Going Nowhere

by Abbie Zanders

  He looked amused. “No. You’re far too intelligent to believe that sort of drivel. But our futures are very much entwined. It simply makes sense.” He shrugged. “A binding agreement, a sharing of assets. Think about it, Alyxandra. By marrying me, you would instantly become an extremely wealthy woman.”

  “I don’t care about your money.”

  “Maybe not for yourself, no. But think about how many kids you could help, Alyxandra. You could build new state of the art facilities and equipment, provide cutting edge treatments and programs, and oversee them yourself.”

  I thought about all the kids who didn’t have access to decent medical care. About what could be done with Roger’s vast wealth and presence in the industry. Some of my resolve faltered. Was I being selfish by not giving in? If I could help thousands, maybe millions at a time, instead of just a few, shouldn’t I?

  Roger watched me closely. No doubt he had chosen his words carefully, knowing just where to aim for maximum effect. He was a predator, and an intelligent predator always went for the weakest spots.

  “What’s in it for you?” I asked.

  He grinned and opened his arms. “Why, I get you, of course. You and whatever gives you the extraordinary ability to heal.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but he held up his hand.

  “Spare me the denial. I’ve had my top researchers working around the clock to try to duplicate what you did and they all come back with the same conclusion—it’s not scientifically possible. But then, you weren’t using science, were you, Alyxandra?”

  Panic began to overtake the anger, but I forced it back. He was fishing. If he had actual proof, he would have held it over my head a long time ago.

  “I already told you, I can’t explain what happened.” It was the truth, kind of. I couldn’t explain what happened when I healed someone. It was a divine gift, passed down through hundreds of generations. By admitting the truth, I would not only be screwing myself, but my entire family. “I don’t know what you think I did, but—”

  “I think you held standard cultures in your hands and turned them into miracle cures. I think several of the people you routinely came into contact with are no longer suffering from life-long health issues.”

  Poker face, don’t fail me now. “That sounds insane. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he agreed, “it does. Which is why I hired people to find out everything I could about you. It took years and cost a small fortune, but it was worth it. You have an impressive ancestry, Alyxandra. There have been quite a few very gifted people in your family line. But I’m sure you already know that.”

  I felt as if the floor had opened up beneath me. Mentally, I was in a free fall, scrabbling desperately for something, anything to hold on to.

  “If you’ve looked into my background,” I said through gritted teeth, “then you know my little brother died of cancer. If I had the ability to heal him, don’t you think I would have?” It killed me to say those words, because I had been asking myself the same question all my life.

  At least he had the decency to wipe that grin off his face. “Yes, I know about Christos. But I also know that in every hospital in which you’ve worked, the remission rate of patients has increased significantly. You might not be able to help everyone, but you can help enough.”

  I shook my head, feeling extremely weary. My head was pounding, my limbs ached, and I felt like I hadn’t eaten in days instead of hours. “So, this is all based on some selfless desire to rid the world of disease and illness?”

  He laughed. “God, no. We need more people to die, actually. Can you imagine what would happen if sickness was eradicated? Billions of dollars in revenue gone. Millions of jobs eliminated in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, insurance, caretakers. The earth would become so overpopulated it would be unlivable within mere decades, perhaps even during our own lifetime. No, Alyxandra. I’m not talking about mass distribution to the general population.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “The cures will only be made available to a select few, specifically those who have the ability to pay dearly for them. Besides, I don’t wish to overtax you. The healing does take its toll, does it not?” His face turned serious, while I felt the blood draining from mine. This was my worst nightmare coming true.

  “No,” I whispered hoarsely.

  “Yes. There is no other way. I need you.”

  “If I refuse?”

  “Oh, I don’t think you will.” He held up his phone and showed me pictures of Grace’s house. Pictures taken from inside the house, showing Grace napping peacefully in her rocker.

  A surge of rage erupted from somewhere deep inside me. “You son of a bitch!” I lunged across the seat at him, but he was ready for it. He used my own momentum against me to pin me against the back seat. He wasn’t a huge man, but he was bigger than me and in great shape.

  “Now, now. Is that any way to talk to your betrothed?” He smirked. “Be smart, Alyxandra. No one has to get hurt.”

  Except me, I thought. There had to be another way. There had to be.

  * * *

  Reid

  Tunnel vision. That was the only way I could describe it. Everything else faded into the background. My mind focused, my body prepared for battle. Nothing else mattered. Not my job, not my life, nothing.

  My mate was missing.

  “Tell me.”

  Grace worried her hands. “Patty, the nursing supervisor on Alyx’s floor, called to see if Alyx had come home. Alyx had asked her if she wanted anything from the cafeteria while she was down there, but Alyx didn’t come back. Patty said she thought Alyx might have left early because she hadn’t looked well.”

  My chest tightened. That would have been my claim taking hold. I should never have let her go in to work. She should be here, with me. I should be easing her through the transition. I should have told her the truth.

  “Alyx doesn’t get sick, Reid,” Grace said firmly. “Something else is wrong.”

  Fever. Aches. Ravenous hunger. Extreme fatigue. I had hoped Alyx’s special gift might have saved her from the worst of it. Other than looking a little more tired than usual, she had seemed to be weathering it well. I should have known better. This wasn’t something she could just shake off and move on from, and unfortunately, it was going to get worse before it got better.

  Fucking hell.

  “Maybe she was tired and fell asleep on one of the cots in the employee locker room,” I suggested as I grabbed my coat. It was time for me to man-up and stop fooling myself. Alyx was mine. I had done this to her. I was going to help her through it, dammit.

  Grace shook her head. “Patty said they checked there. They checked everywhere. She’s not answering any of her pages. She’s gone, Reid. Something terrible has happened, I just know it.”

  I paused. There was a lot more to Grace’s concern than she was sharing. Fear—real, soul-deep fear—permeated Grace’s natural rose scent.

  “Grace, I think it’s time you told me everything.”

  Twenty minutes later, I had the pedal to the metal and was booking it to the hospital. My mind was swimming, my heart was pounding, and my wolf was one precarious step away from taking control. The need to find and protect my mate was strong, stronger than anything I had ever felt.

  Roger Chamberlain had her. I knew it. Fucking felt it in my bones. He was the son of a bitch boss she had told me about. The one who wouldn’t let go.

  The thing was, I knew what the bastard was capable of. I had seen firsthand what his deranged mind and greedy thirst for power had done to those he had taken before.

  Bottom line: that fucker was going down.

  I made it to the hospital in record time and went right up to Alyx’s floor. The supervisor, Patty, wasn’t too keen on talking to me at first, but one of the other nurses, a young woman named Andi, remembered me from when I had come in with Alyx to see Dylan.

  Patty told me that she had notified hospital security after talking with G
race, but I had seen those guys. Human rent-a-cops. They didn’t have a tenth of the tracking ability or skills I had. There was no way I was leaving my mate’s rescue up to those yahoos.

  The first thing I did was allow my wolf to rise close to the surface. To everyone else, it looked as if I was walking around aimlessly, but I was really creating a trail map based on Alyx’s scent. Under normal circumstances, it would have been a difficult task with all of the powerful odors lingering in the hospital environment, even for me. But because I had marked Alyx, her scent was now infused with mine, a veritable beacon to my wolf.

  Alyx had waited at the elevator, but had taken the steps down to the ground floor. I followed the trail out one of the side exits and into the parking lot, where it abruptly disappeared. Judging by the strength of the scent, it had been at least several hours ago.

  I had picked up another scent, too. A man’s. One who had followed the same path down the stairs and into the parking lot, where it, too, had disappeared.

  That guy’s future was bleak. When I found him, he was going to get up close and personal with the wrath of a mated wolf.

  I worked my way back up to the pediatric oncology floor and did another walk through of the public areas. This time, I was concentrating on Alyx’s abductor.

  I found traces of him in the public waiting areas, but none beyond the nurse’s station. That told me it had been a planned attack. He had been hanging around, waiting for his opportunity.

  It also meant that someone had to have seen him.

  I talked to the nurses, asking if they had noticed anyone lurking around they couldn’t readily associate with a patient. Unfortunately, none of them could. They had been too busy with patient care to pay much attention to the comings and goings in the waiting rooms.

  I paid a visit to hospital security next. They weren’t quite as friendly about me sniffing around their territory, but tough shit. I wasn’t into pussyfooting on the best of days, and today was not a good day. One growl was all it took to get them to show me the security footage from Alyx’s floor, the main elevators, and the parking lot.

  The digital playback clearly showed a man approaching Alyx at the bank of elevators. I froze the image right as she preceded him into the stairwell. The glint of a gun at Alyx’s back made my vision go red. My wolf was going crazy. It was all I could do to prevent the shift right then and there.

  Within minutes, I left the stunned rent-a-cops cowering in their office. If anything happened to Alyx because of their incompetence, I was going to take it out of each one of their sorry asses.

  The good news was now I knew what the fucker looked like.

  I called my CO and told him what was going on. I didn’t know what had shocked him more: the fact I had found my mate, or that I had asked for help.

  When I mentioned Chamberlain’s name, he seemed just as stoked as I was.

  I sent him the pics I had snapped. He was going to have our resident hacker patch into state and federal databases to put a name to the face. With the resources we had at our disposal, Alyx’s abductor didn’t have a chance in hell of remaining hidden. I was going to find him and take him down. I only hoped he didn’t do anything to hurt Alyx in the meantime.

  Stay strong, Alyx. I’m coming for you.

  I hadn’t even made it back to my place before my phone dinged with the information I needed.

  The guy’s name was Henry James. He had served two tours as a Marine and now worked in the private sector for none other than Roger Chamberlain. The best news yet: the fidiot had used his own credit card to book a room at one of the higher-end, extended stay hotels for the past two weeks, less than two hours east of Nowhere.

  Grace opened the door before I had even made it down the driveway, her knitting bag already in her hand. I had called ahead and told her to pack some things to keep her occupied for a few hours because I was going to put her in my safe room. She was one of those weaknesses I was talking about earlier, and I had no doubt a man like Chamberlain would use Alyx’s grandmother as incentive to get what he wanted.

  “Don’t worry, Grace,” I told her. “I’m going to get Alyx back and put an end to this once and for all.”

  “I know you will,” she said with absolute faith.

  Chapter Twelve

  Reid

  The hotel parking lot was less than half-full when I got there. It didn’t take me long to find the vehicle I was looking for. Black. Classy. Tinted windows.

  Alyx’s scent was very strong around the car. So was her abductor’s, a.k.a. Dead Man Walking. There was a third scent, too. One that reeked of expensive cologne, Italian leather, and Armani. I was willing to bet my left paw that scent belonged to none other than Roger Chamberlain himself.

  A grim smile pulled at my lips. That was good. This way, I didn’t have to waste time tracking the fucker down.

  I moved toward the building with purpose. As I might have mentioned, I was essentially a single-minded individual when I was on a mission, and my current task had one hundred percent of my focus. My objectives were simple. One, find Alyx; and two, kill everyone who had touched her.

  “What took you so long?”

  I pulled up short, claws pushing through my fingertips, ready to rip out the throat of anyone who got in my way.

  It took only half a second for me to recognize the voice coming seemingly out of nowhere. There was a reason Jason Bradley’s call sign was Ghost. My teammate wasn’t seen unless he wanted to be.

  Mine was Reaper, for obvious reasons.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.

  Ghost stepped from the shadows enough for me to see the huge shit-eating grin on his face. “Nice to see you too, Reap. Cap filled us in. He wants Chamberlain and whatever lackeys he has hanging around taken alive. Thought that might not happen with you flying solo. Congrats on the mating, by the way. Lucky fucker.”

  I grunted an acknowledgment. If Ghost was here on Cap’s orders, then the others probably were, too.

  Right on cue, I felt the sights of Hawkeye’s sniper rifle settle on the back of my neck for a few seconds before moving away. It was his fucked-up way of saying hello. Hawkeye was the best of the best. We were all excellent shots, but Hawkeye never missed.

  Bear, Boomer, Dex, and Psych couldn’t be far behind.

  “How did you—”

  “Get here so fast?” Psych finished, suddenly appearing on the right. Finishing other people’s sentences was one of his more annoying habits, which was exactly why he did it. “Isn’t it enough that we did?”

  Not answering direct questions was another.

  Dex, aptly named for both his Poindexter-like brain and his penchant for dismembering people, gave a short whistle.

  I looked up, catching a glimpse of his snow-white hair disappearing around the corner.

  I didn’t doubt my ability to get in and get Alyx out, but there would be damage. The probability of taking Chamberlain alive soared to ninety-nine point nine percent with their presence.

  Knowing I wouldn’t be getting the chance to kill Chamberlain did kind of put a damper on things, but my team’s arrival reminded me that there was more at stake here and I needed to look at the bigger picture.

  I took some small comfort in the fact that the man would be thoroughly, and painfully, interrogated. If he was still breathing when we got done with him, there would no doubt be others lined up, chomping at the bit to get their crack at him. News of the lab we had taken down had spread like wildfire through the shifter community.

  We jogged over to where Dex was holding open one of the side doors, then silently followed him up the stairwell to a suite on the sixth floor. As we walked in, I saw Cap, our CO; Boomer, who liked to blow things up; and Bear, who was huge, hairy, and mean, looking at a 3-D hologram of the building’s inner structure.

  Tony Stark had nothing on our special ops squad when it came to toys, I thought with a surge of pride.

  “Rea
p, glad you could make it to the party.”

  In the time it took me to drive from the hospital to my place, get Grace situated in my safe room, gear up, and get here, my entire team had secured the hotel and had set up a command center in the room adjoining Chamberlain’s. We were good, but we weren’t that good, which meant something else was going on that I didn’t yet know about. I didn’t like being out of the loop, not at all, but before I could open my mouth, a warning look and a slight shake of Cap’s head told me those answers would have to wait.

  Dex tapped a few keys on his portable tablet. “Hawk, you still with us, man?”

  “Roger that. The dumb fuck left the drapes open. Like ducks in a barrel.”

  The team chuckled. Hawk’s superior skill with a rifle didn’t extend to his use of common phrases. “That’s fish, fidiot. Like shooting fish in a barrel.”

  “Huh. Whatever.”

  A picture formed on Dex’s screen from Hawk’s bird’s-eye view. Above his scope was a telescopic digital recording device, useful in situations like this. We could see what he saw in real time.

  My eyes instinctively sought out Alyx. She was sitting on the couch, looking weary and pissed off, but otherwise unharmed. Chamberlain was standing off to the side, his back to the window. One guy stood in the background, another at the door.

  “Patching in to audio now ...”

  * * *

  Alyx

  It had been a few hours since we had left the hospital. Surely someone would have noticed I was gone by now. In a classic moment of hindsight, I wished I had taken Reid up on his offer to help and told him everything. If nothing else, at least someone would have a name to start with.

  And maybe I wouldn’t feel so alone now.

  I had no one to blame but myself. I had been too stubborn, too proud, and now I was getting exactly what I had asked for—the opportunity to fight my own battles. No one knew where I was, nor my captor’s name. I was going to have to figure a way out of this on my own.

  However, there was Gram to think about. It had been stupid of me to put her in harm’s way, foolishly underestimating the lengths Roger was willing to go to get what he wanted. To know that someone had been able to get into her house and take those pictures, that shook me. Was there someone watching her even now? If I didn’t play into Roger’s sick game, would he pick up the phone and make good on his implied threat to hurt her?