some banal branch of Aspect like a water or wind affinity, some placid little power that would answer his call when he bid it to and shut the hell up when he didn’t.
Instead, he got a jack-of-all-trades Aspect that did what it wanted eight times out of ten, and apparently wanted him to look presentable even when he didn’t give a damn. He’d been awake since one-thirty in the morning making sure two worried fathers and their terrified children weren’t going to be separated from each other. If he wanted to loosen his damn tie, he would.
Coffee. Coffee would solve all of his problems. He stood, ignoring the little pings from his Aspect telling him to stay here, stay right here. He’d been letting his Aspect drag him this way and that for the last year and where had it gotten him?
Nowhere good, that was for sure.
In the reception area, he threw his assistant a dazzling smile. “Would you like a coffee?”
Mrs. Harringford, a trim brunette in her early fifties, merely raised her reusable travel mug and went back to clacking away at her computer. When she’d applied for the position, he hadn’t hired her because her skill set, job history, and references were stellar, even though they were. He’d had a dozen applicants with perfect resumes. He’d hired her because she was completely, utterly immune to him.
He smiled, she frowned. He charmed, she grew bored. It was delightfully refreshing and he still hadn’t tired of it. Even if she did seem to think he had an unhealthy relationship with espresso.
The small suite where Random kept his law office was situated on Seclusion’s Main Street, six stores down from the local coffee shop, Rise and Grind. He quickened his pace as he walked to it, gritting his teeth against the annoying and increasingly insistent pings of his Aspect insisting he return to the office.
He didn’t want to return to the office, he wanted to have coffee. Exquisitely made, delicious coffee. The second he stepped into the shop and the pretty brunette at the end of the line turned and zeroed in on him, he wished he’d listened to his damn Aspect.
He just hadn’t thought it was actually trying to help him in a way he wanted. Typically, when his Aspect was as irritating as it was right now, it was because it was trying to drag him headfirst toward Valkyrie Winters. Since he’d recently sworn to have nothing more to do with the woman, he hadn’t been inclined to listen. Apparently, it had actually been trying to keep him out of the path of Lauren Hale, and he now felt like he owed his power an apology.
Lauren turned a blinding smile on him. “Random.”
He found a smile and managed a, “Lauren,” in return.
Lauren was stunningly pretty, with big doe eyes that presented the false impression that she was sweet. She was a shark in a summer dress, a social climber who had nothing more to worry about than what to spend her mother’s money on. She was the type of woman who went for unattainable men simply to prove that she could obtain them. The harder to catch, the more interesting. Random, never once having been in an actual relationship, was apparently the ultimate challenge.
He was under no illusion she had any real interest in him, specifically. It was simply that he had a playboy reputation, and she didn’t like being left out of the loop. If she could make him date her for a couple weeks, even better.
More than once, he’d contemplated just sleeping with her and getting it out of the way, so she’d decide he was no longer interesting and move on. Unfortunately for him, despite the many rumors to the contrary, he was actually quite selective about the women he slept with. Admittedly, in his early years he might have been thoughtlessly hurtful out of sheer stupidity, but he liked to think he’d gotten a handle on his situation relatively soon.
The situation was this: he’d always been hopelessly in love with Valkyrie Winters, whom he could never have, and he had no interest in anything serious with anyone else. The solution was simple: have fun with women who also only wanted to have fun. He was the perfect rebound man and the lifestyle had always suited him just fine.
Until Valkyrie had made him think he could have her. Until he’d spent the last year chasing her only to have her shove him off a cliff at the end of the race.
“So what do you think?” Lauren asked him. She’d been talking, but his brain had been a million miles away.
“About what?”
She laughed, soft and delicate. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?” Her words were teasing, but irritation showed at the corners of her eyes. She was used to getting her way, to being pandered to, and she didn’t like being ignored.
“Guilty,” he answered. “Long ni
ght.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t be up for another one, then?”
Oh, for goddess sake. “Of being dragged out of bed at one in the morning to help clients who are afraid their children are going to be taken away from them through no fault of their own? I’d rather not, but if necessary, I will.”
That shut her up for all of the time it took both of them to order, after which she chattered on brightly while he prayed for the barista to screw up her order so he could sneak out while she was yelling at the poor bastard. It didn’t happen, and he received the message from his Aspect loud and clear: he’d ignored it earlier, and it wouldn’t be helping him now.
He’d once tried to explain to his best friend, Jace, that living with his Aspect was like having a completely separate entity inside him, one whose feelings were easily hurt. Jace hadn’t believed him, but the fact he now had to walk back to his office with Lauren keeping step beside him was living proof of his Aspect’s vindictive nature.
He actually had to stop at the door to his office and face her to keep her from following him in. “Have a good day,” he told her. Somewhere else. Anywhere else.
“Actually, I need some advice. Legal advice.”
He muttered a litany of curses in his head in Spanish. Spanish was a great deal better for cursing than English, and though his mother had never been interested in teaching him the language, his Aunt Ella had made sure he’d understood that half of his heritage.
“I have a client now,” he lied. “But my assistant can make you an appointment.”
“Oh, well, it’s very personal. Maybe we could discuss it over dinner, or—”
“Things don’t get much more personal than lawyer-client confidentiality, Ms. Hale. If you change your mind, Mrs. Harringford can make you an appointment during my office hours.”
He escaped into his office suite and closed the door behind him. Maybe he would take the rest of the day off. He didn’t actually have a client and he’d kept his case load low of late, only taking the cases from people who really needed his help and sending the others to colleagues well able to handle them.
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