Cold Hard Secret (Secret McQueen) (34 page)

I did not know. Though I guess it made sense in a weird way.

“But it doesn’t matter if Callum said yes.
Lucas
is definitely not going to be on board with you and me getting married. He’s convinced he can stay married to me and eventually I’ll, like, come around or something. He won’t grant me a divorce.”

Desmond pivoted on his stool and placed his hands on my hips, turning me towards him so our knees were touching. “I know you think he’s a bad guy.”

“He
is
a bad guy. I don’t just think it, I know it.”

“Let me finish.”

I felt embarrassed for interjecting my opinion.

“I know you think Lucas is the villain in our story. I get it. He has done things to you, to both of us, that seem completely unforgiveable. But you have this habit of seeing Lucas as a man, and I think sometimes you forget he is, first and foremost, a king.”

“I know he’s the king.”

“Do you understand what that
means
though? Because I grew up with him. I’ve known for as long as he has what the whole purpose of his life has to be. The
pack
is his life. They own him. Every morning he gets up, the first thing on his mind will be the pack. It will matter more to him than love, than his children, than anything else he ever encounters in his life. You hate Lucas because you think he picked the pack over you. But the truth of the matter is, Secret, he had no choice. It’s too deeply ingrained now for him to let the pack take second place. And when he decided to marry you, he did it because he thought it would be good for the pack.”

“He didn’t have to do all the things he did. He threatened you. He hurt me. He’s manipulative, and the only person he cares about is himself.”

Desmond shook his head. “No. He loves the pack more than he loves himself. That’s what makes him seem cold. I think if we can appeal to that part of him and make him see
this
is what’s better for everyone, there’s a chance he’ll see it too. This isn’t hopeless.”

Who
was
this man I was marrying?

I was totally awed by him.

“Only you could still see the good in him after everything he’s done.”

“I love him because I understand him. Once you
know
Lucas, it’s hard to hate him. He doesn’t do things selfishly. Most of the time he’s being quite selfless and sacrificing his own happiness as a result. It just never looks that way from the outside.”

“Never,” I agreed.

Desmond smiled and closed the gap between us, pressing a delicate kiss on my lips. I let myself enjoy it for a moment before the familiar uneasy feeling came over me, and when I tried to imagine letting it go any further, I got overwhelmed.

“I can’t,” I whispered. “Not yet.”

“Saving yourself for marriage?” he teased. Withdrawing, he gave me some distance, but he left his knees pressed to either side of mine.

“It might be a while,” I admitted.

“I’ve signed on for life. I’m not in a hurry.”

He said that now, but what if it was months before I could share a bed with him? Years even? Our road to marriage was paved with cobblestones, and we were in for a hell of a bumpy ride.

Chapter Forty-One

By the time night fell the next day, I knew it was time for us to leave Louisiana. One night was already a night too many, and if I was going to work on solving the rest of the problems in my life, I couldn’t do it while hiding behind my uncle.

I invited
Grandmere
to come back with me to New York, but she declined the offer. “I’ve missed so much, and I can’t make up for the time I’ve been gone, but I can try to catch up now. It’s the least I can do.”

Eugenia, on the other hand, was bereft. She’d been gone the night we arrived. Callum, knowing I’d be arriving with Mercy’s head, had sent my sister to New Orleans for the night on the pretense he needed something from a shop there. She’d been gone the whole night and only arrived back during the afternoon. When I awoke at sunset, she was furious she had potentially missed my entire stay.

“I’m coming with you,” she announced.

“No. No way. It’s not safe,” I protested. I’d been talking to Callum about organizing a ride to the airport when Genie had shown up. Now I looked to my uncle for backup to shoot down her ridiculous plan.

“I live with a pack of wolves,” Genie reminded me. “New York isn’t nearly that dangerous by comparison.”

The city itself might not be, sure. There was a police officer on every corner, and the worst thing that might happen to her in Times Square would be having her purse stolen. But it wasn’t the
city
I was worried about. It was all the otherworldly things within the city that might find use for my little sister.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Callum,” I implored. “This is ridiculous.”

“Actually…”

I couldn’t believe my ears. The tone of his voice said very clearly he was considering her suggestion, in spite of my arguments to the contrary. Why didn’t anyone trust I knew what I was talking about?

“
No,
” I repeated.

“I’m going to be working closely with Ben and Fairfax once you go, undoing the damage of this drug. Because Eugenia still hasn’t completely figured out how to reconcile her magic and her werewolf shifts, I worry the forces I’ll have to use to shift her twin back might impact her. Who’s to say how those kinds of connections can impact someone as sensitive to the supernatural as she is?”

I wanted to keep saying no until someone listened.

Eventually, though, it was Holden who convinced me. He had joined us in our preparation to leave, but he’d hung back, avoiding any interaction with us. I think if we hadn’t been so far away from anything else, he would have found his own way home and not told us he was leaving. As it was, he did everything in his power to blend into the background until he finally spoke up.

“Let the girl come, Secret. She’s tough. She’ll be fine.”

“I don’t think—”

“
She’ll be fine,
” he insisted.

I let out a shaky breath and looked at my sister. Yes, she was young, but so was I when I’d first come to the city. And there were threats, absolutely, but I had managed until now to keep almost everyone in my life safe from the things threatening me.

I hesitated.

“She’s going to come anyway,” Holden added. “If you let her come
with
you, at least you’ll know where she is.”

Would Genie honestly sneak off and come after me on her own? I glanced at her, and the defiant lift in her chin told me Holden had read her spot-on. Cheeky little monster
would
have followed.

I yielded. “Fine.”

Her tough veneer faded, and she looked relieved and delighted. Then she seemed to reconsider for a moment, her gleeful bouncing cut short. “Ben’s going to be okay, right?”

Though the two were twins, Eugenia and Ben had spent a great number of their formative years apart. Genie had gone off to learn magic from our great-grandmother—
La Sorcière
—one of the most terrifying and powerful people I’d ever met. Ben had stayed behind to learn pack politics from Amelia and Callum.

They were close, but not inseparable. Yet I knew she wouldn’t want to go if there was a chance Ben might not pull through.

Desmond spoke up before Callum could. “I got dosed with the stuff. Turning back hurts like hell, but your brother is going to be fine.”

Everyone was working against me here.

Genie visibly weighed her options and then said, “Give me ten minutes to pack.” She dashed off again before I had a chance to come up with any other arguments to the contrary.

Having Genie with us proved to be a godsend in one truly unexpected way. Because of how long she’d spent with only
La Sorcière
as company, she liked to talk to anyone willing to listen. She’d missed being able to chat conversationally. So during our flight home, she told Holden endless stories and got him talking about his past in England. She kept him from sitting around brooding, and kept me from feeling painfully guilty about what had happened between us.

I suspected it would be quite some time before I was able to talk to Holden or be near him without feeling an agonizing sense of loss.

I might never fully recover from my decision to let him go, and maybe I deserved that. I’d let myself love two men and had refused to think of the consequences for a long, long time. Now I was being forced to deal with the harsh reality of my choice, and it seemed only fair it should hurt me.

We were about a half hour from our destination when I fished my cell out of my purse and turned it back on. Since service had been dicey out on Callum’s estate, I’d shut it off to preserve battery life.

It started buzzing immediately, saving me from the too-dark cloud of worry that had started to press down on me. First one text alert, then another and another. Before I knew it, the texts were coming in faster than my phone could buzz.

How many people had texted me in a single day?

The first text was from Sig, sent the previous evening.
I have invited Arturo to visit with us. If you have any hope of redeeming yourself before the council, I urge you to come back now.

I was about to reply, but thought I ought to check the other texts first.

One was from Nolan a few hours ago.
Are zombies legit?

Well…that was a strange and random inquiry.

The next from Keaty.
Come back. Now.

My pulse had started to pick up, since Keaty very,
very
rarely commanded me to do anything, and the tone of his text suggested he needed me. That wasn’t good.

Tyler had written,
Stay out of the city. Don’t return. Find a safe place and await further instruction.

Well…that didn’t bode well.

I flipped through a half-dozen more messages. Tyler had sent three.
Avoid New York City.
Another said,
Please acknowledge.

I texted him first since he seemed hell-bent on keeping me out of town. Did he know about Arturo coming in? Was there some news of a plan brewing from the West Coast?

Been out of range. Landing in Jersey in 20.

I considered answering the others, but I decided to hold off until we landed so I could figure out which mess to sort out first. Reopening Keaty’s message, I stared at it awhile.

Come back. Now.

Something wasn’t right.

The overhead speaker crackled, and our pilot’s voice filled the cabin. “Folks, uh, I’m getting news from the tower that our approach is being denied. They’re rerouting all nonessential landings. Seems, uh, they’re diverting all flights intended to land in the city proper.”

What?

“Why?” I asked, before realizing it wasn’t a two-way system.

“We’re going to land in a private airfield. Sorry about the delay, folks, we’ll be about an extra fifteen minutes.”

I might have been imagining it, but there was an edge of panic to his voice.

“Something isn’t right,” Desmond said, giving voice to the concerns I already had. “Why would they be diverting major airline flights to a small field in Jersey?”

Holden, who had been quiet since the announcement, spoke up. “It means it’s not safe to land in the city.”

An unspoken fear loomed over all of us. I hadn’t lived in New York in 2001, but I’d seen the events unfold on the news like everyone else. Holden would have been dead-to-the-world asleep, just like me, but Desmond…he would probably remember the day the Towers fell. He’d grown up in Long Island City. If he’d been at home, the view across the river would have let him see everything.

We sat in silence for the remainder of the flight, all fearing a new worst-case scenario we’d never imagined before. I had been so busy worrying about my own problems, I sometimes forgot the world at large had troubles that put mine to shame. I looked out the window, but we were too far inland for me to see the city.

The pilot must have called ahead and sent instructions to the other airport, because when we landed, a car was parked on the tarmac waiting. It was almost as tight a fit as my BMW, but all four of us managed to get in.

No one spoke.

We were about fifty miles from New York, and the whole drive in I didn’t see a single car going the same direction as us. There were literally
hundreds
going the opposite way.

It was like the opening scene of a zombie movie.

Are zombies legit?

Hadn’t that been Nolan’s question?

But zombies
weren’t
real. Keaty and I, in all our years of research and hunting, had never come across a case of an honest-to-God zombie. He’d apparently encountered a man in Peru once who was a necromancer, but the ability to
raise
the dead and control it was not the same as a naturally occurring zombie plague. If a necromancer made the undead bite you, it would hurt, but you wouldn’t become a zombie.

Vampires were the only ones who could create the walking dead in that way.

“This looks bad,” Eugenia observed.