She gritted her teeth and, with one last furtive glance at the 9mm, she acquiesced, laying flat on the mattress and once more and pulling the sheet up over her body. She truly was starting to feel cold. On the inside as well as out. She really wanted a blanket. She really wanted her clothes.
She really, really wanted an Uzi.
“Arms above your head and wrap your hands around the pole.”
A muscle in Lily’s jaw ticked with suppressed resentment as she did what he instructed. And then, once more, the barrel of the god-forsaken weapon was against her rib cage and Jennings was leaning over her with the superhuman cuffs to chain her wrists into place.
Suddenly, an idea occurred to Lily. It flashed, half-image, half memory, before her panicked mind’s eye.
Now, Lily. You have your strength. You can’t let him win. It was now or never. She had to get out. She had to warn Daniel - or die trying.
Lily’s head swam and her chest tightened as she prepared to do what she was going to do. It had been a fleeting thought, a quick-floating memory through her fevered brain, that had given her the idea.
It was a thought of Daniel - and his kiss.
A werewolf’s kiss had the power to make someone feel pleasure. But she also knew firsthand that it could weaken someone, and even put them to sleep. It all depended on what the wolf wanted. Lily suspected there was even more to that equation, but the sleeping thing was what got her attention at that moment.
Just one kiss, she thought. Just one little kiss.
Just as Jennings touched the cold metal of the cuff to the side of her right wrist, Lily raised her head and trapped his lips with hers.
* * * *
“I don’t know what the fuck to do now.” Daniel let loose the words as his soul was claimed by a despondency and despair unlike any other. He had lost much in his life, and half of it in the last twenty-four hours. But this?
He looked up at James Valentine through eyes both glowing and red-rimmed, no longer seeing the man as a threat or competition, but as a chance. A hope.
Daniel would cling to anything – anything at all – right now if it presented to him the least amount of hope that he would find Lily and bring her back home.
“Tell me what you feel,” Daniel demanded of the Guardian werewolf. He knew that Valentine would be able to sense whether Lily was still alive. And he wanted to know the truth. Precious minutes had passed since they’d discovered her missing from the parking lot at the Mall of Louisiana. Precious minutes that had transformed into more than a precious hour – and that was a long time. A long, long time when it came to abduction.
“I sense that she’s alive,” Valentine told him, simply. “And I would not spare you, Kane,” he continued, speaking softly and in a tone of such deep seriousness, everyone stilled around him. “No matter what you believe.”
That was good enough for Daniel. He nodded. And then turned away from the Guardian to gaze up and down the street. Everyone sped on Highway 61. Few of his officers bothered ticketing people any longer, unless they showed signs of being under the influence.
Across the street was a small brick church, its worn sign announcing 8:00 service on Sunday night. The sign was decrepit with rust and hung in its frame by a single screw. The parking lot was riddled with weeds. In the middle of the week, as it was now, the lot would be empty. A single service vehicle was parked near the back of the gravel drive and, currently abandoned. It was an older truck. As cars and trucks tended to do in the South, it was rusted along the tire rims, door and hood seams. An emblem on the side depicted an oak tree and rolling hills. A lawn and garden service.
Just in time, it would seem. The church badly needed some work.
A few hundred yards up the road from the church was another drive leading to a barbeque “pit.” Currently, there were four vehicles parked in the drive and smoke billowed from its kitchen chimney. Daniel could easily detect the scent of seasoned, cooked meat in the air.
About a third of a mile in the other direction was a gift shop-casino-truck stop. At the moment, two semi’s were pulled up alongside the back and an SUV was pumping gas at what looked like pump number two. Even at this distance, Daniel was able to narrow his supernatural gaze on the back seat of the vehicle and make out the struggling forms of two bickering toddlers.
There was nothing else. Other than the construction, that was all there was to see along that particular stretch of road.
Daniel turned away from it all and once again began pacing back and forth across the porch of the plantation home.
“Why here? Why did he choose this address?” he asked to no one in particular.
“I don’t know,” Tabitha stated. “It’s ridiculous. I mean, the place is practically famous. Frankly, I’m amazed that none of us knew it for what it was right away.” There was a dangerous edge to the tone of her voice. Daniel recognized it for what it was. It was that note that bordered on hysterics.
Valentine had his arm around her and was holding her tightly against his side. Daniel suspected it may be the only thing keeping his sister from going off the deep end at that moment.
Daniel nodded and then shook his head, agreeing with her. “But there’s something else. Something we’re missing.” He looked up at Detective Knight and pinned him to the spot with eyes that he knew damned well were both red and glowing because they burned in his sockets. “Come on, detective. Think. What do we know about Allan Jennings? He’s worked with us for a fucking decade, for chrissake! There has to be a clue in there somewhere!”
Aiden Knight blinked and then ran a hand through his brown hair. “He’s an excellent marksman,” he offered. “Always groups his shots really close together.”
“He always parked perfectly between the lines at the station,” another cop added.
“He likes to analyze things – charts, graphs, maps. He’s good at tracking people down,” Knight continued.
There was a sound in Daniel’s head. A lone jigsaw piece clicked into its place in the puzzle. “Keep going.”
“He reads a lot. But they’re all the same kinds of books. Murder mysteries, mostly,” Mayfield suggested. He was a werewolf, but he was also Allan’s partner and knew Jennings better than anyone there.
Mayfield paused and stared fixedly at the floor boards. Wheels were spinning in the man’s head; Daniel could almost smell them burning. “He never likes to stray too far from our designated location. If we’re assigned to Perkins, he wants to get lunch on Perkins. It’s the same way with everything, actually,” Mayfield continued, now obviously just thinking aloud. Brainstorming. “He keeps everything real orderly. Grouped together – just like his shots at the range.”
Another sound and another piece clicked into place. “Keep talking,” Daniel ordered.
“The change on his desk was in stacks,” Mayfield continued.
“Everything was in stacks,” Knight added. “Papers, books - everything.”
“So, he was neat?” Tabitha asked, not understanding where this was leading and visibly worried that they were wasting precious time.
“Not just neat,” Knight shook his head and reached into his jacket pocket to extract his iPod. He fiddled with it for a moment, until a personalized list popped up on the screen. He read from it. “His ID’s and pass codes for the sites he visited were always within the same letter and number range. It never varied by more than five degrees in either direction.”
“So, he likes to keep things close together?” Tabitha asked again, her face contorting into an even more thoroughly confused expression than the one she’d been wearing a moment before. “He just sounds orderly!” she shouted. “Keepin’ your passwords like that just makes them easier to remember quickly.” She shrugged in aggravated frustration. “I do the same thing.”
Daniel blinked.
Close together…. Everything Jennings did was grouped close together. From the change on his desk to the bullets he fired at the range. It was almost an OCD thing. Close. Neat. Easy.
Daniel
looked up at the service vehicle parked across the street. His gaze skirted from the truck to the brick church. Empty. Old, broken sign. Out of use.
Was it empty because it was a week day? Or, was it empty because it was no longer a church?
He swallowed hard and the others followed his gaze. Lightning split the sky and thunder cracked overhead.
“Oh holy shit,” Knight whispered.
Chapter Twenty-one: Breaking and Entering
It was the last thing Allan Jennings had been expecting. A kick, a punch, a sudden jerking away – all of that, he had readied for, his index finger smoothly wrapped around the trigger of his gun, waiting for the signal from his brain.
But her kiss?
He’d dreamt of it. A lot. He’d imagined, time and again, how it would feel to capture her smooth, full lips beneath his own: To crush them, press them open, to taste her…
He could smell some faint traces of shampoo in her hair… Lavender, he thought. He could feel her long eye lashes brushing against his cheek bone. The rush of pleasure that snaked through him forced a groan from his throat.
Oh, how he had wanted her. He’d been watching her for so long, snapping photos from a terrible distance, always wondering whether he would have anything more in his hands than a picture. His favorite photograph had captured her perfect pink lips in a demure smile. He wanted those soft lips wrapped around his cock. He wanted to bury himself into every one of her holes. He wanted to cum inside of her, again and again. He’d wanted it for fifteen fucked-up years.
Now she was beneath him on a bed, naked. Kissing him.
His need roared to life and he found himself kissing her back, pushing her into the mattress beneath her, his gun-hand trembling where it pressed against her ribs. He found his other hand slipping to the bed to hold him up as his knees grew weak with the hunger she was awakening within him.
Weak…. A thought flittered through his brain like a warning butterfly. She’s making me weak. It was chaotic, blurry.
His strength was slipping. He wanted to curl up beside her on the bed. Pull her against him. The gun barrel slid to the mattress as her tongue grazed the backs of his teeth. I’m growing weak.
And then it hit him.
Anger flashed through him. Fuck! His eyes flew open. He reared back and, in one smooth motion, he drew his gun-arm up, using it to backhand her with all of his strength.
Her head snapped to the side with a loud crack. Jennings stumbled back, trying to regain his bearings. Fatigue swept through him like rivulets of a tide, coming and going. Ebbing, receding.
On the bed, Lily moaned in pain and spat out blood. Then she turned her head to look at him. Her eyes were glowing bright. Droplets of red smeared her lips and the side of her chin. A bruise formed on her cheek bone. He watched, in some sort of sick fascination, as it appeared – and then slowly faded away.
“You bitch,” he hissed. “You’re further gone than I thought.”
She tried to sit up, but he didn’t give her any further opportunity for defiance. He raised his gun and pulled the trigger. It took four shots this time before she was slumped back on the bed, her head once more lolled to the side in semi-consciousness. He decided not to take her completely under.
Not this time.
Anger fueling his determination, Jennings rushed forward and roughly grabbed her wrists, yanking them over her head to cuff them securely to the post behind the bed. Then he ripped the sheet away from her body and stared down at the wounds in her abdomen. He knew they had hurt her. That knowledge somehow both sated and fed his fury. Her blood stopped pouring from the holes and Allan watched as they closed, one after another, leaving her skin once more smooth and un-marred but for the blood that coated her.
The bullets would be under the bed, lodged in the cement beneath the rug of the basement. Jennings balled the sheet in his fist and ran it roughly over her body, wiping away the majority of the blood.
And then he dropped the sheet and reached down to grab her chin, forcing her to face him. Her eyelids slowly fluttered open.
“I hate you,” she whispered, and then coughed on more blood.
Allan laughed a heartless laugh. His smile was hard and unforgiving. “Then I have nothing to lose by doing this,” he told her.
With that, he roughly released her. He stepped back and placed the gun on the stool beside the bed. Then he pulled his t-shirt over his head, revealing the hard, broad chest beneath.
*****
Lily’s stomach clenched. Her heart lurched in her chest. Her reality had become a waking nightmare. It wasn’t enough for Jennings to shoot and kidnap her. He was going to rape her, too.
“You want to play games, Lily?” he asked as he began to unbutton his jeans. “Fine. We’ll play games.” He shook his head, laughing once more. “Do you realize that I can do whatever I want to you and you’ll just heal back up?” He dropped his jeans, revealing that he wore nothing underneath. His member was thick and hard and stood erect, red and throbbing.
Lily turned her head away. She was nauseated. Had she eaten enough meat to throw it back up again? God, please no.
“Imagine the possibilities, Lily.” He was suddenly there beside her, his hand roughly jerking her head back around so that she was forced to gaze up at him once again. With his free hand, he cupped her breast and she bucked at the touch, trying to writhe away from him.
For that, she earned more of his violent wrath. He drew back a little and sent his knuckles flying across her cheek once more. She cried out at the pain and tasted fresh blood. Her teeth had cut the inside of her cheek.
And then the wound was healing, and his fingers were pinching her nipple. Tears gathered in Lily’s eyes. Bile rose in her throat. She tried to breathe and found that her lungs would not expand.
In desperation, she yanked violently on the cuffs, feeling them rip into her flesh again and again. When she tried to raise her legs to kick at him, he balled up his fist and rammed it into her stomach.
The pain was overwhelming. Lily’s vision began to tunnel inward. It was several, long seconds before her lungs finally, painfully, expanded. Her heart skipped several rapid beats with the sudden influx of oxygen, and she retched. Jennings roughly turned her head to the side as she coughed again, and this time a small amount of bile accompanied the blood.
Jennings lowered his lips to her ear. “Keep fighting me, Lily. Let’s see what else we can do to you, shall we?”
And then he was straddling her, one strong hand wrapped threateningly around her neck, the other roughly mauling her breast. Lily could feel his erection against her stomach and she found herself gagging again.
During the course of her job, she’d been trained to teach women that a man’s invading penis was not something to fight against to the point of coming to real harm. It was not worth dying for. It was taught that the important thing was to live through a rape – and deal with the rest later.
Lily had always accepted the simple logic of that teaching, because in a way it made sense. But something in her had also felt slightly queasy about it. As if it wasn’t quite true. As if it was not wholly correct.
And now she knew why.
She had been through so much. Yet somehow the thought of Allan Jennings forcing himself inside of her was too painful. It was too much to bear. It was one final violating injustice that was simply too great. Only Daniel, she thought. Only Daniel.
She wanted Daniel – and only Daniel – to touch her. She needed him – his hands, his body, his stark blue eyes. She needed her alpha werewolf. Her mate.
Lily began to see stars as, above her, Jennings tightened his grip around her throat, choking the air from her lungs. He was really squeezing. He was trying to kill her. And he was doing it just so that she would wake up a minute later and he could kill her again.
Daniel! Her mind screamed for her love even as her body shuddered beneath the hateful ministrations of another man. Jennings was moving now, prying her legs apart with bruising force. She cou
ldn’t fight him. There was no air left in her body. She felt a trickle of blood begin to flow from her right nostril. Her lungs screamed and the blood roared through her ear drums. It was all she could hear, like thunder…. She was drowning…. There was no pain.
Daniel….
And then, suddenly, she was coughing violently, bucking on the bed as her body greedily grabbed lungs-full of air. Jennings had released her throat seconds before she would have passed out. It hurt horribly, this returning breath, but beyond the pain and the subsiding roar of the rushing blood in her ear drums, she sensed that something else had changed.
There were strange sounds, hard and deep. They banged and banged and vibrated through her bones. She wheezed in more air to the sound of something painful and cracking. Gunshots. Then there was a tearing. A ripping, like metal being rendered in two. A growl? Multiple growls?
Could she be hearing right? She tried to open her eyes, but all she saw were stars, flashing, swirling. The growling grew louder, sending tremors through her naked form.
And then there were voices. Some were yelling. Some were speaking words that she couldn’t make out, couldn’t comprehend. She heard them through a tunnel or a bubble or both. She continued to gasp, greedily sucking in more air and trying not to gag again.
Then warm hands were on her wrists. She heard metal jingling as her vision cleared a little. There was a blurry black form above her, tall and strong.
At once, the familiar wave of his inexorable power washed over her so intense, so physically present – so comfortingly there – that she gave a hoarse cry of joy and of relief, this time allowing the tears to cascade down her cheeks.
Daniel.
She felt his hands gently encircle her sore wrists and then lift her and pull her against him. She closed her eyes and breathed him in, pressing her palm against the solid muscle beneath his shirt. She heard his heartbeat, strong and fast.
His hand was on her head, tenderly running over her hair. He held her so tight.