Sierra Dean - Secret Unleashed

“What?” It was my new favorite question over the last couple of hours, though in fairness people were telling me a lot of things that were hard to process.

“Desmond is here. They wouldn’t let him in to see you, not sure why, something about protection was all I overheard. I assumed they would have told you though.”

If I’d known Desmond was anywhere within a hundred-mile radius, I would have kicked off the covers and gone looking for him myself. Since mobility might be an issue, I would have insisted they let him in to see me.

“Why is he here?”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t who he was trying to see. I just listened to what I could hear from where they had me. He really hasn’t been in to see you?”

I shook my head and tried to sit up, but the movement made me dizzy. How long was it going to take before things got back to normal and I started feeling like myself again instead of a half-dead walking skeleton?

“You’re sure they said Desmond?”

He sat up beside me, wincing. For the life of me I couldn’t imagine what Desmond would be doing here. I was elated to know he was close, but I couldn’t comprehend his presence. He had no interaction with the council—not the one back home or the one here—so how could he have figured out where to look for me?

Aside from our brief conversation en route from Los Angeles to San Francisco, I hadn’t spoken to him in days. Almost two weeks if I factored in the time I’d been kept locked up.

Questions swam around in my brain, bumping against one another to derail my thought process. I would just about have a grasp on one idea when another would push its way to the forefront. Tyler and Emilio had asked all the questions to fill in whatever blanks they had, but it hadn’t occurred to me that between us we would have a complete picture. I should have been more thorough, made them tell me what they knew. Then I might have the slightest hope in hell of understanding the whole story.

Desmond might have some of the answers I so desperately needed, but more than that I needed him . I had dreamed of him the way a prisoner dreams of freedom, and now I was out and he was so close, but he was still out of my reach.

I squeezed Holden’s hand, looking back at him. “Did they tell you anything?”

“Only that you were okay. That was all I needed to know.”

“Did they…did they tell you about Max?”

He grimaced and swallowed hard, I think to fight off any display of emotion. His expression became stoic and he said, “I heard.”

I didn’t ask if he knew all the details. Knowing Maxime had died was bad enough; I didn’t want to burden him with how . Gruesome details of the scene would be burned into my psyche for the rest of my life, and only one of us needed to be haunted by those images. Besides, no words existed to paint a proper picture of what The Doctor had done to him, and maybe that was for the best.

I fought the urge to escape from the bed and go in search of Desmond. The nurse who’d brought Holden to me had said we’d only have five minutes, and for those five minutes I would stay in his arms. Leaning back into him, I twined the fingers of my good hand into his and settled my head on his shoulder.

“Holden?”

“Yes?”

“Did we really make it out, or is this just some dream you’re giving me to help me let go?”

His fingers twitched against mine, squeezing harder, almost to the point of pain before he relaxed them. “If I was going to give you one last dream, don’t you think we’d be naked?”

I laughed even though it hurt. “Maybe you thought that would be too obvious.”

“No. We made it. We’re out.”

“I gave up, you know.”

“No you didn’t.”

“I did. I thought I’d seen you for the last time. I didn’t think I was going to leave that place alive. I gave up.”

“You don’t know how to give up.” He was stroking my hair, placing delicate kisses along my temple and cheeks. “You don’t have a quitter in you.”

“When I saw Max…”

“Secret, shhh .”

“I gave up,” I whispered, pressing my lips against the cool blue fabric of the gown he wore.

“If you’d given up, we’d all be dead. You didn’t give up, you just…let go.”

Calliope had told me once my fatal flaw was my need to be a normal person, to act in a way that I could pretend I was human and not a monster.

But Holden was right. I hadn’t given up.

I’d just kissed my humanity goodbye.

Four days later

Government assets were not supposed to make demands.

I’d learned that much from the exasperated expressions I continued to receive from Tyler and Emilio whenever I asked for something new.

That’s what they got for labeling me as property.

A Dell laptop might not ask for a lot from its government-assigned owner, but if these two thought I was going to politely do their bidding and not ask for anything in return, they needed to be set straight sooner rather than later.

My first request had been to see Desmond.

I’d been denied.

My second through twelfth requests had also been to see Desmond, and each in turn had been shot down. They tried to be polite about it at first, but in the end Emilio and a military doctor had told me to stop asking. Desmond was a civilian, and it turned out architects do not merit military clearance. And certainly not walk-on privileges at a top-secret military hospital.

From what I gathered he hadn’t liked the news any more than I had, but his reaction had been a bit…stronger. For the four days it took for the doctors to be satisfied with my recovery, Desmond had been kept in the stockade.

Now that they were sure I was fully mobile and healthy, instead of rewarding me with a visit, I was being debriefed. Again.

I’d been left in a small interrogation room in the hospital’s basement. From what I could tell the hospital itself was one part of a much larger complex, but since I hadn’t been taken outside during my stay, I couldn’t figure out how big. Chances were good I’d never be privy to that information. The less I knew the better as far as they were concerned.

The same theory extended to discovering the wellbeing of others. Aside from five-minute visits with Holden each night, I hadn’t been allowed to see my father. The doctor said he was in no condition to receive visitors, which suggested I’d been wise not to see him while we were in captivity. Anything that would take a vampire more than five days to heal couldn’t be good.

I’d been ready to get out of bed on my second day, but they’d wanted to be cautious.

I paced the ugly yellow interrogation room, none too pleased about being locked in a small space after what I’d been through. I’d never enjoyed tight quarters, but now even a twenty-by-twenty room felt cramped to me.

The door opened, and Tyler entered, along with a man in full military dress. Tyler settled into one of the vacant chairs across the table from me, and the officer removed his cap, tucking it under his arm.

He was a good-looking man, perhaps forty or a well-preserved fifty, with dark brown hair going gray at the temples and eyes the color of rich espresso. He had crinkly lines around his eyes and mouth suggesting a lifetime spent smiling. Across his left breast lapel were a number of service ribbons, telling me he was an officer of some important rank.

“Good evening, Ms. McQueen. My name is Major Logan van Buren.” He extended a hand to me, and I considered ignoring it but thought better of it. If I was going to curry any favor with these guys, I would have to play nice.

I shook his hand, maybe a bit too firmly, and said, “Tribunal Leader Secret McQueen. Queen of the Eastern werewolf pack.” If we wanted to play a game of ranks, I was willing to pull out the only big guns I had. I didn’t like using either of my titles when I was with my own kind, but I figured they might give me some weight to throw around here.