by Vivi Andrews
“Dominec?” She meant to ask if he was all right, but he reacted like she’d urged him to speak.
“I was selected for a special program shortly after they captured me. They cherry-picked the biggest, strongest and fastest among the captives, and then made us fight one another. There was a jaguar. Not as big, but he was fucking fast. I was new. Holding back. They’d tipped his claws in some kind of acid.”
Grace hissed in a breath.
Dominec waved a hand at his face. “You can guess the rest.”
“How long—” She cleared her throat when the words came out a croak. “How long were you in captivity?”
“No idea,” Dominec said, flat and emotionless, as he’d said everything since he started speaking about the Organization. “My best guess is about five years, but it could have been longer. I’m not very good at time anymore.”
She swallowed, trying to be pragmatic about this, to focus on the job even as her chest ached for him. “And you don’t mind telling the wolves…”
“Anything they want to know. Anything that helps us fucking decimate those bastards once and for all.”
“Okay,” she murmured. The door to the diner opened, revealing Tyler, Zoe and Kelly carrying several bulging take out bags. “Good.”
Dominec nodded, as if that settled it. And perhaps it did.
The others arrived, Tyler taking over the driving, with Kelly claiming shotgun once again, and Zoe clambering into the back with Grace. They brought the good cheer back with them, along with the burgers, but Grace couldn’t quite shake the somber awareness that had settled over her after her talk with Dominec.
She ate her burger as the miles rolled past the window. She felt his gaze on the back of her neck, her awareness of him spreading across her limbs. There was still so much she didn’t know about him, so many questions she wasn’t ready to ask. But where it mattered, they understood each other. They would both do whatever it took to keep their people safe.
The rest was just details.
Chapter Twenty
Dominec knew it was all in his head, but he felt the Canadian border approaching, like a wall of teeth waiting to consume what was left of him. He lay in the back seat, pretending to sleep. Grace had taken over the driver’s seat again at the last gas station before the border. The mood in the car had sobered somewhat since lunch and now Grace was interrogating Zoe and Tyler about the shifters they’d met in their travels.
None of the others seemed to feel the border looming ahead. But then, none of them were wanted in Canada.
It was unlikely the border agents would recognize him. The photos the police had of him were of a twenty-five-year-old kid with a whole face. The case was cold now anyway. A decade old. They wouldn’t still be looking for him, if they ever had, this far from the scene of the crime.
But he couldn’t help the certainty that if the Fates still hated him as much as they had for the last ten years, he’d be arrested as soon as he stepped foot on Canadian soil.
Grace would be pissed at him for jeopardizing the mission.
He should have mentioned the warrant. He could have told her. When she was asking him about his history with the Organization, it would have been easy to slip into the conversation. Part of him had wanted to tell her. He wasn’t in the habit of sharing his secrets, but he didn’t mind so much with Grace. When it was just the two of them, sealed into the quiet of the parked car, he’d almost told her all of it. But the others had returned and the moment had ended.
Everything ended. If life had taught him one thing, it was that. Good or bad, everything ended.
This thing with Grace, it would end too. He’d destroy it somehow or it would get ripped away from him—that was just how life worked—but until then he liked it. Whatever it was.
He’d thrown down the gauntlet with his kiss and she’d taken it up with hers. Now…he didn’t know what came next, but something had started. He didn’t know what, but there was something there now. An unspoken weight in the air between them. An understanding. A beginning.
Provided he didn’t get arrested at the border.
Zoe trailed off, her story about a lynx they’d met in Utah forgotten as Grace slowed the car at the U.S. side of the border crossing. It was a small outpost. The highway was only two lanes here and there was no line. Grace pulled right up to the guard at the window, rolling down her own. She flashed the guard a smile and handed over the stack of their five passports. Zoe was in the other front seat—which Dominec was now realizing was by design as the two women smiled for the guard and answered his questions about the purpose of their trip. Moments later he handed back their passports and waved them through.
They drove the short distance through no man’s land to the Canadian entry point. Instinctively, Dominec hunched down in his seat, though the tinted windows made it impossible for the guards to see him anyway. Again the passports were passed over and again Grace trotted out their cover story about going up to Meadow Lake for some hiking. The guard was younger and more earnest, his questions more extensive. He shone a light through the tinted windows to get a better look at the men in the back. Kelly obligingly rolled down his window and Dominec flinched, ducking his head. The light hit his scars and every shifter ear in the car clearly heard the guard’s breathed, “Christ.”
Dominec braced himself for more questions, for being pulled out of the car, but the young guard just handed back their passports, stammering a bit as he wished them good hiking. As Kelly began to roll up with window, the guard’s eyes flicked to the back seat again and he met Dominec’s eyes. “Thank you for your service,” he said.
Dominec gave a jerky nod as they drove on. Into Canada.
The others, picking up on his tension, didn’t speak again right away, all of their gazes drawn outside the window. The landscape was essentially the same as it had been for the last hour, but now it was Canadian.
He should thank Mateo. The border crossing had probably gone easier because his fake ID came with a wounded vet’s backstory. The others had all used their real identities, but Dominec had been traveling under an assumed identity for years, for obvious reasons. He didn’t even know what had become of his old Canadian passport.
He probably should have gone by his assumed name at Lone Pine, just to be safe, but after years in Organization custody, when he’d been nothing but a number, he had needed the reminder of who he was when he got to Lone Pine.
And even if it was risky, he was glad he went by Dominec there. Glad that was what Grace called him.
He looked up, catching her glancing back at him in the rearview mirror.
She hadn’t reacted when he’d handed her a U.S. passport, hadn’t even blinked at the name Rene Devereau and the Louisiana address, but he could feel the questions pulsing off her now.
And he wanted to answer them, he realized. For the first time in years, he wanted someone to know him. He didn’t want to be invisible. He wanted someone to remember who he was if he vanished off the face of the earth. Someone to prove he had been here, in this life, if only for a while.
Like carving his name in a tree. Dominec was here. Grace would be his tree. She would remember. He trusted her to be the mark he left on the world. When he was gone.
Chapter Twenty-One
The motel was nothing to write home about, but since they weren’t sure what sort of reception they would get at Black Lake, they all agreed that arriving in daylight after a good night’s rest was infinitely preferable to stumbling into wolf territory in the middle of the night.
Kelly was taking his shift behind the wheel when they pulled into the snow-packed parking lot of the Sleep Tight Motor Lodge at eleven fifteen. From the passenger seat, Grace eyed the uninspired two-story stretch of rooms with exterior corridors and a nearly empty parking lot. Not exactly the Four Seasons, but if it had clean beds she would take it. She’d never been a huge
fan of camping and one less night in a tent was a gift from the gods in her book.
Grace hopped out while the others remained in the car. A small bell above the door to the narrow lobby summoned the front desk clerk—a middle-aged woman with a pleasant smile. Within fifteen minutes, Grace had four keys in exchange for a small wad of cash and a scribbled signature on the bottom of a printed out form.
Grace returned to the car and hopped in the front seat, jangling the keys victoriously as she closed the door. “We have beds,” she declared triumphantly, pointing Kelly toward the stairwell halfway down the long, low-slung building. “Park on the other side of the stairs.”
Zoe gave a half-hearted cheer from where she sprawled against Tyler in the back seat, half asleep. Kelly maneuvered the SUV into the appointed parking space and they all piled out. The rooms were all in a row on the lower level. Grace handed out the keys—Kelly on one end, then Zoe and Tyler, then herself, with Dominec as far away from Kelly as possible. Not that she expected them to go after one another in the night, but better safe than sorry.
Kelly must have been tired because he didn’t complain about the separate rooms or even try to flirt before grabbing his bag and ambling off to find his bed. Zoe and Tyler disappeared into their own room just as quickly. Grace hooked her own bag over her shoulder and waited as Dominec grabbed his before slamming the tailgate shut and hitting the button on the key fob to lock the car.
Dominec stood there, making no move to vanish into his own room and Grace found herself strangely reluctant to go as well. She nodded toward his pack. “I meant to ask you earlier if you were packing enough weapons to get us all arrested at the border.”
“I was,” he admitted at a low rumble. “Until Hugo reminded us how jumpy border agents can be about gun trafficking. I left most of my gear back at Lone Pine.”
She didn’t miss the most, but decided not to press it. The night was too cold for standing outside, mooning over him, and the morning would come too soon. “G’night, Dominec,” she murmured, heading toward her door.
“Good night, Grace,” he echoed softly, not moving from his position at the back of the SUV until she entered her room. She leaned against the door, dropping her pack to the nubby carpet floor, and listened—his steps too soft to hear, but the click of the next door down unmistakable.
He was an enigma. One of the few things she actually knew about him was that he was French-Canadian, but the passport he’d handed her today was from the U.S. and listed his name as Rene. The photo had been recent—all of his scars present and accounted for. She knew both Adrian and Mateo occasionally dabbled in fake papers, but she hadn’t known Dominec had them, or that he felt the need. Though she supposed if the Organization had ever tracked her, she would have changed her identity too.
She was still leaning against the door, mulling over the man next door, when she heard it again—that distinctive click of the door closing. Now where is he going?
Grace pocketed her room key, leaving the rest of her gear where she’d dropped it, and slipped outside into the chill of the night.
The moon was either new or it had already set. With the exception of the weak beam of the light above the lobby door, the darkness was absolute, but she had no trouble tracking him. He might be so stealthy even her shifter hearing had trouble catching his steps, but his scent was distinctive.
Grace climbed the stairwell, trying to keep her own steps soft so as not to alert the lions sleeping below. At the top, she climbed onto the thin metal railing and reached up, placing her fingers in the indents in the snow on the roof that had been left by another pair of hands. She began to pull herself up, grateful for all the pull-ups she’d done over the years, when a hand suddenly shot over the edge of the roof and reached down to clamp on her forearm.
She barely swallowed her startled yelp. Dominec’s head and shoulders appeared above her as he hauled her up by her arm, his strength making the ascent easy and fluid rather than the struggle she would have had on her own. When she was beside him on the snowy roof, he moved away, toward the thin comforter he’d obviously stolen off his bed downstairs and spread out picnic-style on the roof. He sat on one side of the blanket, leaving the other open in tacit invitation.
“You’re lucky I didn’t fall, surprising me like that,” she grumbled without heat as she joined him. Even with the comforter as a buffer, her butt was instantly freezing and the bite of the wind on the roof was almost enough to make her regret following him. She wrapped her arms around her middle, huddling low against the wind.
Dominec scooted closer until his body blocked the worst of the wind and the warmth radiating from him took off the worst of the chill. Lions weren’t built for Canadian winters, but apparently Siberian tigers had no problems with the cold. Even in human form.
“You’ve got a real thing for roofs, don’t you?” She let her side brush up against all that warmth.
He murmured something that might have been affirmative, adjusting her so she was closer still, enveloped by his warmth as he braced one arm behind her back. She let the silence of the night fall around them again for a few minutes. It was quiet here in this rural stretch of tiny Canadian highway. Even quieter than Lone Pine. The night held a winter’s hush, disturbed only by the infrequent sound of a passing car from the nearby road.
Grace began to feel downright cozy. She could understand the appeal of roofs. It was peaceful with nothing above them but the sky—and yet they could see everything that might be coming for them. Not surprising that a man who had spent five years in a cage liked it up here.
“Rene, huh?” she asked at length.
She felt his shrug, the movement shifting her. She thought that would be all the answer she got, until a moment later when he spoke. “I’m a wanted man in Canada.”
The slight whisper of his accent was stronger now. She twisted around to stare at him, not bothering to hide her shock. “I’m sorry, what?”
He kept his face tipped up to the sky, when he answered her. She was on his right side, so for a change she only saw the sculpted perfection of his natural features. The man really was a heartbreaker, once upon a time.
“I was living in northern Quebec with my wife and son when the Organization found us,” he said toward the dark clouds that covered the stars. “They only meant to capture us. We were too valuable to them alive for them to want anything else, but my son startled one of them. It was reflex. I was on the floor—they’d loaded me with tranqs, but I could still see. He was just a cub. Little bit of a thing. Ksenia—my wife—went mad when they hurt Micah. Or maybe before? Sometimes it gets mixed up in my head. They beat her until her skull caved in.”
His voice was emotionless. Calm. Just reporting the facts. And it was all Grace could do not to sob. She tried not to have an emotional reaction. For some reason it was important that she keep it together. That she give him that.
“They left the bodies there when they took me. Made it look like a domestic violence case. I had trouble with my memory when I got free of the Organization so I looked up my history, trying to piece together what had happened. That was when I learned I’ve been wanted for their murders for years.”
Grace whispered a curse. She couldn’t help it. He said it like he was talking about the weather and she could barely stand the sound of his pain, spoken of in that calm, dead way. Her chest ached and her eyes burned.
“This is the first time I’ve been in Canada since that day,” he said softly. “Different part of Canada, though. They won’t know me here.”
“I’m sorry,” Grace said. The words were infinitely inadequate.
He looked down at her then. She saw his eyes flickering again—animal, human, back and forth so dizzyingly fast. Not emotionless. Anyone who thought that of him would be making their last mistake. Dominec still felt every wound he’d suffered.
Grace swallowed, fighting the tears that filled her eyes,
and lifted her right hand to cup the left side of his face. The scars were smooth against her palm, not surprising her this time.
The night had made him honest.
Something about the stillness on the roof had loosened his tongue. Dominec had meant to tell Grace about the warrant, but the rest had come out on its own. He hadn’t said Micah’s name aloud in ten years. He didn’t speak of the way Ksenia’s skull had crumpled under their blows. But Grace wouldn’t use the knowledge against him. She would remember for him, when he couldn’t anymore. When his mind finally gave up its last grip on sanity.
When her hand touched his cheek, it seemed to ground him, settling the worst of the fragments back into some kind of order. Her lion lover wouldn’t like this, he thought with feline satisfaction. The two of them up on the roof like this. No, he wouldn’t like that. Not any more than he’d liked seeing the kiss. But it wouldn’t make the lion back off.
“Kelly thinks you’re using me to make a point,” he heard himself saying softly.
Grace’s hand fell away and she grimaced. “You heard that, did you?”
“Didn’t have to hear it. He wears it on his face.”
“That he thinks he owns me?” she groused.
“That he thinks I’m crazy.”
Her eyes darkened angrily. “I don’t like that word.”
“He isn’t wrong.” Dominec tapped his temple with one forefinger. “Things don’t always work up here anymore.”
Her expression grew fierce. “All things considered, I think you’re extremely sane.”
Dominec would almost have been tempted to laugh at her considering how crazy you could be excuse, if she hadn’t been so endearingly militant in her defense of him. “I have been more lucid lately,” he mused, his gaze touching on the curves and angles of her face. She glanced away, out over the night and he studied her profile.
