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“He’s not here.”
Daniel was careful pivoting in his crouch toward the stairs. Lydia was halfway down them and finally stalled out, her hazel eyes wide, her cheeks windburned and bright red against a base of pasty white panic, her grown-out, blown-out, blond-streaked hair frazzled from the wild ride in. With her gray trail pants, and her black turtleneck and heavy fleece, she was wearing what he thought of as her uniform—and he wished she were covered head to toe in Kevlar.
“Where is he,” she whispered in despair.
For a split second, silhouetted on that staircase, she was all he could see, all he could think about—even with the urgency of what certainly appeared to be a kidnapping at best, a beatdown-and-disappear-forever at worst.
Remember this moment, he told himself.Imprint this and store it with the hoard.
At the end, when things got really bad for him and he was just a flicker of consciousness trapped inside the husk of his body, he was going to need to remember what she looked like. Sounded like. Smelled like.
His beautiful wolven. An evolutionary masterpiece, two sides inhabiting the same body, both human and lupine. A shifter that was very real, instead of some Halloween myth.
A miracle he still did not completely understand, but that he no longer questioned. How could beauty like hers be defined, anyway.
“Daniel… are you okay?”
I love you, he thought at her.
During the frantic ride in, with all his focus on getting them here, he’d slipped back into the black ops soldier he’d once been, and the return had landed him in such a familiar place that amnesia had wiped out reality. Everything was back now, though, from the rolling nausea in his gut to thegod-awful wobble that dogged him—to the goodbye that was coming for them, sure as if they were stalked in the shadows, his killer closing in.
Fuck it, his killer was already here, inside of him.
He put up his palm as more alarm hit her face. “I’m fine. Don’t worry.”
Liar. And yet it was a truth. He was no more worse off than he had been, and when you had terminal cancer, no change was the new getting-better.
“What do we do?” she asked.
For a brief moment, a flare of intention reignited his body, purpose and sharp thinking tingling through him. But it was just a pilot light that flared and faded—
The sound of a vehicle screeching to a halt brought both their heads to the front door, and through a part in the drapes of the window seat, the blacked-out Suburban that had pulled in behind the bike was like a presidential detail rolling up.
He glanced back at Lydia and held out the documents. “I don’t know where he is. But we may have the ‘why’ of all this right here—”
The loss of consciousness came with no warning. One moment, he was up on his granted-they-were-loose legs. The next, the carpet was coming at him like a rugby player who felt his momma had been insulted.
The last thing Daniel was aware of was the graceful wings of the paperwork as the legaldocument that transferred ownership of a potentially billion-dollar cancer drug rippled to the floor ahead of him.
Goddamn it, he needed Gus more than ever right now.
And someone had gone and killed his fucking oncologist.
TWO
LYDIA SUSI KNEWthat Daniel was going down a split second before the collapse claimed him. Over the last six months, she’d developed a sixth sense about his passing out—or maybe a change in his scent was the tip-off, her wolven nose a barometer for the subtle shifts in his hormones.
With a lunge and a swing of her legs, she vaulted over the half-wall balustrade of the staircase, but she didn’t make it in time. Gravity was quicker than she was, and Daniel’s fragile body landed in a heap on the carpet, his arms flopping when he didn’t even try to brace himself against the impact, his head bouncing in an alarming recoil thanks to the face-first digger.
As she threw herself down beside him, the tile in the kitchen registered out of the corner of her eye. At least he hadn’t been in there when he’d—
“Daniel,” she said hoarsely.“Daniel…”
With gentle hands, she rolled him over, and theway his skull lolled to the side made her send up a plea to her dead grandfather. But like that Finnish specter ever did anything to help? And why hadn’t she thought more about Daniel on the ride over here? She should have known that he didn’t have the strength for that roaring trip, much less for what was waiting for them.
Gathering herself, she tried to calm down. “We just need Gus to have a look at you—”
Except there was no Gus. Anywhere. That was why they’d come.
