Valkyrie's Call

by Michelle Manus

  Why did he torture himself like this?

  He climbed into the passenger side of her Jeep. Apparently he was only allowed to drive it if she was unconscious. She’d been very clear on that fact when he’d tried to wheedle the keys from her after she insisted she needed to go pack her things right now if she was going to stay at his house.

  The sooner they got off this property, the better. He didn’t like being here, didn’t like Kyrie being here now that she’d told him about the vulnerabilities she’d purposefully left in the estate’s wards.

  Bait. She’d been playing bait for months, had admitted as much. He could have lost her at any moment and he’d never have even known it was coming.

  He drummed his fingers on the dashboard and stared at the closed front door. As much as he was bothered that she’d intentionally left herself open to danger, what really bothered him, what he kept circling back to, was who she’d been playing bait for. Because no matter how he tried to twist the facts in his head to fit together, they did not lead back to Danvers.

  Valkyrie hadn’t been looking for Danvers for the last year. She’d been looking for her father—obsessively looking for him—since before she’d even met Siren, before she’d had any idea who Danvers was, much less had reason to suspect he’d have her father.

  No, everything, every stray detail, circled back to Elijah Winters. To the fact there’d been no sign that he’d gone missing under suspicious circumstances. He’d simply dropped off the map. As if he’d chosen to leave. Whenever Random had pointed out that fact, whenever he’d pushed her, trying to understand why she couldn’t accept that the man had probably just blown a fuse and abandoned her, she’d always answered that she needed to find him.

  Not that she wanted to find him. Not that she wanted him home, or needed to know he was safe. No, it was always, unerringly, that she needed to find him. And there was that little fact that before Jace had left for his honeymoon, he’d said he was certain there was something about their father Valkyrie wasn’t telling him.

  Random glanced at the front door again. Valkyrie didn’t appear likely to walk out it any time soon. He dug his phone out of his pocket and had to call four times before Siren picked up.

  “Is anyone dead, dying, or likely to be either in the next hour?” she asked.

  “Not technically, no.”

  “Then I am hanging up.”

  “You wouldn’t really hang up on me, would you, darling? What if I’m in an emotionally dark place and I need a friend?”

  “Are you?” she asked suspiciously.

  You have no idea, he thought. “No more than usual, I suppose.”

  “Random,” she growled, “I am on my honeymoon.”

  “You’re at the end of week two of a month-long honeymoon. You can take one phone call.”

  She huffed out a breath. “Okay. Fine. What do you need?”

  “I can’t just be calling to see how you’re doing? Wondering if you’re bored of Jace yet and realizing his much handsomer, much more entertaining best friend is still single and available?”

  He felt her roll her eyes from an ocean away. “Please. You may be single, but you have never been available. Jace and I are very, very happy. And if you don’t tell me why you called in the next thirty seconds I will begin to explain, in graphic detail, the numerous inventive ways Jace and I have had sex since tying the knot.”

  “You wouldn’t be that cruel.” He assuredly did not want descriptive details of his best friend’s sex life. Some things a man was just better off not knowing about another man.

  “You know how we’re renting a place on the beach, and Jace has an elemental affinity for water? You would not believe the incredible, mind-blowing things he can—”

  “La-la-la, okay, you win. I called because I need to talk to Jace.”

  “Why didn’t you call him?”

  “One, he would never have picked up. You’re an easier target. Two, I sort of promised someone that I wouldn’t call Jace, but I never promised not to talk to him, so I called you.”

  “You promised, huh? Can I assume that means you and Valkyrie are hanging out? Have you two done it yet?”

  “Geez, Siren,” Jace’s voice cut in, “please do not talk about my sister like that in front of me.”

  Ha. Random had had a feeling Siren wouldn’t be able to resist putting him on speakerphone.

  “He lives,” Random said. “So tell me about this water thing.”

  “Random, if I live to be a hundred, I am never telling you how I fuck my wife.”

  “And thank the merciful goddess for it. Just had to make sure that was actually you, and Siren hadn’t run off with a handsome Irishman.”

  “As if,” Siren said. “So have you? Done it?”

  Random could already feel the beginnings of the migraine this conversation was certain to produce. “No, and we aren’t going to.”

  “Jace was supposed to tell you not to be subtle with her. Babe, did you tell him not to be subtle?”

  “I was about as unsubtle as a brick. She isn’t interested.” Leave it alone, Siren. Just leave it. He wasn’t in the mood to be pushed, not when he’d just had his mouth on Kyrie’s before she’d coolly stepped away from him like it was nothing.

  “No, she is. You must not have done things right. If you just—”

  Random’s temper got the better of him. “I realize it’s highly inconvenient for you, personally, that the love of my life has no feelings for me. I am very sorry that you are having to go through that disappointment right now.

  “Let me take this moment out of my own personal misery to assure you that I have tried every possible fucking thing. I have beat my head against the brick wall that is Valkyrie Winters and lost. She. Doesn’t. Want. Me.

  “Now that you have clear insight into my current emotional torment, can we move on from this topic?”

  A long ten seconds of silence greeted that rant before Siren responded, her voice barely a whisper, “I’m sorry. I’ll let you talk to Jace now.”

  He heard the shuffle of her standing, of the phone being handed off before it clicked off speaker.

  “I’m going to give you a pass because I understand how it feels to be in love and miserable about it. But Random? Don’t ever talk to my wife like that again.”

  He didn’t need Jace’s reprimand to feel like an asshole. He hadn’t meant to hurt Siren’s feelings. She hadn’t meant to set him off. She just wanted everyone to be happy. She’d spent the last six years of her life completely alone before she met Jace, and now that she’d claimed Random, Valkyrie, and Meredith as her family, she desperately wanted them all to be as happy as she was.

  And now that he’d been a jerk, he couldn’t ask her about the adnexus. Especially since it occurred to him that Jace must not have a clue about it—because Jace would have said something to him—and no way in hell was Random going to be responsible for the lover’s spat the airing of that secret was sure to create.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Tell it to her. I recommend accompanying it with apologetic cupcakes.”

  “Noted.”

  “So why are you bothering me on my honeymoon?”

  He almost told Jace to forget it, but he’d already called. “I had some questions about your father.” He swallowed. “You said you thought Valkyrie wasn’t telling you something? Any idea what that might be?”

  “Has something happened?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Is she in danger?”

  “No more than usual.”

  “Random.”

  “She will literally kill me, man.”

  “We’re coming home.”

  “No. Whatever you do, don’t do that. Unless you want to find my corpse buried in the backyard.” Random would bet good money Jace was pinching the bridge of his nose right now.

  “Do not let anything happen to my sister.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I p
romise. Just because things didn’t work out the way I wanted, it doesn’t change how I feel about her. Anything you would do for Siren, I’d do for Kyrie. I’ll keep her safe.”

  Jace exhaled heavily. “I’ll hold you to it.”

  “So about your dad?”

  “I can’t really explain it. Just a feeling that she knows something she isn’t telling me.”

  “I never really saw your dad much.” Random had spent a lot of time at Jace’s house while they were growing up, but Elijah Winters had been a busy man. He’d always been off somewhere, and more often than not, he’d taken Kyrie with him. The man had shown so little interest in his son that Random was still a little surprised he’d cared enough to go to the trouble of disowning him. “How would you describe his relationship with Kyrie?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did it seem like they had a happy father-daughter dynamic?”

  Jace couldn’t keep the incredulity from his voice. “You do remember my dad, right? He doesn’t have an affectionate bone in his body.”

  “And Kyrie?”

  “She was devoted to him. She did everything he ever asked.”

  “And you don’t think that’s a little odd? Your father is a complete ass. Kyrie’s almost thirty. And right up until the time he disappeared she was still doing every single damn thing he told her to. She had no life of her own.”

  “I didn’t think you’d be the type to judge her.”

  “I’m not judging her. I’m trying to understand.”

  Jace sighed. “You know it bothers her—where she came from. That he’s not her real father. She wanted his approval.”

  Movement caught Random’s peripheral vision. Kyrie stepped out of the house. For all she’d been up there an extra fifteen minutes, she only had one small bag packed.

  “Look, where are you going with this?” Jace asked.

  He was going down a dark road he hoped he was wrong about. “Nowhere. Look, I’ve gotta go. Enjoy the rest of the honeymoon.”

  “Ran—”

  Random hung up as Valkyrie tossed her bag into the back seat. His eyes followed her wrists, remembering the chains of Aspect he’d burned off her in the parking lot. So much had happened last night that he hadn’t thought about them enough, but now that he did, he found things didn’t quite add up.

  Valkyrie hadn’t been surprised by the chains. She hadn’t been curious about them. She hadn’t been infuriated by them. That lack of reaction didn’t mesh with what he knew of her. Her reaction to being slapped in magical handcuffs should have been to get pissed off, and then replay the entire event to determine exactly how it had happened so it could never happen to her again.

  Instead, when he’d asked, she’d just said she didn’t know how Danvers did it. Then she’d thanked him, thanked him, for breaking them. Valkyrie didn’t express gratitude. Certainly not for his help removing a few minutes of bondage.

  But a lifetime of it? He could see her being grateful for that.

  “Is there something wrong with my hand?” Valkyrie asked.

  “No.”

  “Then stop staring at it. I need to swing by Meredith’s.”

  Random raised an eyebrow. “I thought you two were only talking whenever you wanted to use her guilt over Jace to get her to do something for you.”

  “We are.”

  “What do you need from her?”

  “It’s personal.”

  “If it’s related to what’s going on, I need to know.”

  “It’s not. Like I said, it’s personal. I can drop you at your place on the way.”

  “No, you cannot. Are you going to make me reiterate the terms of our deal yet again?”

  She muttered something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like, “Bloody lawyers,” but when she pulled off the property, she took the turn that would lead them straight to Meredith’s rather than the one that would meander by his place first.

  9

  Valkyrie pulled into Meredith’s driveway, the Jeep’s rumbling idle a balm to the raw edges of her nerves. Meredith hadn’t answered the call button for the estate’s property gate, so Valkyrie had tried the code she’d used when they were kids.

  The code had worked and now here she sat, outside Meredith’s brilliantly white mansion, wondering why all of Aspect Society’s old families felt the need to spend their excessive wealth on abysmally large houses. Goddess knew she’d hated hers ever since she was a little girl. Hated it more when her mother died and her father let all of the staff go and it was just her and Jace, alone in that big empty house with their father, trying not to set him off.

  He’d been so angry after their mother died, and the rages he’d gone into...well. He might not be her biological father, but Valkyrie understood well enough where her temper came from. She’d kept Jace from most of it. She’d learned to pick up on all the little signals that told her when a rage was coming, and how bad it would be, so she could get Jace away. When they were kids, Jace would do almost anything she asked, and she’d become a master of coming up with on-the-fly tasks that needed to be done right then to get him out of the way.

  Except for when Elijah was using Jace as a lever to keep her in compliance, he could forget his son’s existence for long stretches at a time. Valkyrie hadn’t been able to stop the emotional damage Elijah had done to her brother, but she had stopped the physical. Oh, she hadn’t stopped him from lashing out—that was impossible. No amount of perfect behavior or excellence in training could truly please her father—but she could redirect that anger towards herself. So she had. She had made sure Jace never saw it, that he’d never known. That he never would know.

  “Did you want to talk to Meredith, or stare at her house?”

  She was too well-trained to actually startle, but her heart slammed into her chest at Random’s voice. She’d been so deep in her memories she’d forgotten he was even there. She looked into those fathomless brown eyes she could drown in and lost herself in a different memory, one that had started in this stupid Jeep a year ago.

  She’d foolishly picked him up after finding him broken down on the roadside. On the drive home, he’d been talking his usual line of seduction and she hadn’t been able to resist it anymore. She’d dared him to act on it. He had obliged. Part of her was still amazed she’d had the presence of mind to tell him to take her inside instead of climbing on top of him and taking him in the passenger seat.

  “I know I’m pretty, love, but is there a particular reason you’re staring at me?”

  “No.” Goddess, she was a mess. She twisted the key out of the ignition. “I don’t suppose you’ll stay in the car?”

  “Not a chance.”

  She slid out of the Jeep, booted feet landing on a sidewalk as blindingly white as the Townsend mansion. Did Meredith have the concrete power-washed every week?

  She walked up to the front door and hit the bell. It was a large house. It was reasonable that, depending on where Meredith was inside it, if she was even home, it could take her some time to reach the front door.

  Valkyrie didn’t care. She proceeded to jab the button over and over, continually restarting the annoying, chime-like tone she could hear on the other side of the wall.

  The door jerked open.

  “Touch that damn button one more time and you’ll find yourself eating every ugly truth you’ve ever run away from.” Meredith looked like she’d either just woken up or never gone to bed the previous evening. Her usual covering of flawless makeup was gone, and in its absence the dark shadows beneath her eyes showed prominently.

  “I need to talk to you.” Valkyrie swept inside. It had been a decade or so since she’d been inside the Townsend home, but she remembered the layout well enough to head for the kitchen.

  “By all means, come in,” Meredith said. She strode into the kitchen on four-inch heels that were practically an extension of herself. As long as Valkyrie could remember, she’d never seen the woman wear flats.

  “Thanks.”


  Meredith narrowed her eyes. “That was sarcasm. You get that, right?”

  “I’m not an idiot, I just don’t give a damn.”

  Random had stopped in the doorway, as if he couldn’t quite decided if it was safe enough to enter a room that contained both of them, and he winced now. “I’m sure what Kyrie meant was—”

  “Oh, I’m sure she said exactly what she meant,” Meredith interrupted. “She usually does. And since when are the two of you talking again?”

  Valkyrie shrugged.

  “It’s complicated,” Random said.

  “It always is with her. I thought you’d broken the cycle. Freed yourself. You’re too nice for her. Go find someone who doesn’t eat people for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

  “And who do you suggest he go and find?” Valkyrie asked before she could stop herself, a warning rumble in her voice. She might know she wasn’t good enough for him but that didn’t mean she wanted her face rubbed in the fact.

  Meredith rolled her eyes. “Oh, for goddess sake, Val, that was also sarcasm. Even if I had the inclination, I’m not dumb enough to go sniffing around territory you’ve already claimed. I happen to like breathing.”

  Random coughed. “Ladies, please. You’re embarrassing me.”

  “I grew up with you, Random. You’re incapable of embarrassment.” Meredith turned back to Valkyrie and stared at her. Valkyrie stared back. Meredith swiped a glass of what looked like ice water—but was more likely gin if the mostly-empty bottle next to it was any indication—off the kitchen island. She drank half of it like it was water before asking, “So what do you want?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Then talk.”

  “Privately.”

  “If you wanted to talk privately, why did you bring him?”

  “He brought himself. You know how he is.”

  “True. This way, then.” Meredith topped her glass off with gin and moved for the sliding glass doors that let out onto a large veranda.