Quiver (Revenge Book 1) (24 page)

When her bones refused to move, she gave herself a minute to let her horrible new reality sink in.

Once it had, sweet resignation slowly setting in, Veda went to stand, staring at the moonlight shining in through the bathroom window. Just as she planted one foot on the tile, however, she froze in mid-stand. Her eyes shot back down to Todd, widening.

“No,” she whispered, responding to the new voices charging through her head. She shook her head at herself. “It would never….”

In the midst of chiding herself, she stumbled. As she thought it through, her eyes moved like a scanner. Over and over she exchanged blows with her mind, until a slow smile began to lift at the corner of her mouth. Soon, it had erased the frown between her eyebrows. The surrender in her eyes spilled over into unadulterated delight.

As she scrutinized Todd’s sleeping face, she could feel the exact moment her smile grew to Mr. Grinch levels of deviousness, high enough to touch her ears.

Then she snatched at the messenger bag on her hip, ripping open the zipper and jamming her hand inside, grabbing hold of the kit she always carried with her. A kit she’d procured during medical school and still found of great use today.

A kit that, to her great frustration, had a plethora of interesting tools—most of which she’d never be able to make full use of.

Until then, anyway.

Swallowing thickly, she fingered out the tool she’d been convinced she’d never touch, lifting it into the air and examining it.

The scalpel gleamed under the bathroom light, the glare dancing across its stainless steel body as Veda twirled it in her fingers.

Her eyes flew back to Todd’s face. Down to the number 23 on his wrist.

No.

Her smile bloomed wider.

She couldn’t.

Her eyes reclaimed the scalpel.

Could she?

—

The bottom of the sheer white dress tickled Veda’s leopard-print toes. She let them curl up against the slick black rock that was big enough for her to lie on. Remnants of the crashing ocean waves flirted with the edge of the smooth boulder, infiltrating it just enough to trickle on top of it and tickle her toes before retreating back into the water. Since she was a child, this had been her favorite place in all of Shadow Rock. She could put on her swimsuit and sit on this rock for hours, letting the waves flirt with her toes until the tide rose too high and swallowed the stone completely, forcing her off. She smiled down at the white bubbles that tapped at her skin before disappearing back into their home in the ocean, lifting her eyes to the starry night sky.

As she took in the rocky cliff to her left, so tall and vast it blocked half the yellow moon, Veda didn’t miss the new ease with which her lungs accepted each breath. The new strength behind every pound of her heart. The fresh marrow that filled every bone in her body.

She could only imagine the woman she’d be once she delivered to the other nine what she’d delivered Todd Lockwood that evening. She knew, one day, she’d look in the mirror and see a different woman.

A better woman.

She took another deep breath, letting the ocean scent fill her nostrils before looking over her shoulder to make sure the messenger bag she’d sat on the sand was still where she’d left it. The beach was always empty at night, so she didn’t know what kept prompting her to look.

But when she gazed over her shoulder and locked eyes with Gage, she finally knew.

Because the gods wanted to see every pillar of strength she’d built up come plummeting down. And they did at the very sight of him, strolling across the sand, wearing all white as well, with his hands deep in the pockets of his breezy pants, his open shirt and hair blowing in the wind.

She faced him, opening her mouth to chide him, but was unsurprised when nothing came.

She spotted a red mark on the side of his cheek and wondered where it came from, but she didn’t have the heart to ask. She was too busy going against that heart. The heart that beat to be closer to him, close enough to breathe in his magical smell, to be wrapped up in the firm cocoon of his arms. To make love to him the way he’d made love to her the other night, looking into his eyes, gasping against his lips, begging him for more of the feeling she couldn’t make sense of herself.

He broke their gaze to look off toward the massive black cliff where his home glowed in the distance. “Imagine my surprise, after hours of searching this island for you, to walk out on my balcony and see you down here, on my beach.” He stepped onto the big rock but didn’t cross over to her. “Was this the spot you talked about when you were a little girl?”

“Gage….” She still couldn’t make sense of the feeling rushing through her. “I thought I told you to go home to your fiancée.”

He began toward her, his bare feet making slow strides along the smooth black rock. “And I thought I told you that I’m in love with you.” His gaze didn’t relent, even as he softly shook his head. “It’s over.”

Veda slammed her eyes shut.

He spoke to her lowered lids. “I ended it with Scarlett.”

Her eyes fluttered open.

He tried to smile, but it was faint. Strained. “Tonight… was the first time my father ever hit me.
Ever
.”

Veda’s eyes zoomed back to the redness on his jaw, and her heart instantly softened as she imagined how hard it must’ve been for him to go against his parents. His family. Their company. “Damn it, Gage—”

“Afterward, while I scoured the island looking for you, I kept waiting for the regret. The fear. The debilitating sense of responsibility I’ve always been burdened by as their only child. It was inevitable. It always came, eventually, after I defied them. But this time… Nothing. It didn’t come. It’s not going to come. I didn’t know it two months ago, but I know it now. I know now that love doesn’t fade. It doesn’t tire. It doesn’t quit.”

Veda felt her chest rising with emotion, and she felt that very emotion wetting her eyes.

“I won’t quit you, Veda.” His voice lowered to a whisper. “I’ll never quit you.”

When he stepped forward, everything in her soul told her to step back, but she knew stepping back meant stepping over the edge of that rock and tumbling into the water. There was no escape. No way out.

And the closer he got, the closer he allowed her to get to him—his emotional brown eyes, his hair growing wet from the mist, his lips already parted for the kiss she hadn’t yet granted him—she knew she didn’t want to.

Once again, she was confused at herself. Did it mean nothing to her that, in the messenger bag she’d left in the sand a few hundred feet away, sat a photo of the men she hated? Did it mean nothing that she’d discovered Gage in that photo as well? That he’d been at the party when her life had been changed forever?

She lifted her eyes to his when he came within arm’s reach, unable to stop her mind even as his fingers grazed her jaw.

Her thoughts didn’t stop at his touch but they did slow, reminding her of just how dangerous this man was to her psyche. Her sanity. Her clarity.

Her eyes searched his, unable to maintain the last shred of sense that still remained in a body that now yearned for little more than his touch, his kiss, his dick.

Did he know?

Did he know the dark side of his friends? Of his family?

Was he one of them?

Could she ever return the love of a man who sent those kinds of questions blasting through her mind?

When Gage leaned down and covered her lips in a tender kiss, she sucked in a breath that came so clean, so sharp, and so easy that she had her answer with that one simple brush of his mouth.

He hadn’t pulled back for even a second before she warmed his lips with a whisper. “I love you.”

His eyes expanded at first but then shrank with relief, followed by a shy smile.

“The Lockwoods… The Blackwaters… They’re dangerous. They hurt people.”

Veda heard Coco’s voice, even if it was now but a distant echo, but when he breathed back, “I love you too,” even Coco’s voice faded away. And when he took her lips again, that time teasing hers with the tip of his tongue before drawing them deeply between his own,
his
words won over.

The kiss grew deep in just a few heated, panting moments, and Veda locked her arms around his broad shoulders when he bent his knees to ease her down onto the rock. The ‘itchy thing’ she’d been sure she could kill months ago seemed stronger than ever as he moved between her splayed legs, pressing the bulge in his pants against her humming pussy as if he knew it too.

He knew every inch of her belonged to him.

“I love you.” He whispered the words over as over as he undressed her, never breaking the invisible line that kept their eyes locked as he removed her bra and panties.

Veda’s chest heaved when he sat back on his heels and took in her naked body, her pert brown nipples hard as a rock and reaching toward the sky. Her slim legs parted, begging for him to take his rightful spot nestled in the swollen mound between them. Her leopard-print nails, digging into the rock when the torture of being without his touch went on for longer than she could bear. Her heart pummeled her ribcage and traveled straight to her pussy, making her believe he could visibly see her cunt pounding for him as furiously as she could feel it.

She wondered how long he planned on torturing her, but in the next instant his trembling fingers took the open flaps of his shirt, biceps flexing with his own frustrations as he tore it down each of his arms. Abs contracting with evidence of his desire, he tore the tie at the waistband of his pants apart, coming up to his knees to push them down.

Veda licked her lips as his length sprang into the night air, gasping when he didn’t even bother to finish removing the pants before he was between her splayed thighs again, reaching between their bodies, gasping as he grabbed his shaft and guided the aching tip to her channel.

He seared a flaming kiss on her lips as he entered her, breaking them away only to make room for the strangled moan that jumped forth in its place.

Veda gasped with him, tangling her fingers in his hair at the instant flex of his hips that drove his column as deep as it could go. Every nerve ending in her body prickled to life as the pleasure in her pussy spread through her like a wildfire. Even as the tide picked up and the waves came farther onto the rock, soaking her curls and saturating their bodies in its salty essence, it wasn’t enough to cool her down. As she rocked with him, letting the white-hot pleasure take over her body and leave her eyes, which were locked to his, she knew the only thing in the world that could douse the flame burning inside her was him.

Soon the sounds of their lovemaking grew just as loud and ferocious as the crashing waves, and as her spine left the rock, body convulsing at the familiar tightness in her stomach, she couldn’t tell if the wetness streaming down her legs was from them or the ocean water. She didn’t know if the dew on her skin was sweat droplets accompanying her spine-bending orgasm or the residual water trickling on and off the rock. She didn’t know if the scream that filled the space between their sealed lips was hers or his as he reached his peak too.

“Oh, Veda,” he moaned, brushing the tips of their noses together as he unloaded everything he had, his hips flexing and flinching from where he remained buried deep, forcing quiet yelps of surprise from his lips for every shot that left his dick unexpectedly.

Veda held him close, her breasts heaving against his solid pecs, kissing him tenderly as he slowly came down from a wave that left his bones convulsing, a wave that gave the ones saturating that rock a run for their money.

His eyes fluttered shut, a small smile taking over his face as he collapsed on her chest, pressing his lips to her ear. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

She drank in his words, thankful to the gods above when she was able to stop herself from saying it back.

Little did he know, she wasn’t the best thing that had ever happened to him.

She may not have been the killer, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t just served Todd Lockwood a platter of irreversible justice that would slowly bring him to his knees.

That didn’t mean she didn’t have every intention of ensuring every last one of Gage’s friends paid the same price for their sins.

And they would all pay.

Or she would die trying.

Epilogue

The next morning Veda shot Gage a look from the corner of her eyes, tightening her fingers around his. He didn’t look at her, but a smirk lifted the corner of his lips as he tightened his fingers right back. She made a mental note to ask him what kind of moisturizer he used, as his hands were way softer than hers.

She’d never been so happy to be distracted by the aspects of her boyfriend’s body that were more feminine than hers because it was keeping her attention off everyone around them. There wasn’t a single employee in the lobby that early morning who didn’t stop in their tracks or slow their stride at the sight of Veda and Gage.

“People are literally tripping over themselves staring at us. They’re about to bust their heads open.”

“Stick to the plan,” Gage said from the corner of his mouth, smiling tightly at every stunned face, every slack jaw, and every widened eye that passed silent judgment on them.

As they approached the welcome desk, Latika was already watching them over the rims of her glasses.

“Do you ever take that judgmental smirk off your face?” Gage smiled down at her.

“Mmmmhm—”

“Let me stop you right there,” Gage said. “I’m very honored this morning, Latika, to inform you that your patronizing
mmmmhmmms
will no longer have their desired effect on us.” He lifted his and Veda’s clasped hands.

Latika’s lazy gaze shot to their intertwined fingers, unmoved.

“Veda is my girlfriend now,” he continued. “And yes, HR has given us the green light, just in case you’re thinking of getting creative about extorting the pension plan improvements you never stop hassling me about.”

Latika’s eyebrow shot higher. “Sweetness, did you think HR didn’t know? Did you think this entire hospital didn’t know?” She didn’t even give Gage a moment to answer before she was howling with laughter. “Did you think Javier Lopez didn’t know?” she cried.

Gage’s face fell as she spoke the name of the young Mexican boy who’d been in a coma for almost a year.

She stood and circled the desk, her laughs moving to roars, throwing her head back as the glee overtook her and clutching a chart to her chest as she sauntered off.

“First time I’ve seen you leave that chair since the day you started here!” Gage cried after her, scowling when she responded with a lazy wave in the air as she meandered away from them, still tickled by deep belly laughter.

“Well….” Veda adjusted his tie. “That was just as painful as I imagined it would be.” She came to her toes to kiss his cheek, her body rolling with warmth when a little love from her lips immediately softened the tightness in his jaw muscle. She smacked his ass and went to walk away, shooting him a look from over her shoulder. “I can hardly wait for what the rest of the day will bring.”

He seized her arm, pulling her back. “Give me some of that sour apple.” He moaned when she did just that, rising to her toes once more and giving him a soft kiss before turning and sauntering away. He watched her go, biting his bottom lip. “The unimaginable things I’m going to do to you tonight…,” he warned.

“Promises, promises.” She bit her own bottom lip.

His smile vanished, replaced with a heated look she’d come to recognize all too well. “My place. Tonight.”

“Okay,” she mouthed before turning away from him, unable to stop herself from rolling her eyes at the shit-eating grin that she couldn’t wipe from her face.

Somewhere around their third time making love on the beach the night before, it had hit Veda. Why she hadn’t been able to kill Todd.

She snuck another look over her shoulder just before she turned down a different hallway, blushing when she saw Gage leaning on the welcome desk, his hot eyes still glued to her ass, and it hit her again.

She breathed in a sigh as her eyes fluttered, letting the new feeling taking over her body race through her veins and soften her heart. She couldn’t believe it. She had a
boyfriend
. And unlike the last one, Gage Blackwater didn’t feel like a Paint-by-Numbers, Boyfriend Edition.

No. He felt like….

She didn’t know what
that feeling was. The one roaring away inside her. She just knew she wanted to let it live. Let it flourish. Let it shine its light on a part of her she’d been convinced was long dead and gone.

Her doe eyes blinked open when she ran square into something, and when she found herself gazing up at Dr. Hitler—er,
Dr. Britler
—the grin on her face vanished.

“As delighted as I am that the CEO of this hospital has managed to put that dimwitted grin on your face….”

The remnants of Veda’s smile, on life support since the moment she’d laid eyes on him, washed away until she was full-on cringing.

Dr. Britler continued. “As it turns out, this hospital actually pays you to…” He shrugged, chuckling. “Do your job.”

Veda rolled her eyes.

“Crazy, I know.”

Her mind told her to let it go. Her heart said much of the same. But her lips worked on their own accord. “Since my first day here, you’ve never stopped giving me shit. Do you have a crush on me or what? Because this ‘pull the pigtail and run away’ thing we’ve got going here? It’s getting really tiresome. Exhausting, actually. Why don’t you and I just head on into the on-call room and….” She pumped her fist through the air while clicking her teeth, giving him a sexualized leer that was so Pepe Le Pew she was almost waiting for a cartoonish French accent to come spilling from her lips.

Dr. Britler sputtered, went to walk away, sputtered again, and came back to face her, tapping the edge of a medical chart into her chest.

Veda snatched it from him with a scoff.

His voice remained ever monotone. “We’re desperately short on nurses this morning. I need you to listen in on the attending in room 105,
now.”

Veda raised the chart as Dr. Britler breezed past her, wagging it in the air. “Half a million dollars in student loans to do a nurse’s job. Worth every penny, that medical degree. Thanks, Stanford!”

Dr. Britler blew a sharp whistle in response because, of course, she wasn’t a human being who deserved actual words.

Veda huffed the entire way to room 105. She tried to remind herself why she’d chosen a small hospital in Shadow Rock for her residency and not one of the more illustrious ones scattered all over the country, most of whom had also offered her a position.

Every day, it seemed, she was forced to remind herself
why
more and more.

Every day since she’d met Gage.

She turned the corner into the room, and when she caught sight of the people inside, she froze in the doorway, her mouth falling open. She shot a look down at the chart and, sure enough, there it was.

Her wide gaze flew back up.

“Veda, good,” Dr. Jin, the attendant physician, always soft-spoken and warm, waved Veda in.

But that wasn’t what had stopped Veda in mid-step.

Detective Lincoln Hill, slouched in a tattered chair in the corner of the room, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, leaned his elbow on the chair’s handle, resting his fingers over his lips. The moment he caught sight of Veda, he let his lashes flutter shut. A smirk grew on his lips and he chuckled.

But it wasn’t even Linc and his handsome, smug, angry face that had stopped Veda cold.

No.

Todd Lockwood sat on the edge of a bed wearing only a hospital gown. His cheeks seemed more crimson than normal, and the red didn’t fade, not even after several minutes. His blue eyes avoided everyone, stuck to the window as he tightened his crossed arms.

When the silence went on too long for his liking, however, he looked to Dr. Jin and barked, “Can we get this over with, please?”

Now that Veda was there, Dr. Jin was able to speak to Todd freely. Hospital policy required that any doctor who felt uncomfortable in any way always ensured that a nurse be present as witness, for insurance purposes. If a nurse wasn’t available, a fellow doctor would do as well.

Seeing Todd left no question in Veda’s mind why Dr. Jin, who rarely requested a witness, felt so uncomfortable that morning. Todd had that knack. It lived under his skin, that undeniable penchant to leave women ill-at-ease. Especially the soft-spoken ones like Dr. Jin.

But Veda knew that Todd’s days of fine-drawn abuse had come to a startling end, and she entered the room with her head down, trying to fight the smile threatening her lips, leaning against the wall a few feet behind Dr. Jin.

Don’t smile
, she warned herself, shooting another look at Linc, whose eyes were on her.

He seemed to be fighting the same internal celebration she was, but unlike her, he was doing a piss-poor job of hiding it. She’d never seen Linc smile, but now that he was almost there, she could see that it showed in his eyes long before it actually hit his lips. New life had been breathed into his green orbs that hadn’t been there before.

The police badge hanging from the chain around his neck seemed to rise and fall faster every second their eyes remained locked.

Why was he breathing so hard?

“Can you fix me or what?” Todd’s deep voice rang out again, shaking with the same helplessness present in his eyes.

Snapped out of her Linc-induced trance, Veda studied Todd, taking note of the vulnerability in his eyes. She couldn’t help but wonder if her own had looked that helpless, that soulless, that unprotected the night he’d taken her innocence.

Dr. Jin sighed. “Mr. Lockwood, it seems whoever performed the castration was highly trained. The quality of the stitching was executed at a professional level. Whoever did this… Well, they knew what they were doing.”

Veda fought the urge to brush her shoulders off, never more grateful for the surgical electives she’d picked up during med school than she was right then. Not bad for an anesthesiologist, eh?

Dr. Jin shuffled her feet and cleared her throat. “I’m afraid, in the absence of the testes, the best we can offer you is your choice of prosthetic.” Dr. Jin’s cheeks heated. “Testicle prosthetics actually feel perfectly natural. They have the weight, shape, and feel of a normal testicle. You wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference—”

“What’s going to happen to me?” Todd’s voice rose so high that, if Veda weren’t looking at him, she could’ve easily placed it on a ranting five-year-old in his place and never know the difference. “Can I still have sex?”

Dr. Jin looked over her shoulder and locked eyes with Veda and Linc, both of whom were still on the verge of passing out from holding their breath to keep the laughter at bay, before returning her tightened lips to Todd. “Unfortunately, sterilization will prevent you from reproducing, and the absence of the testes will immediately reduce the production of testosterone—”

“Can. I. Get. Hard?” Todd roared, pressing his thumb and forefinger together, as if he were talking to an infant.

And just like that, the redness vanished from Dr. Jin’s face. Her shuffled feet steadied and planted. Her crossed arms fell to her sides.

“Yes,” she said, with the kind of authority that hadn’t been in her tone until then.

Veda nodded ever so softly, glad to see Dr. Jin finally realizing who the man before her was.

She began listing off the facts like wildfire, clearly no longer worried about Todd’s delicate feelings. “Seeing as the testes produce ninety-five percent of the testosterone in the male body, you can still have an erection, and you can still ejaculate. However, your sex drive with be
greatly
diminished.”

Todd’s face collapsed.

That did nothing to impede Dr. Jin, whose voice actually rose. “The frequency, strength, and length of your orgasms will dwindle and never recover. Premature balding, hot flashes, and vertigo are common, and it’s highly probable you’ll experience rapid breast growth.”

Todd buried his head in both hands just in time to stifle the belly sob that raced up his throat, the strength of his cries shaking the bed below him.

Only then did Dr. Jin let up. Sputtering, she skipped a beat and then hurried across the room. Her hand lingered in the air over Todd’s hunched back for a moment before she finally lowered it and laid a delicate touch. She rubbed his back the way a hypochondriac would rub an infectious animal, all while whispering about the medications that would help him live his new life.

But Veda knew better than anyone that there wasn’t a medication on Earth strong enough to give a man new life. To help a man grow back wings that had been slashed beyond repair. To touch the sky once more after you’d already crashed into the ground.

Pushing her hands in the pockets of her scrubs, Veda watched Todd weep, and even as Dr. Jin fell for his alligator tears, Veda guzzled them like an eighteen wheeler low on fuel.

She used his pain as fire.

She used his tears as fuel.

Before she could stop it, the smile she’d been fighting broke ground on her lips, and it kept spreading until she was sure it smashed through the ceiling and touched the moon and the clouds.

She cut a look at Linc, saw his smile had broken free as well.