AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He willed the lust down to simmering and brushed a bit of hair from the side of her face. “There is nowhere I would rather be, Sienna.”
Her smile brightened.
Recognizing his limitations, Fenn reached out and shut off the shower. “Now, let’s towel off and I’ll tell you what you need to know.”
The Cavalry
Mayaseemedtohavefallen asleep, which gave Sienna a small glimmer of relief, but Sienna was sure to keep her phone easily accessible and the volume up. She wanted to sit nearby, close enough to hear if Maya called for her, but Fenn said their visitors were coming. So she did her best to pretend she wasn’t nervous as hell and more emotional than usual and planted herself in the living room. In an attempt to lighten her psychological atmosphere, and maybe keep from having to focus on her therapeutic breathing techniques, she switched the tree lights on.
She’d managed to walk herself back from a stress-triggered vision twice in the time since she’d put fresh clothes on before Fenn stood again. He nodded at her before starting toward the foyer, and her mind danced back to that too-short time in the shower. With his arms around her, his hands gently stroking along her body and covering her in soothing sudsy soap. The way he’d been careful to keep it out of her eyes while he cleaned whatever she’d gotten on her face.
He was entirely too kind to be the incarnation and embodiment of the cessation of life.
Sienna shoved the reflection, and her automatically spiked heartrate, down when the first unfamiliar voice carried from the main entrance. It was male, and sounded rough, but even as it projected she caught the more familiar rumble of Fenn’s voice and the one she didn’t recognize lowered again. She imagined Fenn had told him to speak quieter, and a smile teased her lips.
The faintest sound of footsteps on hardwood forewarned her that she was about to be face-to-face with literally all four of them and she pushed to her feet.The Four freaking Horsemen.She’d be more geekishly excited about that under different circumstances.
Fenn stepped into the room first, moving closer to her and angled to face the room. “This is Sienna Jacobsen,” he said.
She was fairly sure she went a little bug-eyed, anyway, at the impressive sight of the three men crowding the usually wide entryway of the room. They hadn’t stopped by the closet, so all of them still wore coats and boots, but what really struck her was that they actuallydidall look somewhat familiar. It was a vague sense, closer to déjà vu than that of seeing an old friend. Still, her brain scrambled and all she managed was an awkward half-wave as her stare trailed from the forwardmost—and shortest—to the one in the back.
The forwardmost man stood on the far side of the semi-circle, dressed in dark neutrals of gray, brown, and black. He was the leanest of the three, with brown, slightly curly hair that hung over the tops of his ears and forehead. He had golden brown eyes that almost glowed against his darker look, grim expression included.
Closer to Fenn stood another man, who might have been the tallest and was easily over six-foot. He had a thick head full of copper-colored hair that hung loose past his shoulders and a day’s growth of stubble on his jaw. He was without doubt the most muscley of all of them, and coupled with his height his overall size made him the most physically intimidating. A fact Sienna doubted he hid from, given his vibrantly red overcoat. He didn’t shy from her appraising stare, a twitch of amusement lifting his lips and sparking in his striking green eyes.
The third man stood almost perfectly in between the other two, half a step behind and nearly the same height as the one in red. He wore a sleek black coat, but Sienna spied a white scarf tucked around his throat. He was impressively built, too, though standing side-by-side with the other guy made it clear that he wasn’tquiteas muscular. There was a calm, patient confidence in his dark brown eyes that peeked out beneath the sweep of his equally dark hair, which he kept cut shorter.
Sienna swallowed against a lump of nerves in her throat and drew a breath. She was pretty sure she could guess who was who just from looking at them. It was surreal.
The one in the middle stepped forward, a sympathetic smile lifting the corners of his lips, and held out his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sienna. I am Rajan.”
Sienna reached out to take his hand, noticing the one in red who she assumed was War shift his weight in her peripheral vision, and it struck her. The reason these giants of men were familiar to her. She barely remembered to shake properly as Rajan’s strong fingers curled around her smaller hand, and something must have shown on her face because his expression faltered.
“Is something the matter?”
Fenn laid a hand on her shoulder. “Sienna?”
She looked between Rajan and War again, blinking quickly, then up at Fenn. “Do you remember … that first vision I had in front of you?” Had that only been recently? It felt like it’d been weeks since she’d recognized him in that restaurant.
Fenn frowned. “Of course.”
Her breath came faster as the details rushed back to her. The blood in the snow. The barely identifiable figures, clearly approaching. The light overhead, out of sight—perhaps the closest thing to a metaphor her visions ever offered. “This was it,” she said.
Rajan’s brows lifted on his forehead.
The leaner man with the circles under his eyes scoffed. “And you just conveniently forgot until now?”
Rajan moved back and turned a narrow-eyed stare on the man. “When was the last time you had a vision, Cassian? Perhaps you can enlighten us as to how it ordinarily works?”
Sienna shook her head before the leaner man—Cassian, apparently—could do more than grunt in irritation. “No,” she said, “not meeting like this. I mean … you, coming here. I think I saw it, kind of, but it was … vague. Different.”
The one she had pegged as War, whose name she didn’t yet know, propped his hands on his hips and grinned too wide. “Your woman’s dreaming about us, Fenn.”
Sienna felt a rush of heat run through her unexpectedly, but strangely, it helped to sharpen her focus.
“Shut up,” Fenn snapped. His hand did not move from her shoulder.
“It was you two,” Sienna said, indicating Rajan and War. “You were dressed like you are now, as near as I can remember, and walking toward wherever I was watching from. The driveway, or the porch, maybe. It was dark around you, so all I could see was you and the snow beneath your feet, but that could have just been because of the way my sight narrows.” She drew a breath. “There was blood in the snow. I didn’t see it at first, but it was there, closer to the light you were walking toward. I never saw youarrive.” And that had been Maya’s blood, she realized, if she was right about her vision.
