Vengeance

by Shana Figueroa

  Val dumped the envelope’s contents on the table. They were indeed e-mails, thank God. She read the first one, only two lines, from someone named “Fortuna” to an unknown recipient:

  I’ve told dearest he needs to take care of R. That should bring M and V together, as you’ve requested.

  What the hell was this? She looked at the date—five days before Robby died. R, M, and V…No. She pushed it aside and read the next one, from Fortuna again, written three days after Robby died:

  R gone. M and V made contact.

  Then the next one, written by Fortuna six days after Robby died:

  M and V together. Our asset made sure they’d stay that way for a while. Everything going according to plan. Stop worrying. You rely too much on your Alpha.

  “No,” Val whispered. Goddamn her. Goddamn her! Covered in a cold sweat, Val splayed the rest of the e-mails across the table in a manic attempt to read them all at once. Each was short, one to three lines long, primarily from Fortuna to an anonymous account. They all said some version of the same thing: Get rid of R. Get M and V together. Keep M and V together.

  Val struggled to keep down her breakfast. Robby did die because of her. Someone desperately wanted her and Max to be together, and they’d enlisted Delilah, aka Fortuna, to make it happen. But why did it matter? Why were they important?

  She got her answer from one of the last e-mails, dated three days ago:

  They’re in love, as I foretold it—me, not your Alpha. Remember that. A child is certain, no matter what happens now. I expect the support you promised per our deal. The wheels of political progress need greasing.

  It wasn’t Max and Val that were important—it was their offspring. These anonymous people wanted to steal their future child, the beautiful boy or girl she’d seen in her visions. God no. Hell no. She backhanded the e-mail away as if she could reach through the page and slap Delilah herself. That’s when she saw the paper underneath, the last in the collection Delilah had sent, not an e-mail but a blank page with a single handwritten note:

  Thank you for killing my idiot husband.

  She sat frozen, her mind reeling. The waitress wandered by and asked if she’d like a coffee refill for the road; it was all Val could do to shake her head in response. She could take all these e-mails to the FBI, or even the media, but how would she explain them? It made no sense without disclosing the whole future-seeing aspect of it, and nobody would believe that. Even Delilah’s personal message to Val, as damning as it seemed, meant nothing without the context behind it, and that bitch knew it. Whether or not Barrister had truly been abusive, Delilah was no victim. She and Barrister were two fucked-up peas in a pod. Delilah had sent her this glut of information solely to torture her. And it had worked.

  Her eyes wandered back to the TV, where the squeaky-clean public version of Delilah Barrister, mourning yet stoic widow, still addressed an audience of reporters at the press conference.

  “I’ve talked about this at great length with my family, and we think the best way to honor Norman’s memory is to continue his fight for this city and state that he loved. Therefore, I will be taking my husband’s place in the run for mayor.”

  The closed captioning noted excited gasps from the audience.

  Delilah looked at the camera. “I ask that everyone that would have voted for my husband, and those that are still undecided, cast your vote for the values and integrity my husband gave his life for, and for a better future for Seattle and Washington State.”

  Val remembered her first vision with Max:

  I’m standing on the balcony of Max’s house, the balcony where he threw his father to his death. The sky is overcast, the water is black. All of the glass is cracked, and trash is strewn everywhere. At my feet I see a weathered newspaper with a headline that reads:

  President Barrister Declares War

  Before I can check the date or read the article, the brightest light I’ve ever seen bursts in the sky and mushrooms upward. I hear and feel a rumbling that grows louder, shattering the glass around me, until a shock wave hits and I’m engulfed in flames. I’m screaming as the fire chars the flesh off my body and roasts my bones.

  President Barrister—Delilah Barrister. For Delilah’s help, these anonymous and powerful people had promised her a ticket to the White House. And Val had danced like a fucking puppet to her lies.

  Still feeling like she might vomit at any moment, Val gathered the papers back together, dumped them in her bag, and crawled out of the booth. The TV finally cut away from Delilah, onto a different subject: “Secret Sex Tape of Mayor Brest and Unidentified Blond Woman Goes Viral on Internet—Poll Numbers Plunge.”

  Her cell phone rang on her way out the door. She glanced at it and saw Max’s number on the caller ID. Their child couldn’t be stolen if they never had one. Tears filled her eyes as she watched it ring, and ring, until it went to voice mail, unanswered.

  Epilogue

  Kitty drummed her nails on the chair’s steel arm as she sat across from Cassandra in the Alpha Seer’s Hong Kong office. Per usual, Cassandra was dressed in her white blouse–pencil skirt combo, black hair cascading down her back, while Kitty wore a black pantsuit, her blond hair in a tight bun. She watched as Cassandra drew what looked like plans for a Rube Goldberg machine on a piece of paper, head down in quiet concentration. It was hard to break the habit of waiting for a cue to speak, though Kitty knew there wouldn’t be one.

  “Delilah is up by six points,” Kitty said. “She’s almost certain to beat Mayor Brest. The good people of Seattle don’t want a mayor who gets his rocks off by wearing diapers and pretending to be a baby. Unfortunately, Delilah also tipped off Valentine to her future Alpha child. She’s spooked, and has stopped seeing Max romantically.”

  No reaction from Cassandra. Made sense, given that the Seer already knew exactly what Kitty would say. Still, Kitty had to say it; otherwise, there would be nothing for Cassandra to look into the future to see—the paradox of remembering the future.

  “Seems to me Delilah hasn’t lived up to her end of the bargain, if she told Northwalk she’d get Max and Valentine together and then split them up again—”

  “Do not kill Delilah,” Cassandra said in her breathy British accent, not looking up from her drawing. “She will be dealt with. In time.”

  Kitty tensed against her will. Often it seemed as if Cassandra could read her mind, though she knew the Seer couldn’t. She and Sten would be dead by now if Cassandra or any other member of Northwalk knew their thoughts. We should just kill them, Sten had said. She would if she could. How do you kill someone with perfect recall of the future? The fact that Northwalk still employed them meant they’d never succeed, or Cassandra hadn’t seen fit to warn anyone for reasons only she knew. Though if Kitty had learned anything from a lifetime of manipulating the future at Northwalk’s bidding, it was that anything was possible. Patience was key.

  “You must ask,” Cassandra said.

  Kitty composed herself, relaxed. “How do you want me to get Max and Valentine together again?”

  Cassandra finally looked up from her drawing, put her pen down, threaded her slender fingers together. “Let the gale raze their affected hearts. Then offer the life boat.”

  Wait, was what Cassandra meant. That, Kitty could do. She’d been waiting all her life, waiting for the right moment to seize what was hers. It would happen, Cassandra’s failure to see it be damned.

  “There is more,” Cassandra said. She never asked questions that weren’t rhetorical; she only made statements.

  “The doctors tell me they were able to successfully reverse Max’s vasectomy during the surgery on his bullet wound. Sten’s a good shot.”

  Cassandra looked at her drawing, tracing the intricate lines with her fingers. Kitty knew it was part of a machine, something Cassandra was bringing into being before its time.

  “So many moving stars,” Cassandra said. “They bleed into each other.” Her ethereal eyes filled with tears that leaked onto the
paper. “There shall never be another one.”

  Kitty had no idea what Cassandra was talking about. The Seer knew things no one else could understand, things no one should understand. Being able to see everything until the end of the universe wasn’t good for one’s sanity. She didn’t have much time left before she totally lost it. Northwalk was champing at the bit for Max and Val’s Alpha child.

  Cassandra looked at Kitty. “Go.”

  Kitty stood and walked toward the exit.

  “End it, Omega,” Kitty heard Cassandra say behind her. Omega—Cassandra’s designation for Valentine Shepherd. “Save us all.”

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank my agent, Carrie Pestritto, for taking a chance on a new author with a very weird idea. I’d also like to thank my excellent editor, Madeleine Colavita, for frustrating the hell out of me by pointing out areas where my manuscript needed work that I was sure were already perfect, then proving me wrong when the final product turned out to be a hundred times better than the original.

  I’d like to give a shout-out to my writing group partners in Dayton Write Now who had to suffer through the crappy first drafts of my story: Karen Brandin, Amy Jomantas, and Daphne Burgard. Another big thanks goes to my other awesome writing group, Western Ohio Writers Association, including their fearless leader Gery Deer and his beautiful wife Barbara, and the three sexy amigos: Bill Bicknell, Michael Martin, and Philip A. Lee. Without their #RealTalk and much better grasp of the English language than me, I never would have made it as a serious author, or known the difference between a participle and a gerund (…I still don’t, but they remind me!).

  Thanks to the men and women of the US Armed Forces for giving me the opportunity to serve and protect my country, as well as a steady paycheck that allowed me to write for the love of it. Specific thanks to my military friends and coworkers who managed to stifle their shock and express support when I told them I wrote romance rather than military sci-fi.

  Finally, I’d like to express my extreme gratitude to my family: my mom for encouraging me to follow my dreams; my sister for giving me her love and support; my pugs for being my writing buddies and arm rests; my daughters for tipping the scales of my lifelong memories from mostly bad to mostly good; and my husband for keeping the home fires burning and giving me his unwavering support when each day I went to work, then came home and sat in a corner and plinked away on my laptop.

  Much like an Oscar speech, there are dozens of other people who contributed to my success and deserve to be recognized, but at this point I’m being figuratively played off the stage. So if you’re one of those people, please accept my apologies, and my thanks!

  About the Author

  Shana Figueroa is a published author who specializes in romance and humor, with occasional sojourns into horror, sci-fi, and literary fiction.

  She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, two young daughters, and two old pugs. She enjoys reading, writing (obviously), martial arts, video games, and SCIENCE—it’s poetry in motion! By day, she serves her country in the US Air Force as an aerospace engineer. By night, she hunkers down in a corner and cranks out the crazy stories lurking in her head.

  She took Toni Morrison’s advice and started writing the books she wanted to read. Hopefully you’ll want to read them, too!

  Learn more at:

  ShanaFigueroa.com

  Twitter @Shana_Figueroa

  Facebook.com/Shana.Figueroa.9

  Please see the next page for a preview of Retribution, the next book in Shana Figueroa’s Valentine Shepherd series!

  Chapter One

  Valentine Shepherd ran so fast, she felt her heart might explode from the strain. She rounded a corner and sprinted down her Tacoma suburb street, quiet in the late morning when most people were at work. With the mid-July sun hard on her back, she crossed the invisible finish line in front of her house and slowed to a halt, put her hands on her knees, and threw up into the bright green grass. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and cast a glance around her neighborhood to ensure no one had seen. No workout felt good enough without a dollop of pain—sore knees, joint aches, pulled muscles, nausea. Going easy on herself meant letting weakness fester, giving her enemies the upper hand. She’d be damned if she let that happen again.

  Val walked half a block away from her house to cool down, then turned and walked back. She stopped and stared at a car she didn’t recognize, parked on the corner in front of a fire hydrant.

  “BFG three thousand fifteen. BFG three thousand fifteen,” she said to herself, committing the car’s license plate number to memory so she could track down who it belonged to, who Delilah Barrister had sent to watch her. Then again, why would she bother having someone stake out Val’s house? She was a goddamn prophet—like Val, but better. More devious at least. Norman Barrister’s widow probably knew what Val was doing every second of every day.

  Val shook her head at the mystery car. “Shit,” she muttered, turning away from yet another shadow to obsess over.

  She stalked back into her house, kicking aside one of Stacey’s raincoats splayed on the floor next to the door. She’d need to have another talk with her friend about leaving crap lying around for clients to stumble upon. Very unprofessional for the recently popular Valentine Investigations. Business had been booming since she’d “solved” the mystery of who killed Seattle millionaire Lester Carressa and exonerated his only son and heir to his fortune, Maxwell Carressa, of the crime back in October. They’d even had to turn some clients away. She hated saying no; she was often their last resort for justice. But even with Stacey’s help and her own ability to glimpse the future, she was only one person against a world where cruelty and injustice were the norm.

  Val rubbed her sweaty face on a dishcloth and threw open her fridge, then shoved aside bundles of kale Stacey bought but would never eat and grabbed a beer from the back. She touched her hot cheek to the cold glass bottle, rubbed the condensation on her skin, and let it trickle down her neck. Then she twisted off the top and took a long drink. The immediate buzz was comforting. Dwelling on things she couldn’t change would drive her mad. She should accept it and move on, like Max had done—

  A lump grew in her throat. Don’t even start, she chastised herself. She chugged the rest of her beer. Don’t think about him. He went on with his life. You can, too. She looked at herself in the gold-burnished decorative mirror—the one she’d put up in the hallway across from the kitchen a million years ago, when she’d lived there happily with Robby and gave a shit about home furnishings. Her strawberry-colored hair hung in a high ponytail glistening with sweat, flushed face dominated by gray eyes the color of steel. She sneered at the woman behind the glass.

  “How’s being mayor?” she said to her reflection. “Working your way up to governor, still milking your dead husband’s glorious legacy?” She stepped closer to the glass, imagining Delilah’s premonition of this moment, the good laugh the mayor would have about it. “You know I’ll kill you, right? I never thought I was capable of cold-blooded murder, but you’ve made me reconsider—”

  “That’s some crazy shit, Shepherd.”

  Val jumped at the man’s voice coming from the living room. She dropped her beer bottle and lunged back into the kitchen. Staying low to the ground behind the counter, she threw open the cabinet door underneath her sink and grabbed the gun she kept there—one of many she hid around the house in case of emergency. She braced her arms on the countertop, gun pointed at the voice. Her eyes narrowed when she recognized Sten Ander, corrupt Seattle PD Vice Squad detective and Delilah’s henchman, where he lounged on her sofa with his legs crossed and fingers bridged behind his head.

  “Come here to finally kill me?” Val said to Sten, the psychopath who’d tried to murder her and Max on three separate occasions. She hadn’t seen Sten since he’d shot Max in the stomach at the Pacific Science Center. He’d shaved off his giant 1980s beat cop mustache; now he looked like a darker, crazier version of Jeremy R
enner with a narrower nose and thicker eyebrows.

  “Yes, I came to kill you,” he said as he bounced his foot in the air. “That’s why I’m unarmed—to show off my head-exploding psychic powers.” He stared at her and scrunched his face in mock concentration, then relaxed and sighed. “Damn. I was sure that would work.”

  Fucking Sten. She’d never met a person so full of shit, and she’d met a lot of shitbags in her line of work.

  Val kept her gun trained on him. “What do you want, Sten?”

  “I came to deliver a message.”

  “So spit it out.”

  “See, here’s the thing. It’s kind of complicated. I think—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Val lowered her gun, turned away from him, and opened the fridge. She pulled out another beer. “If you’re gonna start with the bullshitting, I’d rather you just kill me.” She popped off the cap and took a long swig.

  “I think, before I give you the message, we should talk about your budding drinking problem. You’ll never score another rich boyfriend as a paranoid drunk.”

  Val slammed her bottle down on the countertop. Fucking Sten and his mind games. “You wanna talk?” She stomped around the partition and shoved her gun in Sten’s face. “Let’s talk.”