Secret Unleashed: Secret McQueen, Book 6

by Sierra Dean

  Cedes handed him what I could only assume was a demolition work order. An order that probably hadn’t existed two hours ago. It helped to have friends in high—or low—places.

  “So what, we’re saying that on entering the building they accidentally triggered existing demolition charges?”

  Cedes nodded, and Tyler let out an aggravated sigh. “Well…that sounds like a steaming pile of horseshit to me. But it’s a hell of a lot better than what this one was going to suggest.”

  Cedes acknowledged my existence at last. “Asbestos?”

  “Guilty.”

  “Don’t say the g-word in here,” Cedes scolded. “Look, we have to book you guys for trespassing and damaging private property. Nothing too major, but it’s going on your record.”

  “Hot damn! I’ve been trying to get something on my record for eons. Apparently the worse the crime, the harder it is to get arrested for it.” I beamed at her. “I assume we’ll need to pay for the damages, and someone will have to post bail?”

  “You got it,” Cedes said. “That going to be a problem?”

  “Not if you give me my one phone call.”

  As luck would have it I had my fair share of multimillionaires and people with deep pockets to call. There was a time I’d have defaulted to calling my ex-boyfriend/werewolf husband Lucas Rain. After all, who was better than a billionaire when you needed cash fast?

  But I didn’t want to owe anything to Lucas if I could avoid it. I’d asked my last favor of him when my mother showed up in town, and now that it was done, I didn’t want anything else to do with him. I certainly didn’t want to be in debt to him for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It wasn’t the fear of owing him money, but rather being symbolically shackled to him any more than I already was.

  Which meant there was only one man I could reach out to and not come out in the red at the end.

  I wish I hadn’t been in a holding cell when Sig came through the front doors of the police station. I’d seen how dazzled Barbie had been by Holden during previous visits, and if Holden was impressive, Sig was a force to be reckoned with.

  Barbie wouldn’t have stood a chance. She’d probably been reduced to a foaming puddle of drool in the lobby. Sig just had that effect on women. And a lot of men, too, I was willing to bet. He was six-foot-seven and a towering ode to Scandinavian hotness. Lean, blond, with piercing blue eyes and the power to woo with the smallest gesture, Sig was a hell of a man.

  He was also the true Tribunal leader, and held the council’s purse strings, so he would be able to get Holden and me out, and pay for the building too. There was no way to know how much the council had paid in the past to cover up the things vampires had done in the city or around the world.

  Keeping a secret like ours wasn’t easy—or cheap—but the council had spent centuries amassing wealth. Everything from stock holdings—getting in on both Microsoft and Apple when they went public had helped—to long-term, high-interest savings accounts and bonds, the council was set. Super set. They hid their wealth under the radar by maintaining accounts in different names and foreign countries, but if it were all added up, the vampires would have the gross income of a midsized country.

  With almost none of the debt.

  I might have felt guilty asking for the money if it were anyone else, but the vampire council was not anyone else. I sort of felt like they owed it to me now, considering I’d been their bitch for so many years.

  The officer monitoring the holding cells let Holden out first, and me next, announcing we’d posted bail. Out in the lobby, Sig was leaning casually on the front desk saying something to Barbie in his smooth accent—one I’d never been able to place because it was so old—and Mercedes stood nearby, pretending she wasn’t enchanted by him.

  Everyone who ever met him was enchanted by him, it was part of his gift. Some vampires had extra talents, and Sig’s was putting those around him at ease, human and vampire alike.

  That was part of the reason he scared me so much. I felt relaxed when I was next to him, and since I was almost never relaxed, it made me extra nervous about him. Like he might attack me at any moment, but I would be so calm I’d simply roll over and let him maul me.

  My blind trust was what made me most wary of him.

  “Ah, here they are, my troublemaking friends.” He straightened to his full height and spread his arms wide like he wanted to hug the whole room. Barbie was gawking at him with a starry expression, and even Cedes was having difficulty suppressing a smile. “I do hope they weren’t too difficult for you.”

  “Of course not,” Barbie said, as if she’d had anything to do with our brief stay in the slammer.

  “We might need to get them frequent visitor badges at this rate, but a stay in the cells was new.” Cedes toyed with her frizzy black curls. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was flirting with the Finnish master vampire.

  “Hey, Cedes?” I interrupted. “How’s Owen?”

  Her hand dropped from her hair, and she seemed to shake off the hazy glow of Sig’s presence. “Owen. Right. My boyfriend, Owen. Owen is great.” She took a few big steps back from Sig, suddenly realizing the impact he’d had on her wasn’t altogether natural.

  Cedes didn’t trust vampires on the best day, and it had taken years for me to get her to treat Holden like a person—sort of—but she still didn’t have fuzzy feelings about vampires en masse. Sig wasn’t helping matters now, even if his mojo was involuntary. To people like Mercedes and Tyler who didn’t get the nuances of vampire power, everything unnatural was an invasion of their psyche.

  I wanted her to stay wary, but I didn’t want her to think all vampires were monsters. Some of them might be, but not all, and it wasn’t fair of her to paint every single one of them with the same brush because of the misdeeds of a few.

  Maybe it was a side effect of her job too. I was willing to bet Cedes had a hard time seeing the good in humans, considering what she saw in the field on a daily basis. If I could get her to see vampires the same way she did humans, then I might have a chance of showing her there was some good mixed in with the bad.

  Problem was some days even I had trouble seeing the good, in vampires and humans both.

  “Cedes, this is Sig. He’s my co-chair on the…council.” I avoided the word Tribunal because there was just no way to make it sound like a normal job. Council could be anything, though.

  “We were introduced,” she said, her expression serious and her whole posture becoming more rigid. Since I was feeling the soothing impact of Sig’s presence, I knew she must be fighting it hard.

  I leaned in close and whispered so Barbie wouldn’t hear, “He’s not doing it intentionally. It’s just…him. Try not to resist.”

  I might as well have told a wall not to resist a wrecking ball. She’d yield eventually, but now that I’d told her not to, she was more hell-bent on keeping his powers at bay. If Mercedes Castilla had a superpower, it would be stubbornness.

  “You guys are good here?” she asked, though it sounded more like a statement than a question, as though we had no choice but to be okay. Without waiting for our reply, she turned heel and jogged up the steps and back into the upper floor of the precinct.

  “Are you two done here?” Sig probed. It was a loaded question, and I knew he was going to unleash hell on me the second we were out of human earshot.

  “Definitely,” Holden replied, the first word he’d spoken to me since we’d arrived here. In spite of our holding cells being next to each other, he hadn’t said a thing. Either he didn’t want to risk saying something telling in front of non-vampire company, or he was pissed at me for getting him arrested.

  Or for ruining his precious suit.

  We left the station together when all the necessary paperwork had been completed. With Sig signing everything, it made me feel as if he’d just bought me.

  He already owned my life in so many other ways, what was one more?

  Once the three of us were outside in the warm summer nig
ht, Sig’s pleasant veneer melted away, and he fixed me with a stern, unimpressed glare. “Do you know what it means to lie low, Secret?”

  “I—”

  “That was a rhetorical question, as the answer is obviously no. I let you stay in the city because you promised me you could stay under the radar. Keep a low profile. All those silly new expressions you people have for keeping out of trouble. And what do you do? You bring down an entire apartment building.”

  “In fairness, that was Grendel…”

  “Now is a poor time to make excuses, pet.” He shortened his long strides, giving me and Holden a chance to catch up. Holden didn’t seem to be in much of a rush, trailing a few feet back.

  “We saved the girl,” I said. “And didn’t Shane bring Grendel in?”

  “He did.”

  I sighed inwardly, relieved to know Shane and the wardens had been able to wrangle Grendel into council headquarters before the vampire’s knees healed and he was able to make a run for it.

  “I think he knows something about Peyton,” I said, recalling what Grendel had baited me with in the apartment complex. “He might know where he is.”

  Sig crossed the street, and I had no choice but to follow him if I wanted the conversation to continue. The yellowish glow of the streetlights gave his white-blond hair a warm, angelic glow. Sometimes, if I glanced at him quickly and saw only the beautiful face and often-shirtless physique, I forgot he was scary. In those moments he was just an alluring man.

  This was not one of those moments, in spite of how good he looked in his tight black T-shirt. Considering Sig’s outfit generally consisted of leather pants and nothing else, the all black was a change of pace. The shoes were the most impressive thing for me. He wandered around barefoot ninety-nine percent of the time, and I knew he’d only put the loafers on to appear normal at the police station, but it didn’t make me any less fascinated by the sight.

  I was so distracted I didn’t notice him stop in his tracks and ended up walking into his backside.

  It was like smacking into a muscular wall.

  “The time has come,” he said, as if picking up on a conversation thread, but it wasn’t from any conversation I remembered having with him. Had he been talking this whole time while I was busy staring at his shoes?

  Better his shoes than his ass, I suppose.

  “For what?” I asked, before I could be distracted by anything else.

  Holden was beside me now, and he shook his head at Sig. “That’s drastic. We said we could avoid it.”

  “Avoid what?”

  “We said we could avoid it if she played by the rules. I was a fool to believe such an option would work. If Peyton has other rogues working with him, there is no safe place here anymore. When a creature like Grendel can be lured in by Alexandre’s promises, we are left with no other choice.”

  “But we caught Grendel,” I reminded them, still not sure what we were talking about. I didn’t like where I thought it was going, though. “I’m not afraid of rogues.”

  “If you believe this is something you can talk your way out of by professing how unafraid you are, you are sorely mistaken. There will be no further discussion.”

  “But—”

  “I’m sending you away.” Sig’s tone was as flat as the skyline in my prairie hometown. “Tonight.”

  Chapter Six

  I was still saying no when we arrived at the council headquarters. The council building was an exact twin to Grand Central Terminal, a huge old train station cloaked from human eyes by layer upon layer of magic, both vampire and otherwise.

  The three of us marched through the front doors, and I trailed after Sig like a desperate puppy, my high-heeled boots clacking loudly on the black-and-white tile floor. I hadn’t yet learned how to move with the silent grace of other vampires, but maybe that was something my werewolf half had negated.

  Werewolves, as a rule, didn’t need to worry too much about running around in heels.

  “You can’t send me away. I’m not a naughty child you can ship off to boarding school.” We were through the big oak doors that divided the main working floor of the council with the lower chambers where the Council Elders and our Tribunal space were held.

  Somewhere lower still was a cell where Grendel was bound in silver and would be slowly starved until he was a literal husk of his former self. A vampire couldn’t starve to death, but they could waste away to something far worse.

  “Why do you insist on making it sound as though I’m punishing you?” Sig spoke in a quiet, calm voice, which made the slightly hysterical pitch of my own words all the more pathetic.

  “It is a punishment. You’re forcing me to leave my home.”

  “You stupid, ignorant girl. If you can’t understand why it is I’m forced to do this, maybe I should just leave you for Peyton and his minions to discover.”

  That made me stop talking.

  A warden opened up the door to the Tribunal chamber, and Sig and I entered. Holden was forced to wait out in the hall. After a quick scan of the room assured me we were alone and Juan Carlos wouldn’t be joining this conversation, I continued.

  “I don’t see why it’s necessary.”

  “Do you want to witness the death of everyone you hold dear? Would you like to see the slow, violent torture of your human detective friends? Your foolish vampire-hunting sidekicks?” At my surprised face he smiled coldly. “Yes, don’t think I didn’t know about your training exercises with Shane and Nolan. If you think there’s anything you do I don’t know about, you can put that thought out of your mind right now. I know your every move, Secret. Every borrowed breath you take. Whatever you do and wherever you go, I know.”

  Well…that was unnerving.

  “And if I know, others can know. There will be those who see the werewolf you love and consider him fair game in luring you out. And do you think one wolf can withstand a half-dozen vampires?” Sig arched a brow, silently demanding I respond to his question, though he knew the answer as well as I did.

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No. Desmond couldn’t defend himself against six vampires.”

  “If you stay, it will mean his death. Desmond, Mercedes, Tyler, Nolan, Shane. The other wolves you care about. Anyone you’ve ever met is at risk. Do you want them to end up like Brigit?”

  There were no harsher words he could have chosen. I didn’t need to be reminded of my blame in Brigit’s death. I knew perfectly well she’d been murdered because of me, and of course I didn’t want anyone else to suffer her fate.

  It was a cruel way for him to make his point, but it worked. I sat down in the large wooden throne that served as my Tribunal seat and raked my hands through my wind-tangled curls. “Where do you want me to go?” I asked, conceding his victory.

  “We can’t just spirit you away into the night without a reason. The elders would find it suspicious, as would Juan Carlos. And I can’t have you out in the wild without protection.”

  “Send Holden with me.”

  “A fine job he’s done thus far,” Sig scoffed.

  “He would die to protect me, and you know it.”

  “It isn’t his dedication I question. It’s his ability to protect you from yourself when necessary. Holden is far too willing to let you risk your own life when you think it’s appropriate. While I believe he’ll defend you against external forces, I don’t know if I can make him realize your greatest enemy is often yourself.”

  “I think Holden is well aware of how poor my decision-making skills are.”

  “If that’s meant to convince me, it is a poor argument.”

  “Well, if you’d tell me where you want to send me, maybe I can make a better suggestion.”

  “You’ll be going to Los Angeles under the guise of performing a personal request for me. The elders won’t ask questions, and though Juan Carlos will want to know, I’ll impress upon him the importance of having someone I trust look in on my children.”

  “Yo
ur…children?”

  “Yes. You’ll be going to the West Coast Council to ensure my offspring are all in good health. I’ve received reports one of my line has been proving…difficult for them, and you will act in my stead to put him right.”

  “One of your kids is being bad, and you’re sending me to babysit?”

  “Not one of my direct offspring. I haven’t sired a new vampire in some fifty years. No, this vampire is still new—he’s been with us less than a quarter century. An unfortunate situation, really. He went a little mad upon his turning, and he’s had trouble adjusting. I sired his maker, Theo, but it’s a decision I now regret I’m afraid to say. Such a mess.” Sig sat in the chair next to me and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’ve been meaning to look into it for years, but it seems to be coming to a head, and now there’s discussion of putting him down. Without his sire there, it falls to me to care for him, and now by extension it falls to you.”

  “Great. So I get kicked out of my city to go keep your nutcase vampire grandson from getting killed by his own council? Is that about the gist of it?”

  “I have a feeling you are the perfect person for the job.”

  “I’m thrilled. Can’t wait.” I put mock enthusiasm into my words and pumped my fist in the air.

  Sig was giving me a strange look, and I didn’t think it had anything to do with my reaction. His usual cool smile was gone, and there was something like concern on his face.

  “What?” I dropped my hand back to my lap.

  “I hope I’m not making a mistake,” he said.

  “Have you ever made a mistake?”

  “Two thousand years is an awfully long time, Secret. You’d be amazed how many mistakes one can make. You’ve been alive only twenty-three years, and look how many you’ve made.”

  Burn.

  “You’re so sweet to me.”

  “I’m far sweeter than you deserve sometimes. Don’t you forget that.”

  “Says the man who once offered to devour my humanity.” I leaned back in the throne, resting my head against the heavily carved wood. “I still want Holden with me. It will make me feel better, and it fits with the cover story. If I’m traveling for the council, it makes sense I’d have an envoy.”