SIX
AWAKE
HAVEN
Something’s wrong. Really wrong.
The bed beneath me is too soft, and that scares the shit out of me.
I’m used to a cramped cot and cheap sheets. Thin mattress. A bad back.Pain. This is nothing like that, and as I come to with a start, I have no fucking idea where I am.
Especially since, a heartbeat later, it hits me that they took me from the facility with the cot days ago. I’d been lying on a cement floor—and now I’mnot.
Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.
What’s going on?
Where am I?
No.
My breath catches in my throat. In case I’m not alone—in case there are more cameras—I keep my eyes screwed shut while I fight through the fuzz and the haze in my brain to figure out what happened to me now. It comes in bits and pieces. Flashes of memory, snatches of voices and sound. It’s a struggle, but I haven’t given up yet. Not completely.
What happened to you, Haven Smith?
I remember some of it at first. How Winter finally decided that he was done waiting for the Order to come for me. Whatever he thought he could get out of the secret society, he didn’t, and his threat to fill my cell seemed to have come true. Two or three days ago—I’m not so sure anymore—I was marched out of the cell I spent so many weeks in, shoved into the front seat of a van, and told to keep my mouth shut or the driver would toss me in the back… and he would join me there.
I had hoped that, though they were moving me, Winter’s rule would still hold. Considering it was just me and Cam, and I didn’t know if the van was bugged, I’d been terrified that he would follow through on his threat. Either in the van or when it finally stopped.
I… I don’t think he did. Despite my meager hope that being freed from my cell might allow me to escape, I never got the chance. We arrived at an abandoned warehouse, he cuffed me to him before we left the van, and he basically dragged me to a room that smelled of mildew and disuse. There was a small folding bed in there with a single top sheet crumpled over it. No sink. No toilet. Cam produced a bedpan for me, telling me I was lucky to get that much, and laughed when I grabbed the sheet and dropped to the hard floor instead of the cot where the cement would keep me cold and uncomfortable enough to keep from sleeping.
He stayed in the room, watching me as though waiting for something. I’m pretty sure he didn’t touch me, but he didn’t feed me, either. He just fiddled with his phone, disappearing into a different room in the warehouse for hours at a time before returning, surprised to find that I was still awake.
I had to be. In that room, if I fell asleep, I’d be assaulted. I was one hundred percent convinced of that. He would take advantage of me, one way or another, and even if that wasinevitable, I refused to be caught unaware. If he was going to hurt me, he was going to at least have to look me in the eyes as he did. As for me, I needed to know it was coming.
Whether he raped me first or just killed me outright, I knew that I was going to die in that room. Cam made enough snide comments that it was clear Winter didn’t believe in leaving loose ends; there was never going to be a ransom and a rescue, no matter what he said over the last six weeks. Death was coming for me, and my broken body would be left to rot in a room where no one would ever find me.
Still, I expected Cam to drop his pants and finally work my legs open before it was all over.
I didnotexpect him to leave my new hell, and when the door opened again, an angel would be standing in the doorway, horrified for a second before he ran toward where I was sprawled out on the floor, waiting to die.
I almost thought I had. Because the angel? It had Connor Heyward’s face. It had Connor Heyward’s voice. He looked a little different than the man who has forever been a thorn in my side and a temptation I couldn’t allow myself to desire, but considering the feelings I’ve kept buried for so long… it was only fitting that, as death came for me, I got to look at Connor one last time.
Only I don’t think I was dead. When the angel lifted me from the ground, I hurt too much to be anything other than alive. As he carried me out of what should’ve been my grave, I swear I saw Dallas Collins and Sebastien Reynolds. Neither one of those men would’ve been in my version of Heaven.
Then I heard Adrian Heller. Desmond St. James. All of the Heirs were there, and once I understood that this was happening… that the Order had come for me at last… I didn’t knowwhatto think. Eventually, I thought it was just another hallucination. In no world would Connor Heyward have foundme, laying me on his lap, stroking my hair as he told me everything was going to be okay.
The Connor I knew would smirk and tease and tell me I was overdue for a trip to the spa. He would have manners enough not to point out I stink like sweat, piss, and other bodily fluids, though he’d joke because that’s what he did. Hell, I’d easier believe he was real if he was flirting with me, half-dead as I was.
But he didn’t. Instead, the angel held me tight, and the thought that I’d finally closed my eyes, that this was some sort of dream—or even a nightmare—and I’d wake up again in that room with no hope of surviving that much longer had me whimpering and letting go.
I must have fallen asleep for real then. What other explanation can there be? Because I’m awake now. Some of the fog in my head, weighing me down… it’s receded enough that I know I’m awake, I’m alive, and I’m in a soft bed that smells clean andgoodeven if I don’t.
I can’t be in the warehouse. I know I’m not in the cell, either. But if Connor was real… where am I now?
Where ishe?
Is he out there, watching me fake unconsciousness? The idea that he might be, that Connor Heyward is seeing me at my most vulnerable… I’m scared and I’m sick and I know that I’m not okay at all, but there’s no way in hell that I’m going to just pretend this isn’t happening. So, panic causing my heart to race as I sit up faster than I should, I snap my eyes open while digging my fingers into the soft mattress beneath me to keep from falling over; for a moment, I forgot I was as weak as I am, and the spike in my blood pressure didn’t help. A blanket is covering me. It falls, pooling at my waist as I suck in a breath, looking around me. Unless I’ve died and Heaven is a masculine bedroom with taupe walls, a hardwood floor, a King-sized bed, luxuriousblack sheets, and a sliding door leading out onto a balcony, my rescue… it really happened.
