Chaos and Moonlight (Order of the Nines Book 1)

by Marrow, A. D.

  “Shit,” he mumbled. That’s the last thing he needed. Stellan flipped the pistol in his hand until the barrel was firmly in his grip. He walked over to the other side of the bed and quickly brought the pistol butt down, connecting with the side of the guy’s head. He wasn’t about to wait around to see if he woke up from the blow or not, so he bounded out of the room and to the staircase.

  “Text Boss,” he whispered to the guys who were milling around in the foyer. “Tell him we got her and to meet us by the car.”

  As he made his way out into the gravel courtyard, Stellan couldn’t help but think to himself that, in leaving with the still-sleeping woman in his arms, he was waking a sleeping giant.

  A big, cranky, deadly giant.

  Chapter 28

  Bane stopped just in front of the glass, taking a long, slow breath. Were his back not a road map of agony, he would have turned around and said to hell with all of it. But every subtle shrug of his shoulders sent pain sluicing through him once again, and he knew that if he were ever going to break away from Morrigan, he had to do this one last thing. While the rest of his men were poised and positioned in the house down the hill, he made his way up to the darkened corner of the long driveway. The burning in his gut led him there. Standing in front of the wood and glass cabin, his heart twisted. He knew Taris was in the other house, and he had given express orders not to draw fire on anyone. Silly, considering he knew it could mean painful deaths for the men who were carrying out his orders, but the shift in him couldn’t be ignored. For once, he didn’t want his lifetime of horrible decision-making to mean the death of the only real family he had left.

  He crouched down as a light flickered on. The fluorescent overhead lit up the kitchen. A sob threatened to escape him as he saw her for the first time in over two centuries.

  God help him, he didn’t realize he’d missed her so much until that moment. He felt disgusting, watching her glide around in nothing but an oversize T-shirt, but it was so natural, so calming that he couldn’t help but crack a slight smile.

  She flitted her way around the center island, smiling as she opened cabinet after cabinet, placing things on the counter. Even from outside, he could tell she was humming. There was a radiance about her the likes of which he’d never seen in a woman before.

  He had to talk to her, even if it were for only a brief moment. On impulse, he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and began frantically wiping the glitter and gloss off his face. This would be the last time he saw her, and he wasn’t about to see his sister again after centuries covered in the shame he’d lived behind for so long. Once he was confident that at least most of the mess had been wiped clean, he paced around the back of the house, looking for an entryway.

  * * *

  She felt different.

  Kalin was old enough to know what was going on, and the knowledge of it was blissfully surreal. Casting a quick glance to the hallway, she couldn’t help but smile thinking about the husband she had left sleeping in the bed. Their ceremony had been a quick one, with Judah officiating and the rest of the group so drunk that they barely knew what was going on. After she and Nick finished their vows, they all but ran back home.

  All that mattered at the moment was that she had found and married the love of her painfully long life.

  Too ecstatic about the future and everything it now held to sleep, Kalin meandered around the kitchen. When she was restless, she baked. Now that she was on cloud nine, she had no idea what she would do. But she knew it had something to do with butter, and lots of it.

  She flipped on the small radio mounted underneath the cabinet as she began to assemble ingredients that normally had no business being in a dish together. She paused for a moment, taking stock of what she’d already laid out.

  “Hershey’s, roast beef, pineapple, sharp cheddar, puff pastry. What am I missing?” She snapped her fingers and turned toward the refrigerator. “Butter,” she mumbled as she pulled open the stainless steel door. “Now where is it?”

  A brief twinge of irritation settled into her belly as she felt the telltale burn signaling that her brother was near. Damn that Taris. He knew she was, for all intents and purposes, on her honeymoon.

  “Shouldn’t you be celebrating with your own lovely lady?” she playfully muttered into the refrigerator. “You should call before you randomly show up now, you know? Newlyweds have a tendency to lose inhibition.” She finally grabbed a stick of butter and slammed the door to the fridge, ready to counter whatever snide quip was about to be thrown her way.

  Instead, she froze, panicked as she stared into a pair of red eyes. Eyes she had convinced herself she would never see again. The butter dropped from her hand onto the tile floor with a disgusting plop. Her heart was pounding out of her chest. Fumbling backward against the counter, she threw open the drawer behind her back and grabbed the largest knife she could get her hands on.

  “What are you doing here?” she whispered, thrusting the knife out in front of her.

  The last time she’d seen him, she was in the same sort of panic, but it was for different reasons. Brief flashes of them running around his bedroom, packing clothes into steamer trunks before anyone found him there danced in her memory. So did the pain.

  “Answer me,” she hissed at him. “Why are you here?”

  Around his lips were red smears, and his eyes looked black around the lids. She knew what he’d become. No one had to tell her the abomination Morrigan had turned him into. Kalin saw it in her dreams, the death and the pain that he’d managed to cause in the two hundred years since she’d helped him escape what would have been certain death. No one else knew she helped him leave, and heaven help her if they ever found out. But he was just a boy then. Just a little, lost boy who fell into a current of complete evil. It had always been her prayer that he would escape them someday and return home. She just never expected it to be like this.

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” he whispered, staring down at the floor. “I just wanted to see you again, that’s all.”

  “Look me in the eyes and tell me you are not here to hurt me, Banan.”

  * * *

  Bane’s heart stopped.

  No one had called him by his real name in centuries. In truth, he lived up to the nickname his father gave him after he accidentally razed a cattle farm some centuries back. The fact that he even had a real name at one time was a long-lost memory, but hearing it on the lips of an old familiar voice was like flipping a switch. The years of pain, the death, the agony and destruction that had been brought about by his bent to get even were weighing like a mountain on his shoulders, and he was finally cracking under the weight.

  Fighting back a strange flow of tears, he stared into Kalin’s face.

  Dear God in heaven, she looked like their mother. Just like her.

  “I’m not,” he stopped and cleared his throat. “I’m not here to hurt you. I just…I had to…”

  The edges of his eyes were blurry, and the weight finally broke him. With a jingling thud, he dropped to his knees on the floor, his gaze fixed on her.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” he let out with a sob.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and lowered his head. The empty space that surrounded him was slowly filled with the feel of Kalin’s body in front of him. Her fingers were in his hair, stroking back the strands that had fallen into his face. In a violent hug, he pulled her to him, burying his face in her belly and squeezing his arms around her midsection.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry,” he sobbed.

  Centuries of repressed tears flooded out of him and onto her T-shirt. And bless her, she let him cry. He knew what it would mean for her if anyone saw him there or saw her holding him, but she let him do it.

  “You are not what you’ve become,” she whispered to him, her delicate fingers still weaving back and forth against his scalp. “I saved you to do something better, to do something great.”

  “She’s made me the devil.”

&n
bsp; “No,” Kalin lifted his face. “The parts of you that she’s poisoned can be cut out. It is up to you to make something else out of them.”

  I deserve to die. The words wouldn’t roll themselves off his tongue, so he mouthed them.

  A solitary tear fell from Kalin’s eyes and landed on his forehead. It burned hotter than any fire he’d ever felt before.

  “I will not argue with you about that, Banan. For what you have done, yes, you deserve to die. And when that time comes, you should not fear it but embrace it, because you will be in a place where you long for it. Lives will be healed when you lose yours, but it will end in its own time. Until then, turn away from it. Leave it behind. You are not this.” She wiped a leftover smudge of red Revlon from the corner of his lips. “Do you still have your family crest?”

  Bane nodded, pulling himself away. He rose up to his full height. Even towering over her, he felt three feet tall.

  “You are the Chimera,” she said, referring to the image that had long been cast as their family emblem. “Strong, swift of foot, noble.”

  “Harbinger of natural disasters.”

  She smiled at him, and his heart pounded again. He started to tell her that she looked just like their mother when his phone buzzed in his pocket. Swiping his finger across the screen, he opened the message.

  Got her. No trouble. Heading back.

  “I, um, I have to go,” he said.

  Kalin nodded and wiped the tears that were just underneath her eyes. “Be safe, my brother. I will pray for you.”

  This was the last time he would see her. It was the last time he would hear her voice. The connection they’d had in their youth was long since gone, and she was the part of his long-forgotten past that haunted him the most. He turned to leave and had his hand on the doorknob before she called out to him.

  “Wait. Before you go, I want to do something,” she said. She stepped toward the counter, grabbing the knife she’d placed there and walked back to where he stood at the doorway. Pressing the blade into her hand, a thick bead of dark crimson pooled in her palm.

  “I want to know where you are and how you are doing, and this is the only way I know how.” She grabbed his large hand and did the same, pushing the silver blade through the thick scar in the center of his palm. The blood began to pool in his hand, too. “We never got lost when we were kids because we did this, remember?”

  Kalin pressed her hand to his, linking her fingers with his. As the blood in her veins slowly began to trickle into his, a strange tingling began to knit its way through his system. It was something familiar. The revelations that coursed through her bloodstream were joyous and painful all at the same time.

  He gave her another minute before he pulled their hands apart and sealed both the cuts. Embracing her one more time, he couldn’t help but wish he could be around for all of the wonderful moments her life would soon have to offer. He placed a final kiss on the top of her forehead and slipped out the door.

  With any luck, he would be able to convince the good doctor to lie for him. He didn’t want Morrigan to know the serum worked. If she knew, then it was a death sentence for Sarah Bridgeman. The man he’d shot the day before was perfectly safe. Kalin was crawling back into bed with him as Banan walked away. He’d felt the guy in her bloodstream.

  As for the other little secret, he would let her figure that out on her own.

  Chapter 29

  “You may not want to be cordial in congratulating them, arse, but I want him to know that I am happy for them both. So forgive me if I have a moment where I want to make them comfortable.”

  The morning-after nausea was rolling around in Achan’s belly. Rotgut bourbon and classic whodunits made for a stomach-churning combination.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to be cordial,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes with his hands. “It’s just that I don’t see the need in bothering them when they are probably still horizontal.”

  “You don’t know that,” Rhiannon replied. “They could be up and dressed and talking about china patterns or whether they want an open relationship or, I don’t know, how to proceed from here.”

  “Or they could be humping…again. Geez, why did you have to wake me up?”

  “Because your brickhouse of an arse was laying all over my countertops this morning, and I couldn’t exactly make pancakes and tea while you were drooling all over my workspace, now could I?”

  Achan inhaled through his nose and smiled, his black eyes beating down on her. “Brickhouse, huh? You so want me.”

  Rhiannon rolled her eyes and lifted a fist to the door. She knocked once and waited. There was nothing but silence on the other side. After a few moments, she knocked again. Again, there was no answer. She turned and handed the tray of food to Achan and rapped on the door one final time.

  “You were right. They must still be sleeping,” she whispered. “Here,” she grabbed the tray, “I’m going to set this in there for them so they will have it when they wake up. Maybe after they have full bellies, they can go back to Taris’ house and stop screwing in mine.”

  “You’re like Dolly Parton now,” Achan snorted. “But to be fair, that was his room.”

  “Yes, before he built Kalin that enormous house on the hill,” Rhiannon mumbled. She turned the knob and slowly pushed open the door. The light from the hallway cast a narrow strip of white onto the hardwood floor. Lying around the bed, she could see wayward sheets, an expensive down comforter, and every stitch of clothing that Taris and Sarah had been wearing the night before. She nudged the door open a little more and let more light in. There was just enough illumination for her to see that Sarah was not in the bed at all.

  “Oh my Lord!”

  The tray went crashing to the floor, the glasses shattering and spreading out over the hardwood. She flipped on a light and screamed for Achan and Judah.

  Taris was lying in the bed, facedown. A large pool of blood was soaked into the pillow beside his temple. She checked his pulse and pulled back the sheet, looking for any more wounds. When she was confident that there wasn’t anything else that needed attention, she pulled the sheet back over him.

  Achan and Judah piled in and immediately began searching the room for any sign of Sarah.

  “What happened?” Judah searched through the large closet and came back to stand beside Rhiannon.

  “Looks like he was hit with something,” Rhiannon ran her fingers over the matted, bloody indentation on his head. The blood is dry, so it wasn’t recent. Taris,” she gently shook him. “Wake up, Bhalthair. Call Kalin and see if Sarah is with her, and tell her to get up here. And someone get me some hot water and some bandages. Now!” Achan and Judah filed out of the room in sprints.

  “There’s no way she did this,” Achan called out as he ran out the bedroom door.

  “Not likely,” Rhiannon muttered, looking around at the shattered vase on the floor and the rumpled sheets. “Which makes me nervous about where she could be.”

  * * *

  If searing pain had a taste, it would be comparable to the bitter acid that was rolling in Taris’ mouth. His head was throbbing. His heart was pounding. His soul felt like it had been torn out, pissed on, wrung out, and shoved back into him through his asshole.

  “How did this happen?” he muttered, holding the ice pack to his head. Sitting down wasn’t an option. He couldn’t help but pace, his coping mechanism of choice.

  “We’re working on it, T,” Achan rubbed his shoulder from the chair in front of the portable video monitor. They’d spent the better part of an hour scanning the security cameras that lined the perimeter of their two-hundred-acre spread. “Kalin is on her way down.”

  Taris felt the bile rise in his throat. How could he have been so careless, so stupid? They were lulled into a tenuous complacency with the great news and the celebration of so many things that the smallest of precautions were overlooked. Something as simple as locking a pissing door was thrown by the wayside. And now that bastard of a brother of h
is and the ex-wife that even hell would spit back out had Sarah.

  It wasn’t a matter of whether they had her or not. He knew they did. The question was where they had taken her. Sure, he could drive around town until he felt his belly catch on fire, but Asheville was huge, and by the time he located them, Sarah could be dead. That thought chilled him to the bone.

  “Where is he?”

  Kalin’s frantic voice echoed up the stairwell. Her small feet beat against the stone until she was in the doorway of the bedroom.

  “Sweet Mother Mary, did they hurt you?” She rushed in and stood beside Taris, throwing her arms around him. Nick was on her heels close behind her.

  “You okay, man?” he asked. The genuine concern in his voice was actually touching.

  “By ‘okay’ do you mean they didn’t try to implode my skull with the playtime end of a hand cannon? ’Cause then no, I’m not okay.” Taris rubbed at the spot again. Rhiannon managed to heal the wound, but the pain lingered. “They have Sarah, Kalin. I know it was Bane and Morrigan.”

  Kalin’s face paled.

  “What is it, Kalin? You know something,” Achan tilted his head, glaring at her.

  Kalin’s breath steamed out of her chest. Mumbling to herself, she absently started pacing alongside Taris, matching his stride step for step. After a few absent passes over the floor in tandem, Taris stopped in the center of the room and stared at her.

  “Kalin, baby. What’s up?” Nick’s calming voice brought her out of the fog, but she still continued her pacing.

  “Oh my sweet heaven, enough with the pacing already. Kalin! What is it with you two and freaking pacing?” Achan clapped his hands at her. She jerked her head in his direction, her amber eyes wide. Her face had gone completely white. “Tell us what you know, girl.”