ShadowWalker
A Leah Wolfe SINS Novel
Rhonda L. Print
Published 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62210-115-3
Published by Liquid Silver Books, imprint of Atlantic Bridge Publishing, 10509 Sedgegrass Dr, Indianapolis, Indiana 46235. Copyright © Published 2014, Rhonda L. Print. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Liquid Silver Books
http://LSbooks.com
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.
Blurb
Zen Rivers’ quiet peaceful life shatters the instant Raven Nightwalker enters it.
Forced into Raven’s protective custody, and hunted for a past she can’t remember, Zen must decide who she can trust in a world she barely recognizes. She soon realizes that Raven is the man she shared a single, steamy kiss with months ago and has heated her dreams every night since, and determines to awaken the passion in her reluctant savior once again.
Yet when the danger gets real and hiding is no longer an option, will Zen be strong enough to walk away from the man who has covered her heart in the shadows of passion and love?
Dedication
For my husband, my biggest fan.
Acknowledgements
Much appreciation to the good people at Liquid Silver Books and my editor, Ansley Blackstock. Hugs to my husband, who has heard me laugh, cry and curse – sometimes all at once – and has still been my biggest fan. Thanks to my beta reader, Lynn Tyler for lending me your expertise, cover artist Valerie Tibbs, and the guys at www.edmoneylive.com for their support. And as always, blessings to my family, friends, and fans. Happy Reading!
Prologue
I am the eyes that you feel boring into the space between your shoulder blades.
I am the chill that slithers in and out of each vertebra of your spine.
I am the shadows that you see moving in the blackness and the sound you hear scraping at your window while lightning dances across the midnight sky.
I am what stalks you as your footsteps echo when you walk a dark, quiet street alone.
You cannot see me, but I am there.
I am, I am –Shadow of the night.
Chapter 1
The sound of my shoes tapping along the ground echoed off the concrete of the well-lit underground parking lot as my thoughts drifted to the mystery man I’d met months ago and hadn’t seen since. He’d rescued me from a beer-fueled asshat and then escorted me home when said asshole would have followed.
While it was dark and he’d kept to the shadows, it was the kiss that haunted my dreams and fantasies since that night. It was just a light meeting of lips, but he tasted so good and felt so right. The kiss ended just as quickly as it began. He disappeared back into the darkness, leaving me breathless. It was just my luck that of all the men that had hit on me, he wasn’t the one who wanted to stick around.
And now, months later, I was walking to the car by myself—again. I was afraid of the dark, I always had been. Not that Austin Weatherford gave a shit. I’d been giving him weekly therapy for over a year now, and he had never shown any concern about my safety, even though he insisted I arrive at eleven and kept me until past midnight to accommodate his nocturnal lifestyle. I didn’t really expect him to care. He was a paying client, and I was a licensed physical therapist—a well-paid one at that. I’ve made quite a fine living getting the kinks out of my overly pampered and very wealthy clients.
My father often joked that with a name like Zen, what else could I be? Perhaps a yoga instructor, but stretching my body into a pretzel had never really appealed to me.
I’d studied for two years at a prestigious college and spent several more at one of the best schools in the country. But I had my heart set on running my life, and as soon as I had the opportunity to break out on my own, I’d jumped at the chance. It hadn’t taken long to build a solid reputation as one of the best in my field.
Not all of my clients were the spoiled, the rich. Many were recovering from serious injuries or had suffered strokes and were referred to me by several of the leading orthopedic surgeons on the east coast. I had, after all, gotten into this line of work to help people.
I’d asked myself more times than I could count why I didn’t have a normal life; something more than a book or a late night movie to occupy my evenings. It didn’t have to be a man—although that particular type of company would be welcome—even a close friend would have been nice. I had neither. I’d lived my life as a nomad, following my parents from place to place. Mom joked that she had gypsy in her blood, so we rarely stayed in one location for more than a year.
Chapter 2
I caught a quick glimpse out of the corner of my eye that shook me out of my thoughts. A black figure darted from behind a support pole. I gasped and tried to run, but caught my damn heels in a drain and fell to the concrete floor.
“Just give me the purse.” His voice grated like sandpaper as he loomed above me brandishing a tire iron.
I could feel my heart hammering in my chest, my breath coming out quickly and harshly. I shrugged my handbag off my shoulder but was shaking so badly I could hardly hold it out to him.
He was covered in black from head to foot; the hood of his jacket pulled tightly around his face so only a small circle allowed him to see and also revealed a glimpse of his beard, poking out of the material in scraggly angles. His left hand was held out, shaking slightly as he waited for my purse. His right gripped the tire iron above his head. He yanked the purse from my fingers and quickly stowed it under his jacket.
My body was tense, every muscle coiled and waiting for the blow of the hard steel rod in his hand. I squeezed my eyes closed tight and waited. The scent of oil, gas, and exhaust filled my nostrils as it rose from the concrete floor beneath me.
“Please don’t hurt me,” I whispered.
I heard a grunt, the clink of metal, and waited for the pain to blossom.
When it didn’t, I opened my eyes and saw my attacker lying on the ground.
A black gloved hand extended to me, the hand of my savior. I followed that hand up a muscled arm that led to an even more defined shoulder. He wore a black T-shirt that strained over the expanse of his broad chest. His chin was square and sat below full-curved lips, but it was the eyes that captured me. Dark and narrow with a slight tilt at the ends hinting of Asian descent. His black brows were knitted together and he looked…annoyed.
My rescuer’s deep voice pulled me from my stupor. “The authorities will be here momentarily, we must go.”
I scooted back. “Go where? I don’t even know you.” This was going from bad to worse, and my heart rate accelerated even more, causing my breath to come out in rasps.
“My apologies,” he began as sirens echoed off the walls of the parking garage. “I am Raven. Now we must leave before the police arrive.”
I scrambled back a little farther, but Raven only closed the distance and towered above me. “We are out of time.” He grabbed my wrist and hoisted me up.
The quick movement combined with the shock was too much, and for the first time in my life, I fainted.
* * * *
A sharp intake of breath brought me out of a deep, dreamless slumber. I resisted, keeping my eyes closed and the blanket pulled tightly to my chest. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept so soundly and without the nightmares that plagu
ed me for most of my life. The feeling that surrounded me was foreign, yet…welcome.
Safe. The word came unbidden to my mind. Safety was something that had eluded me as I slept since childhood. Sleep brought visions of captivity and pain. Dark places with even darker shadows, terror-filled screams escaping their depths, yet at this moment, I felt no fear.
Heat enveloped my back, and I took in a deep, luxurious breath, inhaling the scent of the forest on a warm fall day.
Clarity chased away the last of my sleep-induced fog as the memories of the past night flooded me.
I opened my eyes to discover that moonlight illuminated the room. A startled screech burst from me when I turned and realized the warmth I felt at my back was the body of a man spooning me. For a moment I struggled to remember who he was. His chest was still, and his black tousled hair that was swept over the line of his strong jaw didn’t move with exhaled breath. His lips were…sculpted. That was the word my fuzzy mind was searching for. Sculpted and parted just enough to see the tip of his tongue.
Too rugged to be called handsome, yet appealing in some dark, nefarious way.
Raven.
His name whispered through my mind. The man who’d rescued me from a mugger, only to capture me himself.
I looked around the room for something within reach to defend myself with. Faded ugly wallpaper surrounded me in a tiny room that screamed “motel”. A small ladder-back chair with chipped paint sat at a table I wouldn’t dare eat on. Lamp, alarm clock, telephone, and even the damn television remote was on the opposite side of the bed.
With a strength borne of fear, I shoved at Raven’s chest, and when his body still didn’t budge, I tried to pull my knees up to shove the soles of my feet against him, only to find them bound to the bed.
“Relax, Zen.” Raven’s deep voice rumbled. “Let a man sleep, will ya?” He spoke without moving.
“Let me go, you son of a bitch!” I pulled my arm back to elbow him in the face, and in one fluid movement he reached up and grabbed both of my wrists with one hand. He pulled them above my head as he shifted and tossed the hair from his face.
“I’m not here to hurt you, Zen. On the contrary, I’m here to save your life.”
I opened my mouth to speak and closed it again.
Save my life? Why did that feel true?
“Bullshit!” I spat the word at him, but something inside me protested that he was speaking the truth, and I felt the unease slip from my body.
“If you are here to save me, why the hell am I chained up?” The “safe” feeling I awoke with intensified, and I realized that I felt no fear of the man. Still…
A look of amusement sparked in his eyes, quickly replaced by a flash of…regret?
“Would you listen to me if you were not?”
“Fair enough,” I conceded. I would have bashed him over the head with the nearest object and run for my life if I could. “How the hell do you know my name?”
“I know a lot about you. Zen Rivers. Daughter of Faith and Roger Rivers, both retired physicians currently doing volunteer work on a medical ship off the coast of Africa.”
“You don’t look like the stalker type,” I said, my brain searching for a reason as to not only how he knew so much about me, but why.
Raven pursed his lips and seemed to think about this for a moment. “What does a stalker look like?”
To that I had no response, so I simply shrugged. Raven’s challenging and smug tone irked me.
After a beat he continued. “You’re twenty-six years old, a physical therapist. You run your own private practice.” He shook his head slightly then added, “Making house calls of all things.”
I didn’t miss the note of shocked disbelief in his voice at the last and squelched the need to defend myself.
“So you can Google.” I lifted my chin defiantly and hoped like hell he’d found all that out by running a computer search. If he had, that’s all he knew about me. I kicked against the restraints at my feet and attempted to pull my wrists from his hand. Whether I felt safe or not, I still didn’t like being restrained.
How the hell did I feel safe when I’d been chained to a bed in a strange motel with a man I didn’t know? I convinced myself it was because he’d saved me from the attacker in the garage, but there seemed more to it than that. Raven was…familiar.
He paused for a moment as if trying to decide what to tell me, and then with a slightly amused look continued. “Many of your patients are wealthy, but not all. You take some cases for only what the insurance companies are willing to pay, and sometimes you don’t charge anything at all.”
“Well, that’s not creepy at all.” And still accessible from a computer search, a little more in-depth than I would have liked, but plausible. “Look, what do you want from me? I mean, if you wanted me dead, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. So what is it, money?” I stopped fighting him, deciding to trust my instincts. After all, they had served me well in the past. And if he’d wanted me dead, well, nothing was stopping him. I sure as hell wasn’t strong enough to do it.
He laughed, the gesture crinkling the corners of his eyes and diminishing his bad-boy look. “Money has nothing to do with it. What do you know of your past, Zen?”
“Seems you already know everything.” I sighed, resigning myself to hearing him out, annoyed as the tension in me increased exponentially.
“Before you came to live with the Rivers?”
I drew in a sharp breath. The Rivers had taken me in when I was young. I’d run away from the people who had kept me imprisoned for as long as I remembered. They said I had “skills that they needed, paranormal skills”’, and locked me away in a dark room. I never really knew what they had wanted from me, I was just glad to escape. I was a “failed experiment”; I’d heard my captors argue over that point more than once.
The Rivers moved me to another state, and it was just assumed that I was their natural child. My birth certificate was nothing more than a good fabrication. I’d spent my life following them from place to place as they did medical missionary work around the world.
“How did you…” My voice trailed off when I saw the spark in his eyes that said he knew he’d hit home.
“I couldn’t know that, could I?” His dark eyes waited for my reply.
No, he couldn’t. Nobody knew that. I didn’t know exactly when I came to live with my parents. My memories of my life before the Rivers were of pain, darkness, and captivity. I didn’t even know how I escaped. Just that one day I woke up in the Rivers’ home and my life was never the same. My parents relocated after they found me and didn’t keep contact with anyone they knew before that. They were both only children, and their parents had died before I came along. They took me in and totally re-created their lives to protect me. We moved from city to city, always hiding from anyone paranormal, and always fearful that someday they’d find me and take me back, put me in the dark again. But still, Raven couldn’t know that. No one could. The fear returned, and I retreated to the side of the bed as far away from Raven as I could.
“I’m not one of them,” Raven said quickly, his thumb rolling over my wrist in a reassuring motion. “I’m here to protect you from them.”
“Why should I believe you?” The words came out soft and broken.
He smiled and cocked his head to the side. “Like you said, if I wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead.”
Chapter 3
Before I could process what he’d just said, two men crashed through the door. Raven released my wrists and swung me off the side of the bed. I dangled there for a moment before the chains at my ankles fell away, dropping me the rest of the way to the floor with a thud. With my heart trying to pound its way out of my chest, I rolled under the bed and curled up on my side, reminding myself I was not trapped. I could see through the veil of sheets hanging off the side of the bed and reassured myself I wasn’t confined, wasn’t locked in that dark place anymore. The nightmares that had plagued me captured my thoughts.
Small feet ran across the hard gray floors. They were coming. Coming for me and it would hurt. Why? What do they want me to do? I don’t want to go to the dark place again. Please, don’t…
“Step aside, vampire; it does not belong to you.” The harsh words brought my mind back to the present. Vampire? So Raven is a paranormal.
“Hand it over and we may just let you live.” A man’s gravelly voice snapped me back to the present.
I’d spent a lifetime trying to repress the memories of being referred to as “it”. The words gave me the courage to look at the man who’d just broken in.
Short cropped hair, military fatigues, bulging muscles, and a very, very large rifle completed the scary ass look. The second man was about a foot shorter than Raven yet no less fearful. He was armed with only a knife, but he seemed quite capable of taking care of himself with or without it.
“Phoenix is dead. What use is she to you?” Raven growled.
Phoenix? The name poked at memories in my brain.
The taller man chuffed out a harsh laugh. “It is of no use to me. The bounty on her head, however…” He rubbed at the stubble on his chin and smiled, revealing stained and crooked teeth.
“Dead or alive?” Raven asked as casually as if he were discussing the weather.
“Oh, they want it alive. Are even willing to pay more if it arrives unharmed,” the short man replied.
“I’ll double it. All you have to do is tell me who put the bounty on her head and disappear. Believe me, it’s your best option.”
Another harsh laugh from the taller man filled the room.
A knife flew from Raven’s hand, impaling itself in the laughing man’s chest as his sinister smile faded to pain. The other man lunged, his hand contorted into claws, and the nightmares I’d suffered resurfaced. I’d seen this before in countless nightmares and had hoped to never see it again. He caught Raven around the neck, his claws drawing lines of blood. Yet why was one paranormal protecting me from two others? Did Raven want the bounty for himself?
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