14. Chapter 14
Packed, red-brake lights loomed closer, making the twist in Kate’s chest tighter.
She wanted to get to their destination so Raz could tell her what was happening between them, but Chicago traffic had other plans.
The tenseness in the car deterred her from asking, as it didn’t seem like the space where Raz wanted to share, but she felt like she was coming out of her skin with the need to know.
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” she said into the silence.
“I know. Let me get us somewhere first.” He rubbed his head.
The pinch between his brows worried her.
As the car inched forward, she picked at the fabric of her pants.
If she couldn’t talk about that, she needed some other kind of distraction.
One question had burned in her mind ever since she brought up Lucifer’s Bell in the meeting.
It might not have been the best opportunity for that question, either, but she needed something.
“What’s your connection to Lucifer’s Bell?” she asked.
He flinched. “That’s not an easy conversation.”
His pained reaction hit her hard. She’d seen what the Bell was capable of, so she could only imagine how it might have played a dark part in his life. She shrank into the seat. “I’m sorry. We can talk about something else.”
“No, it’s important.” He wrung his hands around the steering wheel a few times. “It’s just brought a lot of death and suffering into my life. To start from the beginning, I grew up in Germany and lived there through World War I.”
“I’m impressed you don’t have an accent.”
“I’ve lived in the United States for almost a century now.
” He rubbed a hand over his face, his vocal cords cracking with his next words.
“During World War II, our Centurion, or the leader of Germany and my clan at the time, stumbled upon a relic. Lucifer’s Bell.
I could never understand why we stayed away from the conflict, but we raided Nazi supply camps.
He’d been looking for it, but instead of destroying it, he… ”
He squeezed his eyes shut as if attempting to stop the images that came to mind.
Shit. Whatever his next words were, she felt the weight of them in the tightness of her throat.
Raz leaned his forehead against the steering wheel, and nausea swept over her in empathetic droves.
His reaction, even in the silence, was enough to bring tears to her eyes.
Kate grabbed his arm and squeezed, sending reassurance in any form she could.
“It’s okay.” She trailed her hand up his arm until she reached his hand. Twining her fingers with his, she pulled his tense grip from the steering wheel.
“I don’t understand what drove him.” He lifted his head and moved the car as the light turned green.
“He experimented on us. I don’t know if he thought a demon could possess a dragon, but he’d subject anyone to its torture.
It just causes us immobilizing pain to hear that tone and sometimes he wouldn’t relent until well after we were seizing and causing a mess all over ourselves.
” He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment.
Kate couldn’t imagine that kind of abuse—the image that was seared into his mind and the experience he himself had. The nausea returned and her fists clenched at her sides. No one deserved that kind of treatment.
“He used fear to control us so no one spoke out about it to neighboring Centurions. He was so paranoid he cut out his own eardrums so the Bell wouldn’t affect him.”
She gasped. “That’s so monstrous. What happened?”
“I had a friend. Gerard.” He squeezed her hand as if needing strength.
“In the dragon community, we grow up in pods with a Maternal or Paternal dragon to watch over us. Gerard and I became inseparable when we were younger. He always wanted to save the underdog, and because of the fights we got into, we grew stronger together. We were barely a century old when we were first subjected to the Centurion’s experimentation. ”
She squeezed his hand harder. Her words failing to reach past the thickness in her throat.
“We rallied a cinder of dragons to take him out, or really, I did, by Gerard’s prompting. On the day of the attack, it was a bloodbath. The Bell’s effects and malnutrition had weakened us. We were no match. And Gerard…he…” His voice broke, and it was all Kate could do not to hug him.
He cleared his throat. “While we were fighting for our lives, he took the Bell for himself. He used me. Fuck. He used us to get what he wanted.”
The anger in his voice cut straight through Kate, and she shivered.
She couldn’t believe his own friend would turn on him like that.
Used him. Her stomach protested. She understood how betrayal could gut someone.
She wanted to yell out obscenities about the fucking bastard, but from Raz’s hunched form, there was more to the story.
“When we finally killed the Centurion, we believed we were free.” A tremor ran through him.
Kate sat silent, waiting for his story.
“But when we returned for everyone else, Gerard had used the Bell to stun and mutilate them.” Raz looked up at the sky as if to keep tears from falling. “That sight still haunts me at night.”
Kate’s hand shook as it clutched his. The burden of his story fell hard on her. This man had been through so much. She wished she could take that pain away from him.
“For reasons I still don’t understand, he chose that dark power over everything. I should have been there to stop him. I abandoned my clan to that fate.”
“Don’t blame yourself. You were saving them, Raz. You couldn’t have known Gerard’s intentions.”
He grinned tightly. “Maybe I could have, though. In the end, I trusted the wrong person. Gerard ran off with the Bell and I was left without a clan. A Rogue dragon. The only thing I could do was escape to the United States, knowing that if anyone found me, they would have killed me on sight. The Europeans don’t tolerate Rogue dragons as well as they do here.
I’ve been searching for the Bell’s whereabouts ever since.
Then it popped up in the Middle East, and I was so close…
but I only ended up getting someone else close to me dead when Midnight stole it. ”
Lukas. She had been correct in her assumption about Raz’s relationship with him. Her fist tightened in her lap. His death was on her hands because Matsuda had made Midnight kill that night to send Kate a message. But she couldn’t tell Raz that or the truth about Midnight. He’d never forgive her.
She was going after her sister, as Raz was going after the Bell that had destroyed his life.
Guilt curdled in her stomach. Kate had lied to Raz and told him that he could get Lucifer’s Bell and the LRAD replica in that submarine.
She was aware the Bell was down there, but the replica that Matsuda had built was off-grid.
She’d led Raz to believe both would be down there, and from the anger that had enlivened his tongue when he talked about his friend using him or Lukas’s death, she just couldn’t bring herself to tell him the truth.
She needed his help. Her plan wouldn’t work without the Dragon SEALs, but she was only putting off his wrath by not telling him.
She withdrew her hand from his, hating herself for lying to this man who had been through so much.
If he noticed her withdrawl, he didn’t say anything.
The truth was, even if she knew the replica wasn’t down there, she had hoped that Naomi would know where it was.
If she freed Naomi, they could find the replica and destroy it too. She hoped Raz would understand that.
Needing to comfort him in any form she could, she said, “We’ll stop him. I promise.”
He stopped as traffic came to a standstill, horns honking around him. “I should have gone after the Bell that day.”
“You had to live another day. You’ve been fighting for so many others since then. This explains why you’re such a great agent. It wasn’t your time to stop it then, but now it is.”
“Thank you.”
Her chest swelled and at the same time hurt. She gazed out the window to avoid his heated stare.
“Tell me about her…the woman Matsuda took from you,” Raz said.
She cleared her throat. “Thought you weren’t into telling downers back-to-back.”
He shrugged. “Might as well. We’re going to be stuck in traffic for a minute.”
“We may need some alcohol after this.”
He laughed. “Okay, then just stick to the fonder memories of her.”
“All right. Naomi Mizuki adopted me as her sister and was my polar opposite. Introverted and reserved. So prudish, she’d always say, “Oi Kate-chan, dōshite…
“ Kate shook her head. “Sorry, it was something like, “Hey kid, why do you keep sticking your hand in fire?” But when I felt down on myself for being so immature, she told me to never lose that spark. ‘Us serious people need a reminder of what fun is.’”
“She’s not wrong,” he said. “Your bubbly personality is a ray of sunshine to hold on to.”
The compliment set her heart ablaze. “Thank you.” Twitching with awkwardness, she sought more to talk about.
“And my god, was Naomi funny. I think it was because she was so serious all the time that her jokes would slap you silly. She had every reason to be confident, but while I flaunt it, she was so humble and wanted to bring everyone up with her. She fought for me when nobody else did, and I wouldn’t have made it without her. She…was my only family.”
“She sounds like an amazing woman.”
Kate nodded. “The best sister—“ that you betrayed and abandoned. The truth sat heavy in her chest, and her voice broke as tears pricked her eyes. She wiped the wetness from her cheeks.
“It’s okay, Kate,” Raz said. “We’ll get justice for her.”
She didn’t want justice for Naomi. The only thing she wanted for her was freedom. And no matter how much it hurt, she’d suffer the heartache of manipulating Raz to see that through.