Chapter 10
Daniel
Chance insisted on coming with me back to Gary’s house, and I relented because after the morning we had, I was feeling pretty raw, and I also didn’t want to take the time to drop him off somewhere.
“Damn, Danny boy,” Chance said, leaning forward to get a better look out the windshield. “Where’s your banjo? Feels like we need some banjo music.”
“Rosemary’s father is really fucking smart,” I replied distractedly. “Lives completely off-grid. If Rosemary hadn’t told me where to go, I never would’ve found the place.”
“And you said he’s ex-Command?” Chance asked with a hum. “Weird coincidence.”
I nodded. “He didn’t want to bring work home with him.”
“Can’t blame him for that,” Chance said, leaning back in his seat. “Bad enough for us, but a human? Fucking forget it.” He paused as the small house came into view. “Looks like Dalton’s here.”
“Good,” I murmured with relief. From the moment Rosemary had called me and I’d heard a car in the background, I’d had to beat back the panic that threatened to choke me. We’d agreed that she wouldn’t show her face in public. She knew that it was for her own safety.
What the hell had she been doing out on the road?
“Time to bring him in on things?” Chance asked.
He’d been pressuring me about it since the moment we’d found the USB drive my brother Zeke had hidden before his death.
It was filled with account information and names and dates and photos, but the hundreds of files weren’t labeled, and nowhere in Zeke’s information did he explain how they all fit together.
My baby brother must’ve been gathering intelligence for a long time before his death, and he hadn’t said a word to any of us about it.
We’d been scrambling for the past couple of weeks to make sense of the information he’d left, and it wasn’t until that morning we’d finally been able to piece most of it together.
We’d gathered to look at photos from when Zeke and Charlie met, and unbeknownst to Charlie or his sister, Zeke had filmed a goodbye video to his mate on Lucy’s camera.
He’d left a cryptic message for us on the video.
The fucking asshole.
If we hadn’t found the files he’d stashed and looked over them until we couldn’t see straight, we never would’ve known what the message meant.
The dipshit couldn’t have just explained what he found. Instead, it was like some kind of fucked-up scavenger hunt, as if we weren’t in the middle of a godsdamn war and didn’t even know who the enemy was.
“We’ll tell Dalton everything,” I confirmed as I parked.
At least he was already at the house, and I wouldn’t need to track him down. After the day I’d had, that seemed like a boon.
I wanted to get our little meeting over with as fast as possible so I could get my mate alone and just breathe her in.
Seeing Zeke’s face on that video, the pain in his eyes as he said goodbye to the other half of his soul, had felt like someone was reaching inside my chest and twisting my insides into a knot.
Witnessing Charlie’s reaction to the goodbye had almost been worse.
My skin was on fire. My head pounded. I’d vomited more in the last month than I had in my entire life. My muscles were knotted and painful. Being away from Rosemary was awful. It was the worst thing I’d ever forced myself to do. I ached for her.
But if I had to make the same choices again, I would, because nothing mattered more than keeping her safe. She was safe with Gary on that piece of land that no one knew how to find.
“You’re back,” Gary greeted as he wheeled onto the porch to meet us.
“It took longer than I thought,” I replied.
“You didn’t tell me he was in a wheelchair,” Chance muttered, coming up beside me. “How is he supposed to protect your mate?”
I clenched my teeth together in frustration.
“My hearing’s not so bad,” Gary replied, looking Chance over. “At least she’ll have a little warning before men start repelling onto the roof.”
“Sorry, my brother’s a jackass,” I told Gary, walking toward him. “Chance, this is Gary Whitlock.”
“Nice to meet you,” Chance said easily, as if he hadn’t just been completely offensive.
“You too,” Gary replied flatly, rising to his feet to shake Chance’s hand.
“Aw, shit.” Chance nodded. “Hiding in plain sight.”
“You’re a fucking idiot,” I snapped.
Gary just shook his head.
“Is she inside?” I moved to pass him, but jerked to a stop when his hand landed heavily on my arm.
“A little warning,” Gary said, his voice low. “She’s been giving you a long leash. You no longer have one.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant until I entered the house. Immediately, the sound of pacing steps was audible, thudding over the hardwood.
Dalton nodded at me from the couch and jerked his head toward Rosemary’s bedroom.
When I found her, my breath left me in a whoosh, and I couldn’t seem to drag any back in.
Rosemary was a mess. Her hair was wet and tangled so badly that it looked half as long as it actually was. She was wearing a pair of shorts and a shirt that were too big for her and didn’t match. There were little scratches all over her forearms and the lower halves of her legs.
Her face was haggard, her eyes hollow.
And her feet were leaving bloody footprints all over the floor.
She jerked to a stop, her eyes on me. “You’re back.”
“What the fuck happened?” I asked, my heart thundering in my throat.
I wasn’t prepared for the way she flew at me, but I would’ve caught her anyway.
I didn’t get the chance.
Her nails raked across my face so quickly that I didn’t even dodge them.
I was too shocked to defend myself as she shoved at my chest, her fists pounding against my sternum.
“Three hours!” she screamed, her voice breaking. “You said three hours.”
“I got held up,” I countered, finally catching her wrists. She tried to rip them away, and I struggled to hold her captive without hurting her.
“Held up?” Her eyes widened in disbelief, and her face jutted toward mine. “Fuck you!”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked in confusion.
In the next moment, I was flat on my back, my top half in the hallway, and my bottom half still in her bedroom. My head bounced off the floor.
Rosemary was straddling me, her eyes filled with a level of anger that I’d only seen a few times before and never from her.
“You left me here,” she raged, leaning down into my face. “You left, and you didn’t come back!”
“I’m here,” I shouted back, mostly because I didn’t think she would actually hear me if I spoke normally.
“You said three hours.”
“Things took longer than I thought they would,” I said, trying to soothe her. I ran my thumbs over the delicate tendons in her wrists. “I lost track of time.”
Rosemary stared at me like she’d never seen me before.
“What kind of mate are you?” she whispered scathingly.
“Yours,” I replied instantly.
“You—I—” she shook her head. Her body lost the tension she’d been holding, and her shoulders slumped. “There’s something wrong with you.”
“What the hell is going on?” Sitting up, I ignored the sore spot on the back of my head and gripped her hips before she could climb off me. “You’re bleeding.”
“I’m fine,” Rosemary replied tiredly.
“You’re not fine.”
“No,” she let out a humorless laugh, the sound bordering on hysteria. “No, you’re right. I’m not. Let go of me.” She shoved at my wrists.
Letting my hands fall away, I stared as she rose slowly to her feet and stepped over me. A second later, the bathroom closed almost silently behind her.
“So I see things are going well,” Chance noted sardonically from the end of the hallway. “That’s good.”
“Shut up, Chance,” I spat, getting to my feet.
“Nice face.”
Lifting my hand to my cheek, I pressed it against the stinging there. The tips of my fingers came away with blood on them.
“Shit.”
“I mean, it could be worse,” Chance said, following me to the kitchen. “She could’ve kicked you in the balls. Did she kick you in the balls?”
“Shut the fuck up, Chance,” I repeated.
“You seem to be walking fine, at least.”
Dalton and Gary seemed to have moved to the kitchen table, probably to give Rosemary and me a bit of privacy, not that we really had any in a house that small. Vampire hearing was very acute. We could hear anything happening inside the house, no matter which room we were in.
Grabbing a paper towel, I wet it and set it against the scratches on my cheek. When I turned, Dalton was staring.
“Deserved that and worse,” he announced, his tone grim.
“What the fuck is going on, Gary?” I asked, rounding the table so I could see his face. I had a feeling that the man had been deliberately ignoring me when I entered the room.
“I’ve stayed out of it,” he said, meeting my eyes. “I understand the mating bond, and I’d never get between that. I also understand the drive to protect the people you care about. There’s not a thing on this earth that I wouldn’t do for Rosemary or for her mother when she was alive.”
I could hear a but coming.
“But if you don’t pull your head out of your ass, I’m going to do it for you.” He glanced at Chance. “And I might be in a wheelchair, but I’ve tussled with quite a few Vampires in the past, and I think I’d surprise you.”
“Lay it out like I’m five years old,” I ground out, still completely fucking confused.
When I’d left that morning, everything was fine. Rosemary had been lying in bed, sleepy and satisfied. How the hell had she gone from that to a complete hellcat in the hours I’d been gone?
“How in the fuck do you keep leaving your mate?” Dalton asked, his head tilted a little to the side.
“She’s safe here—”
He slashed his hand through the air. “No, I understand why you’re doing it. I’m asking how.”
“What do you mean?” I glanced between Dalton and Gary.
“How is it physically possible?” Dalton asked flatly.
“Are you asking if it hurts?”
“I know it hurts.”
I just looked at him.
“How in the hell are you leaving her every day for hours at a time?”
“It’s not fucking comfortable,” I snapped, becoming frustrated with the questions. “Obviously.”
“You’re not in pain?”