Vengeance (23 page)

Val pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed. Her gaze traced his cracked lips, sallow skin, black and blue cheeks, and heavy eyes. Despite it all, as when they'd been in bed together, he looked content. Happy, even.

“How are you?” she asked.

“I didn't die,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. “You didn't die, either. That's a lot better than I thought we'd do.”

“That is amazing.”
And suspicious.
“I sort of told Michael that you hired me to look into your father's death and exonerate you, so you might want to stick to that story.”

“Sure. It's not so far from the truth. You did find out who killed my father.”

“Yeah, about that—my lawyer was pretty confident the DA's office will drop the murder charges against you. Dean blew up their case.” Val grinned. “So when you get released from the hospital, you'll probably be able to go home.”

“Oh.” He frowned and looked away.

Damn him, he still wanted to confess. “I'll help you get settled while you recuperate.” She touched his hand, and he looked at her again. “I think you've suffered enough, Max.”

He searched her eyes with his, then lifted his arm and brushed his fingertips against her bruised cheek. “Where's Norman?”

“Dead.”

“Good.”

Val cupped Max's hand in hers, turned her head, and kissed his palm. The smile returned to his face. She laid her head on his chest, closed her eyes, and listened to his heart, loving every beat. Loving
him
.

T
he savory smells of eggs and bacon permeated the diner as the late breakfast crowd began to filter out. Val sat in a booth tucked away in the corner, out of sight of any news reporters that might be lurking nearby, and sifted through a stack of folders. Her cell phone beeped.

Tell me what the pancakes taste like
, Max texted her.

She patted the half-eaten buttermilk slab with her fork and licked the syrup off the prongs.
Sweet maple on top of blueberry goo, melted butter seeped into the bread. YUMMMM
, she texted back.

A minute later, her phone beeped again:
Damn you.

She responded:
Don't ask if u don't want 2 know.

I thought I could handle it. I was wrong.

She chuckled, then forced herself to push the phone away. If she didn't stop texting with him, she'd never get any work done. Val picked through the folders, each one a new case for Valentine Investigations. Since word had gotten out that she'd “cracked the Carressa case,” all the clients that had jumped ship during her time on the lam came running back, plus a flood of new ones. Business had never been so busy, though she spent most of her days at the hospital with Max, keeping him company while he healed. If he got the all-clear from his doctors, he could finally check out that afternoon and go home. Maybe eat some solid foods.

The familiar beep sounded from her phone again, enticing her like the rattle of a box of Meow Mix to a hungry cat. Val tapped a folder she'd laid open and tried to read Stacey's hand-written notes above an e-mail chain, but she couldn't stop eyeing her phone. She bit her lip, then snatched up the cell and read the text:
I hate green jello. I will never eat it again. NEVER
.

Val wrote back:
And chocolate pudding.

No, I could never hate chocolate pudding.
A moment later, he texted:
Get me out of here.

A warm smile spread across her lips. She would read through a couple more cases, finish her coffee, then head back to the hospital.

Eh, what the hell—she'd already looked through five of them; she could look at the rest later. And the coffee wasn't great anyway. Val closed the folder, put it back on top of the stack, and fished money out of her pocket to pay the bill and go.

As she waited for the server to bring her change, Val's gaze fell on the television suspended above the take-out counter, its volume muted. Delilah Barrister stood in front of a podium before a slew of reporters, her face a mask of anguish despite perfectly coifed hair and makeup. Norman Junior stood close behind her—Derek, the text at the bottom of the screen read. He scrunched his face in an unconvincing version of “concerned” while he held his mother's shoulders and stared blankly off-camera. “Live—Delilah and Derek Barrister Speak Publicly for the First Time Since Norman Barrister's Death,” the headline read.

“Giovanni Dinapoli had been terrorizing us for months,” the closed captioning on the TV spelled out as Delilah talked. His mug shot floated into the corner of the screen. Strange, Delilah had never mentioned Dinapoli to Val. “He threatened my life and my son's life if Norman didn't pay him. Norman wanted to go to the police, but I convinced him not to, for the sake of our family.” She wept as Derek patted her shoulder.

Val narrowed her eyes at the television. Was that true? Why hadn't she told Val about the extortion? Sure, Delilah obsessed over appearances and was willing to lie through her teeth and leave Val dangling in the wind to maintain her perfect housewife image, but it still seemed like a fairly major detail to leave out if she truly feared for her life. Without taking her eyes off the TV, Val slurped down coffee. Her mouth had gone dry. Something didn't add up here.

Delilah composed herself and went on. “In the end, my husband did the right thing and confronted Mr. Dinapoli. He stood up for our family and it cost him his life. My husband is a hero.”

The camera panned out to show members of the Seattle Police Department nodding behind her. And holy shit, there was Sten. Val choked and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. He stood behind Delilah and to her right, his hand wrapped in a bandage, faded bruises still coloring his face around the giant mustache. He nodded enthusiastically along with everyone else. What the hell was he doing there? If Barrister had owned the police, and Sten worked for Barrister, did Sten now work for Barrister's widow? Val didn't totally understand how the transfer of illegal power worked, but she doubted allegiances would shift that easily.

Unless they hadn't actually shifted.

No.
No.
It wasn't possible. She wouldn't even entertain the idea she'd been played that badly. There was absolutely no way Sten had been working for Delilah all along, that she was the one who could see the future, that she'd told Barrister about Lester Carressa's impending death and maneuvered Sten against Val and Max.

No way Delilah had tricked Val into coming to the Pacific Science Center, knowing she'd run into Barrister, knowing she'd kill him.

A wave of nausea hit her. Ridiculous. Paranoia clouded her thoughts again. She needed to get a grip on reality, and get the hell out of there before she puked all over the table. Hands shaking, Val began throwing the folders back in her tote. She stopped when she noticed a stack of mail wedged in the middle, a manila envelope with no return address among the bills. These must be the e-mails Delilah had promised, the ones that incriminated her husband. Breathing a sigh of relief, Val pulled out the large piece of mail and ripped it open. Barrister's wife had come through after all.

Val dumped the envelope's contents on the table. They were indeed e-mails, thank God. She read the first one, only two lines, from someone named “Fortuna” to an unknown recipient:

What the hell was this? She looked at the date—five days before Robby died. R, M, and V…No. She pushed it aside and read the next one, from Fortuna again, written three days after Robby died:

Then the next one, written by Fortuna six days after Robby died:

“No,” Val whispered. Goddamn her.
Goddamn her!
Covered in a cold sweat, Val splayed the rest of the e-mails across the table in a manic attempt to read them all at once. Each was short, one to three lines long, primarily from Fortuna to an anonymous account. They all said some version of the same thing:
Get rid of R. Get M and V together. Keep M and V together.

Val struggled to keep down her breakfast. Robby
did
die because of her. Someone desperately wanted her and Max to be together, and they'd enlisted Delilah, aka Fortuna, to make it happen. But why did it matter? Why were they important?

She got her answer from one of the last e-mails, dated three days ago:

It wasn't Max and Val that were important—it was their offspring. These anonymous people wanted to steal their future child, the beautiful boy or girl she'd seen in her visions. God no.
Hell no.
She backhanded the e-mail away as if she could reach through the page and slap Delilah herself. That's when she saw the paper underneath, the last in the collection Delilah had sent, not an e-mail but a blank page with a single handwritten note:

She sat frozen, her mind reeling. The waitress wandered by and asked if she'd like a coffee refill for the road; it was all Val could do to shake her head in response. She could take all these e-mails to the FBI, or even the media, but how would she explain them? It made no sense without disclosing the whole future-seeing aspect of it, and nobody would believe that. Even Delilah's personal message to Val, as damning as it seemed, meant nothing without the context behind it, and that bitch knew it. Whether or not Barrister had truly been abusive, Delilah was no victim. She and Barrister were two fucked-up peas in a pod. Delilah had sent her this glut of information solely to torture her. And it had worked.

Her eyes wandered back to the TV, where the squeaky-clean public version of Delilah Barrister, mourning yet stoic widow, still addressed an audience of reporters at the press conference.

“I've talked about this at great length with my family, and we think the best way to honor Norman's memory is to continue his fight for this city and state that he loved. Therefore, I will be taking my husband's place in the run for mayor.”

The closed captioning noted excited gasps from the audience.

Delilah looked at the camera. “I ask that everyone that would have voted for my husband, and those that are still undecided, cast your vote for the values and integrity my husband gave his life for, and for a better future for Seattle and Washington State.”

Val remembered her first vision with Max:

President Barrister—
Delilah
Barrister. For Delilah's help, these anonymous and powerful people had promised her a ticket to the White House. And Val had danced like a fucking puppet to her lies.

Still feeling like she might vomit at any moment, Val gathered the papers back together, dumped them in her bag, and crawled out of the booth. The TV finally cut away from Delilah, onto a different subject: “Secret Sex Tape of Mayor Brest and Unidentified Blond Woman Goes Viral on Internet—Poll Numbers Plunge.”

Her cell phone rang on her way out the door. She glanced at it and saw Max's number on the caller ID. Their child couldn't be stolen if they never had one. Tears filled her eyes as she watched it ring, and ring, until it went to voice mail, unanswered.

K
itty drummed her nails on the chair's steel arm as she sat across from Cassandra in the Alpha Seer's Hong Kong office. Per usual, Cassandra was dressed in her white blouse–pencil skirt combo, black hair cascading down her back, while Kitty wore a black pantsuit, her blond hair in a tight bun. She watched as Cassandra drew what looked like plans for a Rube Goldberg machine on a piece of paper, head down in quiet concentration. It was hard to break the habit of waiting for a cue to speak, though Kitty knew there wouldn't be one.

“Delilah is up by six points,” Kitty said. “She's almost certain to beat Mayor Brest. The good people of Seattle don't want a mayor who gets his rocks off by wearing diapers and pretending to be a baby. Unfortunately, Delilah also tipped off Valentine to her future Alpha child. She's spooked, and has stopped seeing Max romantically.”

No reaction from Cassandra. Made sense, given that the Seer already knew exactly what Kitty would say. Still, Kitty had to say it; otherwise, there would be nothing for Cassandra to look into the future to see—the paradox of remembering the future.

“Seems to me Delilah hasn't lived up to her end of the bargain, if she told Northwalk she'd get Max and Valentine together and then split them up again—”

“Do not kill Delilah,” Cassandra said in her breathy British accent, not looking up from her drawing. “She will be dealt with. In time.”

Kitty tensed against her will. Often it seemed as if Cassandra could read her mind, though she knew the Seer couldn't. She and Sten would be dead by now if Cassandra or any other member of Northwalk knew their thoughts.
We should just kill them
, Sten had said. She would if she could. How do you kill someone with perfect recall of the future? The fact that Northwalk still employed them meant they'd never succeed, or Cassandra hadn't seen fit to warn anyone for reasons only she knew. Though if Kitty had learned anything from a lifetime of manipulating the future at Northwalk's bidding, it was that anything was possible. Patience was key.

“You must ask,” Cassandra said.

Kitty composed herself, relaxed. “How do you want me to get Max and Valentine together again?”

Cassandra finally looked up from her drawing, put her pen down, threaded her slender fingers together. “Let the gale raze their affected hearts. Then offer the life boat.”

Wait
, was what Cassandra meant. That, Kitty could do. She'd been waiting all her life, waiting for the right moment to seize what was hers. It
would
happen, Cassandra's failure to see it be damned.

“There is more,” Cassandra said. She never asked questions that weren't rhetorical; she only made statements.

“The doctors tell me they were able to successfully reverse Max's vasectomy during the surgery on his bullet wound. Sten's a good shot.”

Cassandra looked at her drawing, tracing the intricate lines with her fingers. Kitty knew it was part of a machine, something Cassandra was bringing into being before its time.

“So many moving stars,” Cassandra said. “They bleed into each other.” Her ethereal eyes filled with tears that leaked onto the paper. “There shall never be another one.”

Kitty had no idea what Cassandra was talking about. The Seer knew things no one else could understand, things no one
should
understand. Being able to see everything until the end of the universe wasn't good for one's sanity. She didn't have much time left before she totally lost it. Northwalk was champing at the bit for Max and Val's Alpha child.

Cassandra looked at Kitty. “Go.”

Kitty stood and walked toward the exit.

“End it, Omega,” Kitty heard Cassandra say behind her.
Omega
—Cassandra's designation for Valentine Shepherd. “Save us all.”