Vengeance (6 page)

V
al planted her feet on the wet pavement, gun trained at the alleyway's bend, ready to shoot the first thing that entered her line of sight. The rain picked up, an icy October shower that matted her hair to her face and would have chilled her to the bone if not for the wild adrenaline racing through her veins. For what seemed like an eternity she listened to the approaching footsteps and stood her ground, waiting to die.

Then she heard it—a chain rattling. Val ripped her gaze away from where her killers were due to arrive any second to see a set of bolt cutters slip through the fence and snap the padlock off. The chain slinked to the ground, and someone pulled the gate open.

One of her pursuers had somehow doubled back, and now they surrounded her.

Val spun around to face her flanker, finger on the trigger to let loose a hail of bullets into Sten or his friend's smug face. She gasped and just barely stopped herself from firing as she registered Max Carressa standing in front of her, holding the bolt cutters and recoiling from her gun. She hardly recognized him in jeans and a black motorcycle jacket, a baseball cap deflecting the rain out of his startled face, though his gorgeous eyes were a dead giveaway.

“What the hell?” she said.

Max grabbed her arm. “Come on!” He glanced behind her, where Chet's murderers thundered up, just around the corner. “Do you wanna die here or not?”

No, she did not especially want to die there. With no time to consider any other option, she followed Max to his car, idling at the curb, and jumped into the passenger's seat. He flew into the driver's side and punched the gas. The car tore away as Val caught a glimpse of Sten and another man round the alleyway's corner and begin running toward her in a futile attempt to catch up or read the car's license plate number as it sped out of sight.

Val watched the world fly by through the back window as the car cut left and right down side streets, then merged onto the highway, until she was sure they'd lost her pursuers. She turned back and put her head between her legs for a minute, trying to catch her breath, then stole a glance around Max's car. It looked average, something a middle-class professional might drive, not a flashy status symbol of a rich playboy. He was trying to blend in, avoid notice from the cops. He'd planned this.

“How did you find me?” Val asked, still short of breath.

“The same way you found Chet.”

For a moment Val didn't understand what he meant, because what she thought he meant couldn't be true. “No, I mean how did you know where I'd be at that moment?”

“
I mean
, I saw it in a vision of the future.” He glanced at her. “Like you, right?”

Val stared at him, slack-jawed, and her heart began racing again. Was he telling the truth? How could he know otherwise? Could there be others like her, and how had she never encountered any of them until now? What did any of this craziness have to do with Robby's murder or Norman Barrister or Lester Carressa?

“You look like you're going to be sick,” Max said. “Please don't throw up in this car. I'm borrowing it from a friend.”

“I'll be fine,” she snapped. “Just pull over somewhere. I need a drink.”

He exited the highway and drove to a bar with peeling paint and a broken sign, careful to park out of view of the street in case someone was looking for their car. Blue-collar locals filled half the dimly lit tavern as country music crooned from an ancient jukebox in the corner. Max and Val sat at a booth in the corner, away from curious ears. An older waitress with too much eyeliner asked them what they wanted to drink.

“Bud Light,” Max said, keeping his head down so the waitress wouldn't recognize him from news coverage of his father's death. Even a day's worth of stubble and a ball cap covering half his face couldn't hide the fact that he was an unusually handsome man with a mug that was hard to forget.

Val pushed her wet hair behind her ears and wiped away a smear of mud from her cheekbone. “Shot of tequila, please,” she said. “Actually, make that two shots.”

The waitress nodded and disappeared, leaving Max and Val alone. They sat in silence for a while, studying each other. He looked calm, normal—a ridiculously attractive version of normal anyway. But she looked normal, too, and God what a lie that was. She'd often wondered if people could tell she was off, sensed the oddness in her somehow. Now that she'd met another like her—assuming he spoke the truth—she knew her secret was well hidden. She would never have guessed he was a freak, too.

And what a beautiful freak he was. His light brown eyes with starbursts of green around the pupils raked over her features and made her blush again. Why did he have to stare at her like that? He didn't make her uncomfortable as much as painfully aware of exactly how many inches apart their bodies were. Her heart still ached for Robby, but she wasn't blind.

He slipped off his coat, uncovering a Soundgarden T-shirt over exquisitely sculpted biceps, and handed it to her. Val looked at the coat for a moment, not sure what to do with it, until she realized that not only was the hand holding the coat shaking, but her entire body shook from the cold that saturated her wet clothes and chilled her to the core. She took off her own jacket and put on his, still infused with his body heat and masculine scent. His warmth soaked into her like a hot bath, and her tremors subsided.

“Thank you,” she said, “for the coat, and for saving my life.”

He nodded in response as the waitress returned with their drinks, eyed the unusual fractal tattoos on Max's forearms, then left again. Val threw back the first tequila shot and let it burn a path down her throat. She took a deep breath as her resolve fortified again and her thoughts untangled themselves.

“What the fuck is going on?” she said.

Max took a swig of his beer and shrugged. “Hell if I know.”

“You can…You can really…”

“See the future when I come? Yes.”

“Since when?”

“All my life. Since my first wet dream. As far back as I can remember. You?”

She raised her eyebrows at him. “Why would you ask me that? Aren't you the expert?”

He laughed. “Hardly. You're only the second person I've ever met who can do it.”

“There are
others
? Who? Where?”

“I only met the one guy. He was looking for something, like you. He implied there were others, but he came and went quickly—in more ways than one. I didn't get many answers out of him.”

“If you knew there were others, why didn't you look for me—I mean, people
like
me? Like us?”

His eyes fell and he fidgeted with his beer bottle. “It's complicated.”

She balled her hands into fists as a spike of anger surged through her. “I've felt alone my
entire life
. Even when I was with other people, I still felt alone. And you were just a few miles away the whole time? Did you even try to look?”

His face darkened, and when his eyes met hers again, she could practically count the bricks in the emotional wall he'd erected. “It's
complicated
.”

Fine, he didn't want to talk about it. She knew how difficult it could be to discuss your deeply personal and weird ability with other people who'd probably dismiss you as a delusional sex addict. Whatever—his previous disinterest in finding others like himself wasn't important now.

“How did you know about me?” she asked.

“A hunch. I confirmed it right after you visited me at the Red Raven.”

She smirked. “Did your little pussy cat help you with that?”

“Kitty's gotta work her way through nursing school somehow,” he said with lazy sarcasm.

Val rolled her eyes, then asked, “What do you mean ‘confirmed it'?”

“I saw a string of prime numbers. That's the same thing I saw with Ethan—the other guy with our condition.”

“
Condition?”

He sighed and took a long drink of his beer. “At first I saw images, and I couldn't figure out what they meant until I started interpreting them as numbers, because I'm decent at math. Now all I see is numbers. I've gotten pretty good at deciphering what they mean. But I still think of it as more of a sexual dysfunction than a gift.”

“But it's how you got rich, right?”

Max's face hardened and his eyes turned cold. “Yeah, it is.”

“At least you don't see dead people all the fucking time.” The image of Chet in his death throes popped into her head—yet another person she'd failed to protect—and her hands began to shake again. She downed her second tequila shot, then slammed the glass on the table. “What's your connection to Norman Barrister?”

“The guy running for mayor?”

Val nodded.

“I don't have one.”

“Bullshit.” Gorgeous knight in shining armor or not, she was going to get some damn answers out of him. “Before Chet was gunned down in his own apartment by a couple of Seattle's finest, he told me that he heard Barrister talking about your dad's death two weeks before it happened. How would Barrister know that?”

Max furrowed his brows in deep thought. “I don't know. Maybe Chet was lying or misheard.”

“Well, someone plugged him to shut him up, so I'm guessing there's at least a kernel of truth in what he told me.” Val let a silence fall between them for a few seconds so Max could think about what she'd said. “Did you murder your father?”

He flinched, and his eyes turned cold again. “No.”

“Then either someone else murdered him and is actively framing you—or at least letting you take the fall—or your dad really did accidentally trip and fall off his balcony, and someone like us predicted it. Which do you think is more likely?”

Fidgeting with the label on his beer bottle, after a pause, he said, “The latter.”

“Why?”

“Because what are the odds that you and I are randomly involved, two people who just happen to be able to see the future?”

“True,” Val said. She sighed, then stood.

“Where're you going?” Max asked.

“I'm going to call a friend to come pick me up and take me back to my car, and then I'm going home.”

Max got up and blocked her exit. “You can't go home. The cops that chased you from Chet's place have probably run your license plate by now and know who you are and where you live.”

Val frowned. He was right. In fact, they didn't need to run her plates. Sten knew who she was. It would take him a matter of minutes to track down her address. She imagined him parked across the street from her house right at that moment, just waiting for her to come home so he could choke her to death in her sleep, right after he raped her for shits and grins.

“Stay with me,” Max said. “Whoever's after you doesn't know that we're together yet. We probably have a few days before they figure it out. Until then, we can have visions with each other, and compare what we see until we piece it together. That's why Ethan sought me out—two people with the condition have much stronger visions together than paired with normal people.”

She cocked an eyebrow at what that information implied. “Was it true?” she asked. With an assistant like Kitty, there was no way he wasn't at least mostly heterosexual.

“Yes.” He shrugged, reacting to the incredulous look in her face. “He needed help, so I helped him. If we ever meet again, he'll owe me a big favor. It's always good to have a healthy roster of people in your debt.”

It was tempting to take him up on his offer, to see what sex was like with another of her…her
kind
, she guessed the correct term was. She'd slept with Dirty John just a few days ago, and then Stacey a few
hours
ago, but both encounters had been born of desperation. Something about Max gave her pause.

Despite how he'd helped her, she still didn't know much about him—or if she could trust him. She knew for sure, though, that he was dangerous. She still felt the fire in him that'd been there the first time they met, intense and tempting. He might kill her—in more ways than one. Maybe kill her softly with those goddamn eyes. Make her feel things she wasn't ready for. Not to mention how cavalierly he'd proposed the idea, like being ungodly handsome and rich meant she'd jump into his bed on command. Fuck that. She was nobody's submissive.

Val folded her arms. “I'll pass on being your crystal ball whore, thanks. I'll stay in a hotel.”

“With what money? If you use your credit cards, they'll find you.”

“I'll stay with a friend.”

“Then you'll be putting that person in danger.”

Val rubbed the bridge of her nose and squeezed her eyes shut, too tired to counter his argument.

“If you don't want to have sex, then we won't. It'll still be easier to work together if we're in the same location.”

“Jesus Christ, we're two people who can see the goddamn future and somehow we don't know jack shit.” Val shook her head and let out a long exhale. “We're doomed. Fine, I might as well stay at your place. Let's just get out of here.”

T
he last time Val had been at the Carressa mansion, she hadn't made it past the gate. This time, Max punched a code into the keypad underneath the intercom and the wrought iron fence swung open with ease, welcoming its owner. The mansion itself was about a quarter mile from the gate, after a winding single-lane road that cut through a tiny patch of northwest wilderness with sky-high evergreens and ferns carpeting lush forest ground. Val gawked like the middle-class bumpkin she was when Max pulled up to a giant asymmetrical house made of vaulted glass walls framed by smooth pinewood beams, an integration of nature and the cosmopolitan that only a seasoned architect paid millions of dollars could have achieved.

Max unlocked the door and held it open for her, then punched another security code into the keypad adjacent to the entrance. It beeped, and the house lit up like the stage lights on an orchestra about to perform. The first floor was a sprawling open space that reminded Val of a
Northwest Living
magazine cover, with polished wood décor balanced against glass and steel fixtures. Everything was in its place, immaculately clean. She followed him up a spiral staircase to a guest bedroom on the second floor, done up like a posh hotel room at the Seattle Westin with dark gray silk bedding, solid oak furniture, and framed pictures of pressed Northwest flowers. Nothing personal distracted from the room's elegance.

“Where's your room?” Val asked.

“I stay in the guest house,” he said. “It's about a hundred feet away, on the west side of the property. There's a path that connects the two.”

“You don't need to vacate your own home for me. I can stay in the guest house.”

“Actually, the guest house
is
my home. I hate this place. It was my father's, not mine. I'm planning on selling it and moving to the city after the investigation into his death is over. I should have moved away a long time ago, but…” He trailed off, lost in a thought that darkened his eyes, before pulling himself back to the present. “Anyway, I've dismissed the help, so it's just you and me for now. Help yourself to whatever you want. I'll have Kitty bring by a change of clothes for you. Let me know if you need anything else.”

Before she could thank him for his hospitality, Max said, “Good night,” turned, and left, as if he couldn't get out of there fast enough.

Val would've loved to take a look around, but exhaustion from her long day dragged her brain into a stupor she was helpless to resist. She stripped off her moist clothes, slipped her gun underneath her pillow, and passed out on the guest bed.

Val woke with a start, not sure where she was for a moment until the previous day's events came flooding back in heart-pounding detail. She eased her hand off her gun, then checked her cell phone; four missed calls from Stacey. Val queued up Stacey's number, but stopped herself from dialing when she considered the massive amount of explanation she'd have to go through, as well as the inevitable talk about where their relationship stood. She texted Stacey instead:
I'm fine. 2 much 2 explain now. talk to u soon
, then turned off her phone.

She took a hot shower, washing away the grime from her mad dash down Chet's alley. Her clothes still felt damp, and she recoiled from the musty smell they'd acquired after sitting in a wet pile all night. Wrapped in a towel, she padded to an adjacent room, also impeccably decorated with no personal touches, and rooted through a dresser drawer until she found a men's dress shirt and boxer shorts for temporary coverage. She descended the stairs to the first floor, now awash in the early morning sun that filtered in through glass walls overlooking the crystal waters of Lake Washington. Her stomach growled, and she opened the stainless steel fridge to find it bare save for bottles of ketchup and mustard and other assorted condiments that would keep well into the next decade. She shut it and grumbled, shivering and hungry for a moment, then noticed the outline of the guest house through the window, behind a crop of trees. Val took a deep breath, steeling herself for the biting chill of the morning air, then opened the side door and ran across the cobblestone path to Max's house.

Strains of rock music reached her about halfway down the path, and she was grateful she wouldn't have to wake him up as she pounded on his cherrywood door. A few seconds later the door opened, and Max's eyes widened when he saw her outfit. She couldn't help gawking at him, too, shirtless in a pair of drawstring shorts and light boxing gloves, rippled muscles glistening with sweat. Her hands itched with the urge to touch him, and by the look on his face, he was thinking the same thing about her. Then she remembered how the last two times she jumped into bed with someone on a whim had ended in disaster, and she kicked the attraction away as she shoved past him.

“I need to talk to Barrister today,” she said, rubbing the cold out of her arms. Stepping inside the doorway, she froze for a moment as Max's essence overwhelmed her. The scent of his workout infused the studio-style house, musk and male with overtones of sweat. She took in the worn punching bag still swinging from a chain in the corner, as well as his bed shoved against the wall, a tiny kitchen, and a bathtub shower all in the same space. It had the same aesthetic feel and open floor plan as the main house, except someone obviously lived here. Clothes lay piled in a corner, one of his expensive suits crumpled on top. Another suit was sheathed in plastic and draped across a love seat. A couple dirty dishes sat in the sink. Shelving with a hundred or more books took up the spot where a television would have been, next to more books stacked on the ground and a whiteboard with equations scrawled across its face.

Val felt as if she'd walked into a physical version of his mind, intimate and fascinating. Though she felt a little guilty for invading his personal space, she immediately liked it, and knew that was bad if she hoped to keep her distance.

“Funny,” he said as he closed the door behind her, “you don't strike me as the suicidal type, but I've been wrong about people before.” He pushed a button on his phone mounted atop a couple small speakers and the music turned off.

In his kitchen, she slathered peanut butter on a slice of bread she found paired together on his countertop. “We know he's somehow connected to Robby's and your father's deaths.” She ate between sentences. “He's our only viable lead right now. If we move fast, he won't be expecting us. We can catch him off guard, rattle his cage.”

“
If
he's involved—which we don't know for sure yet—then he's capable of murder, or at least fine with having other people do it for him. We don't know what he'll do if you confront him. It's not a good idea.”

“Fine. You stay here. I'll go and let you know what happens.”

He sighed and ripped the Velcro straps off his gloves, pulled them off. “When?”

“Now.”

“May I suggest you put some real clothes on first?” He cocked his head to a stack of neatly folded women's garments on his bed.

Val finished her peanut butter bread, walked to the edge of the bed, and picked through the clothes. She was surprised to see them all in her correct size, including a pair of soft leather boots. “I'm impressed your girlfriend was able to guess my size after seeing me for only a few minutes.”

“Who, Kitty?” He slipped off his shorts, and then his underwear, so he stood completely naked as he pulled his shower curtain back and turned on the water.

Val gasped and tried to avert her eyes away from his toned muscles and full endowment; she failed. A collection of deltoids, quadriceps, biceps, and abs filled her vision, all rippling beneath a sheen of sweat. A few long scars on his back and legs marred his smooth skin, and she wondered where he got them, what they felt like. For a fleeting moment she imagined licking all that salty water off him.

“Jesus, Max,” she said after she came back to her senses. “Some people consider spontaneous nudity to be rude.”

He shrugged. “I'm not prepared for company in the guest house. Anyway, I don't have anything you haven't seen before.”

Of course not, but he still made her mouth water. Whether he was naturally fit or worked hard to look that way, his body matched his face for beauty in a way that confirmed how unfair the universe truly was. To give one man the build of a quarterback without the bulkiness, the face of a cologne model, the intelligence of a college professor,
and
millions of dollars seemed like a cosmic joke at everyone else's expense.

“And Kitty's not my girlfriend,” he said as he stepped under the steaming showerhead, then whisked the curtain shut so only his head was visible. “I don't have a girlfriend. It's not practical with our condition. Women don't like it when you're always passing out during sex.”

“I've had some decent relationships. You just have to work around it.”

“That's easy for you to say. You can just lay back and enjoy the ride. I'm expected to
perform
.”

Val hadn't thought about what her ability might be like for a man. He made a compelling case for how much worse it could be, especially for someone like Max whose looks, intelligence, and money allowed him access to almost any woman he wanted—women with high expectations. His perceived deficiency between the sheets could be crippling.

While he finished his shower, she picked out a leggings-skirt combo and a long-sleeved cashmere top; not her usual style, but she needed all the help she could get in the fashion arena. She looked around for somewhere to change and found none. There really was no opportunity for privacy in Max's home. Even the recessed bathroom was missing a door. It must've been quite a while since he'd had a visitor's comfort to consider.

She doffed her borrowed shirt and boxer shorts and changed, telling herself that
she
didn't have anything
he
hadn't seen, either, while pretending to ignore his half-second glances in her direction. So he liked the way she looked, too, made him squirm a little like he'd done to her. Val bit her lip to hide a smile. Turnabout was fair play, after all.

“Why do you own a sex club?” she asked as she pulled the boots on. “Are you just into freaky stuff?”

“There's some of that, I guess,” Max said with a laugh. “I—” He stopped lathering his hair and looked away for a moment, as if considering how honest he should be. “I originally intended to use it to conduct randomized experiments on people.”

Val cringed. “That's sick.”

“I eventually came to that conclusion, yes. But by then I'd already bought it and done all the refurbishing, so it became an escape instead, and the observation room my office.”

“
Observation room?”

“Poor choice of words—”

“Were you
watching me
?”

“No,” he said with a sliver of anxiousness, enough to convince her he was lying.

Val felt her cheeks heat up. Oh God, he'd seen her with Dirty John. She'd hoped to go through life pretending the unfortunate incident never happened, but now she had a damn witness. Of course Max had probably seen freakier people doing freakier things a million times before, but he'd still violated her privacy—like she'd violated his when she barged into his house. Maybe they were even—almost. She stood and marched to the shower.

“The existence of the observation room is in the contract people sign,” he said. “Everyone consents. You would've known about it if you'd come in through normal channels—”

She whisked back the curtain with one strong yank. He gaped at the sudden intrusion just as she slapped him across the face. “Pervert,” she said, and snapped the curtain shut again.

“Damn, you hit hard,” he said, rubbing his cheek and eyeing her over the shower rod. “If I
had
seen you in one of the Red Raven's rooms, it wouldn't have been on purpose. Sometimes I'll do a general look around the club from the observation area to make sure everyone's safe and—”

“Yeah, whatever. Make it up to me by getting your ass out of the shower sometime today. And buy me a gyro for lunch.”

She thought she heard him chuckle softly before the shower turned off. Val picked through his books and pretended not to notice his erection as he toweled down and got dressed.

“All right,” he said after he'd changed into jeans and a black V-neck sweater that killed all the anger she had left. Did he
always
have to look so good? “I'm ready to go do something incredibly ill advised. You?”

“Just a sec.” Val ran back into the main house and returned a minute later with her coat and handgun. She checked the magazine, slapped it into the hand grip and racked the slide back, then slid the gun into the shoulder holster under her jacket. “Okay. Let's go talk to Norman Barrister.”