Secret Unleashed

Chapter Thirty-Seven

It took Logan seven hours to ask me everything he wanted to know. In those seven hours I told him what I’d seen of the way the compound worked, how many different employees I’d interacted with, and repeated every conversation I’d had with The Doctor.

I still couldn’t think of him as Friedrich. The name was too normal and too soft for the man it was attached to. I’d thought giving him a human name would help me feel better about things, help me humanize him and think of him as something other than the boogeyman in my nightmares, but it didn’t do any good.

He was still The Doctor. He would always be The Doctor.

The only way I was going to exorcise my demons would be when I eradicated him from the face of the earth. I needed to be the one who killed him because otherwise I’d never believe he was gone. Until my skin was stained with his blood and I saw the light go out in his eyes, I wouldn’t be free from the power he had over me.

Nine days was all it had taken for him to beat me down, and now he owned me.

It didn’t matter that he was in captivity or I was supposedly free, because in my mind I was still wearing the collar. I was still shackled to him and would be as long as he stayed alive.

Once the major was done asking his questions—some of which were new, most a repeat of the same old story—he got to his feet and shook my hand. Tyler followed suit, giving me a firm handshake and a supportive smile.

“I’m looking forward to working with you in the future, Secret. I think this team can do great things.” Logan nodded from me to Tyler. “Of course, I don’t need to remind you your affiliation with us would best be kept quiet. I understand your vampire council likes to believe they’ve got everyone fooled. Let’s let them keep thinking that.”

“That might not be as easy as it sounds.”

“You’re their leader, aren’t you?”

“I’m one third of the leadership of one of the councils. But even there I’m outranked by one.”

“You think you’re going to have any difficulty lying to one vampire?” Logan asked.

“If you’d ever met Sig, you wouldn’t have to ask.”

“Come a time you feel you’re no longer safe, you make the call and we’ll extract you.”

I laughed, my first real non-crazed laugh since I’d been free, and the sound was so unfamiliar to me I almost jumped. “Logan, with all due respect to you, I’m not a double agent. You need me for intel on all the things that go bump in the night, fine, I’ll help you. But I’m not giving anyone up, and I’m not telling you anything I don’t feel comfortable sharing. I appreciate what the FBI did for me, and whatever part the military played, I’m grateful to you too, but you don’t understand the first damned thing about vampires. So here’s my first bit of insider information for you.”

“What’s that?”

“The moment I no longer feel protected by my own council, I’m already dead. Because that’s the only way I get out of there. Understand?”

“Yes, Ms. McQueen. I believe I do.”

“Good. Now bring me Desmond Alvarez.”

They left, Tyler offering me a brotherly pat on the shoulder before taking his exit, and I resumed pacing the room. Logan had told me Desmond was in a room next door, yet the time between their exit and his arrival felt interminable.

When the door reopened, I froze in my tracks, staring at the entry like a frightened deer stares at an oncoming car, knowing what was inevitable but unable to move out of its way.

He wore a similarly shocked expression, like he hadn’t believed he’d get to see me when they brought him into the room.

“Secret?”

I’d missed him. I thought I’d understood the depth to which I could long for someone, but seeing him in front of me told me I had no idea. My hands trembled to touch him, and a hideous-sounding sob wrested free of my throat.

I’d been drowning, and he was the oxygen I hadn’t known I needed.

“Des—”

He didn’t give me an opportunity to finish saying his name. In one moment he was filling the doorway with his body, and in the next I was in his arms. He lifted me full off the floor and supported my weight easily with a hand on either thigh, latching me to him.

I wrapped my arms around his neck, clinging to him like he was the last refuge on an angry sea. When he kissed me, I felt years of my life being restored. His kiss and its sweet-and-sour limey tang was the last piece of the puzzle falling into place.

His lips tasted salty, and when I pulled my face back, tears were streaming down his cheeks. I kissed each one, reveling in the joy that brought rather than the horrible anguish that had been causing mine.

“I thought…” He drifted off when he began placing soft kisses on my cheeks and nose before finding my mouth and seizing it in a way that left me clinging to him and gasping for air. His kiss was ferocious and claiming, burdened with need. I knew what he’d thought because I’d seen the look on his face once before when he believed I was dying.

He’d thought the same thing I had about Holden.

Desmond had believed he was never going to see me alive again.

I touched his face, letting my fingers memorize every line and groove, savoring the rough tug of his short beard on my palms. When I’d left he’d had a bit of stubble, but it had evidently been quite some time since he had bothered with a razor.

“I like your beard,” I mumbled, scratching it with my fingernails.

He laughed lightly and pressed his forehead against my sternum, where his laughter vanished into tears. When he righted himself and put me on the floor, his cheeks were stained from crying, but I didn’t think I could recall ever seeing him so damned happy.

“They wouldn’t tell me anything. I wasn’t allowed to see you, and no one would explain what had happened to you. What happened?”

The idea of telling my story again so soon after the major’s rigorous debriefing was more than I could bear. I shook my head and placed a hand on his chest over his heart. “Not now.”

“Tell me something.”

“How much do you know?”

“The last time I spoke to you was two weeks ago when you were flying to San Francisco.” He guided me to the chair Logan had previously been sitting in, then took Tyler’s former seat for himself. “I waited about two days since I knew you were on council business and I didn’t want to interrupt anything at the wrong time, but when you hadn’t called me in over forty-eight hours, I started to worry. I tried calling you, and I tried calling Holden since I knew he was with you, but neither of you were answering. So I called Lucas.”

I’d almost forgotten seeing Lucas at the hotel. It felt like a different lifetime now, him kissing me in the hall while his famous girlfriend waited inside the restaurant. I longed for a time when dealing with my messy love life was the worst of my problems.

Desmond continued, “He told me a bit of what happened, but I gather he was leaving some details out. He did say you were upset when you left him.”

“Me? Upset with Lucas Rain? Never.” I smiled and pulled my legs up under me. I’d been sitting in these uncomfortable metal chairs for hours, but it sounded like Desmond was just getting started on his story.

“I thought you’d bolted.”

Ah, yes. It wasn’t the most absurd thought he’d ever had because I had run from my problems in the past. “I told you I’d never leave without telling you. I promised you,” I reminded him. In the supernatural community a promise meant a lot more than your word. It usually represented a solemn oath. I was a bit offended he believed I’d go back on mine so easily.

“I know, and I’m sorry for thinking it. But after he told me what he’d done, and you weren’t answering…”

“You thought I ran off with Holden, didn’t you?”

He nodded, not pretending otherwise. “You’re a PI, Secret, tell me what you would have assumed given the evidence?”

He was right. Even a rookie detective would have jumped to the same conclusion. But the fact Desmond was here and I’d been rescued from hell made me believe he hadn’t planned on letting me go without a fight.

“I wanted to be sure. You had promised me, and I believed you intended to keep your promise. It didn’t make sense to me that you’d up and leave. So I called Vivienne.”

“You called Grandmere?”

“I did. I assumed if there was anyone on Earth you would feel you had to tell where you were going, it would be her. She hadn’t heard from you either, which is when I started to really worry. I called everyone. Everyone. I spoke to Callum and Eugenia and half the Southern pack, hoping you might have made contact. I knew you’d gotten close to your sister, and I thought she might have spoken with you, but she hadn’t. She was able to tell me you hadn’t been active on Skype for over a day, which she explained was a sure sign your phone was either turned off or the battery was dead.”

Smart girl. I had no idea how to change my status on the video chat program, so it was always on. And anyone who knew me also knew I wasn’t in the habit of turning off my phone.

“Since your bloody phone is always on, that meant it had to be dead. Your voicemail was full, which meant you weren’t retrieving your messages, and I have my texts set to tell me when the recipient reads them. You hadn’t seen a single one I’d sent. I knew something was wrong.”

“I’m so sorry.” I hated that he’d been worried, but at the same time I wanted to hug him for not giving up. “What happened next?”

“I went to Mercedes.”

Clever. When he exhausted his supernatural resources, he’d gone for a more conventional one. The last time I’d run off, I told Mercedes where I was. Since Lucas had approached her then, I was betting he’d told Desmond about his failed attempt to coerce information from her. I felt a sudden pang of guilt. Oh God, Cedes needs to know I’m alive.

Seeing my flustered expression, he grabbed one of my hands. “Tyler had someone call her. He couldn’t do it himself because she doesn’t know about him. From what I’ve been told, and the thirteen nondisclosure agreements I’ve been forced to sign, none of us are supposed to know about Tyler.”

“How do you know then?” Would Tyler have been stupid enough to let Desmond see him? That seemed like an awfully big risk unless there was more to it than I’d heard so far.

“Tyler was with Mercedes when I went to speak with her. I’ve got to say, he’s got the innocent vibe down pat because he toed the company line the entire time I was there. I even filed a missing persons report to make it official. But Mercedes told me she hadn’t heard from you either. She said she’d make some calls to the SFPD, but I’m betting there won’t be much of a record. Not if Tyler got to it first.”

I couldn’t handle the chair anymore, so I got to my feet and started pacing again, this time in small circles near Desmond.

He went on. “Tyler came to see me that night. He asked me if there were any details I’d left out, then told me he knew what you were. He said you’d claimed him?”

“I’ve marked him as being mine. It’s a vampire thing. It means he’s under my protection.” As his brows knit together I added, “Before you start thinking it means anything, I’d like to point out I’ve also claimed you. And Cedes. Aaand Nolan, Shane, Keaty and a few others.” I smiled at him and shrugged. “I’m a property whore, what can I say? Point is, it keeps you guys safe from other vampires when I’m not around. At least vampires who obey council laws.”

“I told Tyler about Peyton,” Desmond said when I finished. “And about your mother. He said he had the resources to help. I didn’t know what he meant, but I was willing to do anything. So I told him.”

I stopped pacing. “Did he find them?” If Alexandre Peyton and Mercy McQueen were somewhere in this complex and no one had told me, I was going to lose my shit in short order.

Desmond shook his head, letting some of the steam out of my rage teakettle. I wouldn’t put it past the government to lie to me. Or lie by omission, anyway. After all, they were keeping a huge secret buried from the general public, so what was one little secret kept from me?

“As far as I know the search never involved them. It was focused on you and Holden. I mean, it’s possible other things happened, but to the best of my knowledge you were the main target of the investigation.”

Because Tyler wanted to keep using me. Because I was his asset. It made sense, in a twisted way, that he’d be dedicated to finding me. You don’t put that much time and effort into something just to let it vanish without a trace. I was his pet project, so he’d fought for me.

Tyler Nowakowski was demented. In a sweet way.

“But if the FBI was responsible for finding me, why are you here? Not that I’m not thrilled.” I sat down again, squeezing both his hands. “But why did they involve you? And why did they throw you in lockup?”

He blushed. “The stockade thing was my own fault. When they brought you back here, they wouldn’t let me in. I’d come with the FBI escort, and I’d assumed I’d be given access, but I was suddenly declared civilian, which in military terms means persona non grata. When they told me hell would freeze over before I was ever allowed into the hospital, I sort of…lost it.”

Desmond was the calm one. He was the cool, level head and voice of reason in my otherwise chaotic life. “Lost it how?”

“I might have turned over a Humvee and destroyed all the furniture in the hospital lobby. That was as far as I got before they tasered me.” He shrugged as if to say, Shit happens. “I can’t be mad. I sort of had it coming. Woke up in a cell, and I’ve been there until today.”

“How were you involved, though?” I still couldn’t understand why they would bring him this far only to shut him out in the end. What part had he played to make it pivotal for him to come across the country?

“I found you.”

“You…what?”

“I told them you were my mate. I explained how the mate-bond functioned.”

So much for my keeping his wolfy nature a secret.

“But we’re not mate-bonded. You didn’t mark me, I would have known.” And more importantly, he knew better than to do it without my permission, which was how Lucas had completed the bond.

“They didn’t know that. I made them believe the only hope in hell they had of finding you was bringing me along for the ride. Turns out I was right.”

“So how did you find me?”

“Well, getting to you was a joint effort, but it helped to have FBI resources on my side. We knew you’d planned on going to the Winchester Mystery House the night you vanished. Tyler confiscated all the park tapes. There aren’t any inside the house, so we didn’t see you being abducted, but we were able to see which of the tour guests were missing when it was all over. You, Holden, the boy you were with—”

“Maxime.”

“Yes. And one other.”

That didn’t take a genius to figure out, since I knew who’d taken me. “The Doctor.”

“Dr. Friedrich Kesteral, yes.”

When I’d first woken in my cell, I had wondered how The Doctor was able to take three vampires by force so easily when he was human. After hearing him tell me about all the experiments he’d run, I hadn’t wondered anymore. Thirty years of research was a long time. Long enough to know vampire weaknesses, and certainly long enough to develop a way to incapacitate them.

No wonder the government was so keen to go through The Doctor’s research. Soon enough they’d know every weakness a vampire had, plus a half dozen we probably didn’t yet know existed.

“I take it the FBI was able to figure out who he was.”

“Apparently face recognition software is real. Dr. Kesteral didn’t have a criminal record, but he was considered a person of interest for quite some time, I gather. I didn’t get a lot of the finer details, but they were able to find an empty parcel of land he owned near Palo Alto. Then they decided to use me.”

I sucked air in through my nostrils. “You were their bloodhound, weren’t you?”

He nodded. “The place looked deserted enough, but I was able to pick up your scent. I knew you were there. It took them nearly fourteen hours to find the entrance.”

During which time my arm had been broken and I’d almost gotten away with murder.

“But they found me.”

“They found you.”

“The FBI assumes Kesteral had help removing you, Holden and Maxime from the house, likely through a workers’ entrance. Unfortunately there weren’t any cameras back there to help us find out who.”

“He had plenty of people to choose from. The guy had a bloody staff.” All of whom were probably in an FBI prison somewhere, having their identities erased from public record.

I’d wanted them all to burn, but I’d take what I could get.

“You found me,” I corrected.

Desmond nodded. “I’d go to hell and back to find you.”

I squeezed his hands, worried if I let go, he might vanish. Part of me was still terrified this was all a dream.

“You did.”