Chapter 15
Chapter fifteen
Damien
The three monitors in front of me display different angles inside the sanctuary. The central screen captures Luna moving between treatment areas. Every movement—from her breath to the way she watches the sleeping hybrid, and every new line of worry on her face—is so captivating, I can’t look away.
Her reaction to my gift the other day was not what I had in mind.
I expected the fear and the horror, but the gratitude I hoped would come with it never materialized.
Though her words to her vet tech during Ghost’s surgery were music to my ears.
They were what shot Thomas and Bertha Meyers to the top of my kill list.
“You’ve been watching those cameras for three days.” Cade slams a coffee cup onto the desk, hard enough to rattle my keyboard. “It’s a good thing you have me to run your business, or you’d go bankrupt.”
I don’t look up because I can’t. Luna’s kneeling beside the animal now, changing its bandages. Her movements are gentle, and there’s something about the careful way she touches him that makes heat pool low in my stomach. I want her to touch me with that gentleness.
“She’s different.”
“You’ve said that before. Different how?” Cade folds his arms across his chest in that disapproving way that usually amuses me. Right now, it just irritates the fuck out of me. “Because from where I’m standing, she looks like a potential complication we don’t need.”
We. As if Cade gets a say in what I need. As if anyone does.
“She saved that animal two days ago. A wolf hybrid. Owners tortured it. Left it to die on a chain.”
Cade’s expression hardens.
“And this owner is now on your list, I assume?”
“Top of it. Thomas and Bertha Meyers.” He walks around the desk as I pull up another screen showing driver’s license photos of a heavyset man with a receding hairline and dead eyes and a woman with purple hair and a mouthful of teeth so crooked, it’s clear she’s never seen a dentist. “Already located them. They’re holed up in a motel outside Pueblo. ”
“You don’t often hunt women.”
“Only when they deserve it.”
“Did she abuse the animal too?”
“Even if she didn’t, she stood by while he did. She deserves death as much as he does.”
I’m reminded of my mother and the price she paid for her inaction.
Cade nods, knowing I won’t be deterred from my course. I never am once I’ve made up my mind. It’s one of the things he both respects and fears about me.
“And the doctor?” His sigh tells me he’s been building up to this question.
I was expecting it because even though I threatened him, Cade won’t let a subject drop if he thinks it might harm me.
The protective bastard. “I know you told me to back off, but what’s really your interest there?
She’s an attractive woman, I get it, but—”
I swivel in my chair, meeting Cade’s questioning gaze.
“You should have seen her face when she was treating that animal. The rage she tried to contain. It was beautiful. She has darkness in her.” I turn back to the screens, needing to see her again.
“She wants justice as badly as I do. She just hasn’t embraced it yet. ”
“Damien.” Cade’s shoulders square, his chin lifting in that familiar way that means a lecture is coming. “Leaving that body for her was a mistake. You cannot drag a civilian into this. Especially not one with an obvious moral compass.”
“I’m not dragging her anywhere. I’m simply curious.”
“Your curiosity usually comes with a body count.”
The comment pulls a rare smile from me because he’s not wrong. My curiosity does tend to be lethal. But not with her. Never with her.
“Not her body. Not yet, anyway.”
Cade walks to the window and looks out over the Denver skyline. “This is what I was afraid of.”
I detect the resignation in his voice, the way he’s already calculating damage control.
“Nothing you say is going to change my mind.”
He’s processing my words, trying to find an angle that will talk me out of this.
Good luck with that.
He turns from the window to look at me. “Damien, you know I think of you as a son.”
The words scrape against old wounds I thought were long scarred over.
“You’re not my fucking father, Cade. I killed my father. Besides, you’re barely ten years older than me.”
“Regardless.” His expression doesn’t change. My outbursts stopped affecting him years ago. “I care about you too much to let you go down this path. You don’t have the emotional capacity for a relationship with this woman. You’ll only hurt her. Maybe even destroy her.”
I know my emotional capacity. Cade isn’t wrong about that either. I’m not capable of love. But I am capable of obsession. And I’m obsessed with Luna. From the moment I laid eyes on her.
“I’m not going to destroy her.” But honesty compels me to add, “But I’m going to ruin her for anyone else. No one else will ever have her. Not while I’m breathing.”
Cade sighs, the sound heavy with years of watching me make choices he can’t approve of but can’t stop either. “Just remember your code. We don’t involve innocents.”
“She’s not as innocent as she appears.” I click through more surveillance images, stopping on one that captures Luna’s face as she examines the wolf’s wounds. The raw fury in her eyes is unmistakable. “She has dark thoughts. I can see it.”
“Thoughts aren’t actions. Most normal people have dark thoughts they never act on. That’s what separates them from people who are—”
“Like me?”
“I was going to say wired differently.”
“Same thing.” I zoom in on Luna’s face, studying every line, every shadow. She’s so fucking beautiful.
Cade pushes away from the window with the frustrated energy of a man who knows he’s fighting a losing battle.
“Do what you need to do with the Meyers, but dispose of them properly. And please leave the doctor alone. I’m begging you, Damien.”
The plea in his voice would have moved me once. But that was before Luna, before I understood what it meant to want something so completely that breathing becomes secondary.
“No. Wrap your mind around it, look the other way if you have to, but I will have her.”
Cade leaves without another word, and I continue watching Luna through the cameras.
She moves between patients, her every gesture displaying competence and care.
Then she returns to the wolf hybrid’s bedside and settles beside him, her hands stroking his beautiful silver-white fur, and there’s something so tender about the gesture that it makes me want to reach through the screen and touch her.
I switch camera angles until her face fills the frame. My fingers tighten on the mouse as I zoom in, and white-hot rage explodes behind my ribs. Blood roars in my ears, and my skin burns as if someone lit a match to my veins.
There are tears in her eyes. She’s crying for the hybrid, like she did for the deer. She reaches up and swipes her cheeks when a male volunteer approaches, trying to hide her emotions, but I can’t unsee it.
The Meyers will pay for it.
Unable to watch her cry any longer, I switch screens.
The cameras I hacked outside the motel show Thomas and Bertha walking up to their room with a six-pack of beer and a bucket of KFC.
The planning part of my brain calculates entrances, exits, and the familiar ritual before a hunt as a plan comes together.
But my mind drifts back to Luna.
Would she be horrified? Or would she understand that sometimes the only answer to cruelty is more cruelty?
Athena snoozes on the office sofa as I prepare to leave the estate. I’ve only completed renovations on two rooms in the vast mansion so far, my bedroom and the office, but they’re all I need for my purposes, except the basement for my kills.
Before Luna entered my world, I never slept here, but now I do most nights because I can’t bear to be far from her.
The decay I once embraced, the crumbling plaster and rotting floors, now seems unworthy.
Luna deserves to see this house as it was meant to be, restored to the grandeur that existed before evil poisoned it.
My designers will have free rein everywhere except the basement.
I came up here tonight before heading to Pueblo because I need to see her and not just through a monitor. The thrill of what’s to come spreads through my bones. It’s twofold. The thrill of seeing her and of knowing tonight is the night the Meyers will take their final breaths.
I glance over at Athena. She’s staying here tonight. Having two marks at once will make juggling her presence too complicated, and these two require my full, brutal focus. Not just because of what they did to that hybrid, but because they committed an even greater sin in my eyes.
They made Luna cry, and no one makes my little doe cry. Except me.
I drive toward the turnout on the main road between our properties, parking behind the pines that conceal my vehicle. The silver wolf mask sits in the center console, its empty eyes reflecting the dashboard lights. I trace a finger along its contours, feeling the cool metal beneath my fingertips.
I want to wear it for her tonight. In case she sees me again.
I move through the trees, my black clothing blending with the darkness. I don’t need night vision anymore. I could find my way to her blindfolded. She’s become my beacon, pulling me through the wilderness with an invisible thread I never want to break.
Her house appears through the treeline, warm light spilling from the windows. Her vet tech’s car still sits in the driveway, its presence an unwelcome complication.
Why is she still here?
They pass through the living room, turning off the lights as Luna shuts the curtains. Her friend must be staying the night again. Frustration bubbles up inside me. I need cameras inside that house. The blind spots in my surveillance are maddening.
Luna’s bedroom light turns on, and she closes her door. One of her cats, the fat one, jumps onto the windowsill as she approaches, with a slight stumble in her walk.