Josh double-checked the chains holding Nolan’s arms and legs in place, humming a random tune under his breath. He kept his gun pointed at Nolan’s head, but the other man wasn’t going to give him any trouble. That might have had something to do with the bloody gash on his temple, or maybe the overpowering stench of gas fumes that seemed to be slowly sucking the oxygen out of the room. The chains might have been overkill, but Josh wasn’t going to take any additional risks.
“Mmmm fmmm hmfmfh fffmmm!”
Josh looked over his shoulder to JD. “Shh. It’s quiet time now, okay? You had plenty of time to talk on our way up.”
She struggled against her ropes, her eyes wide and rolling. She worked her jaw around the makeshift gag—Nolan’s neck tie—and he could tell she would try to spit it out again. He didn’t really mind if she shouted. The only person who would hear her was the one person he needed to make this party complete. But he was getting tired of listening to her.
“Mmm fffmfff mmhhmm!”
“Yes, I know. Best friends,” Josh said, with more than a touch of sadness. “And I don’t want to do this, but you already admitted you had further plans for Sara. What am I supposed to do? Pretend I never heard that? Come on, JD, you know me better than that. I mean, really.”
“You’re insane.”
He turned back to Nolan. “Don’t make me gag you, too. I’ve got a rag with your name on it, but it’s been soaked in gasoline, and I don’t think you’ll enjoy it.”
“What do you want?”
“Call your shifter down here.”
“Marco’s not here.”
“Then shut the fuck up,” Josh said, as he walked over to the door. He knew it needed to be in this room, the room where they found Sara, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t check out the rest of the facilities. “I’m going to step out of here for a moment. Don’t worry, I’ll lock the door, so you’ll be safe.”
He took a deep breath once he emerged into the hall, his lungs burning from the prolonged exposure to the heavy fumes. He knew there was a ventilation system in the basement, and they probably weren’t going to suffocate. Which was good. If they suffocated now, they’d miss all the fun. Through the thick door, he could hear Nolan’s shouts. Did they listen to Sara shout like that from the hallway?
He’d have to remember to ask.
Josh kept his gun cocked and ready in case Marco really was around, grasping the two gas cans with his other hand. He didn’t want to shoot Marco, but he knew the shifter was the most dangerous of his captives, and it wouldn’t do to allow somebody like that the chance of escape.
The first room Josh came to was the one with the cage. He nearly dropped to his knees when he saw it, the air rushing out of his lungs. It wasn’t even a place he’d keep an animal. It was large, but it wasn’t designed with comfort in mind. The floor was covered in shredded newspaper, of all things, and there were empty dog dishes. Had they really forced her to eat out of those bowls? Of course, there was no toilet, no sink, no pillow, and no sign of mercy or consideration. Even if they considered her nothing more than an animal, wouldn’t it make sense to treat her well to get the best results?
They were fucking morons. Josh almost wished he could shoot them, resurrect them, and then carry out his plot of arson. Though he hadn’t initially planned to, he dumped the full can of gas into the cage, spreading the fluid evenly across the newspaper.
The next room was clearly Nolan’s records room. Even though the man’s brain was apparently barely functional, he kept copious notes. There were several free-standing filing cabinets, and each one was stuffed with notes, reports, files, photos, graphs, and receipts. They told the story Sara would never be able to share. They spoke of the horrors visited on her, and the photos were graphic, explicit, undeniable.
Two years of research surrounded him, and despite the disgusting and highly unethical ways of collecting the information, Josh knew there would be nuggets of worthwhile information. How could there not be? He didn’t pause to study any of it. Every scrap of paper went into a massive pile in the middle of the floor, and that was doused with the third and final can. He saved just enough at the bottom to pour a trail of liquid behind him down the hall. Some of it splashed on the cuffs of his pants and his shoes, but he didn’t mind. The bottoms of his feet were already coated.
By the time he returned to the first room, JD had managed to spit her gag out. She opened her mouth, but he leveled the gun at her head. “Think real carefully about what you want to say, JD.”
“Look,” Nolan said weakly, “can we talk about this?”
“There’s nothing to talk about. Really. There’s nothing you can say that’ll make this better for you.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What do you think? I’m wiping this, all of this, off the face of the Earth. Sara will never come back to this place, she’s never going to see your face again, and nobody is ever going to see your research.” Josh perched on the edge of the table, his leg dangling over the side. “I think that’s what really is going to hurt. Dying for your work? It’s a bit melodramatic, but you’ll be famous. They’ll talk about you for years. Dying for the work nobody is ever going to see? That’ll probably be the last thing you think about while the flesh is burning off your bones.”
“Josh, what the hell is wrong with you?”
“Shut up, JD.”
“Do you think you’ll get away with this?” she demanded.
Josh studied his gun idly. “Nope, and I don’t plan to. I told you, JD, we’re atoning. Do try to keep up.”
“What the fuck is going on here?”
Josh looked up at the new arrival and smiled. “You must be Marco. Good to meet you. Now the party can really start.”
Marco wasn’t what he expected. For as much trauma as Sara had undergone at the hands of this man, the specter of the shifter responsible had built to larger-than-life proportions. He hadn’t anticipated he’d be facing off with someone who would’ve looked perfectly at home standing behind the counter at the ice cream parlor back in Delta.
Watery blue eyes darted from the gun in Josh’s hand, to Nolan tied up in the chair, to the empty gas can at Josh’s feet. By the time they returned to meet Josh’s, a fresh wariness was in his thin frame.
“You’re the other one,” Marco said carefully.
“I guess I am. Why don’t you come in here and have a seat? Or I could shoot you now, but one spark from this gun is all it would take, and I don’t think Nolan has made himself right with God yet.” Josh looked over his shoulder. “You don’t want to die yet, do you?”
“No.”
Josh turned back to Marco. “I have to admit, I’m curious about something. I get what JD and Nolan think they’re doing here. But why did you do it?”
Marco didn’t move. “All I did was my job.”
“Just following orders, eh? Does that defense ever work? Okay, this question is for anybody. If you had a shifter who is clearly as dense as our friend Marco here, why not just tell him it was his job to be studied for several years and give him a token paycheck?”
“Because you know Sara’s special,” JD offered. “You said it from the beginning, Josh. Remember how excited you were when she started talking to you? I do. You wouldn’t shut up about her, about what a strong shifter she was, how smart, how she’d blended for so long. She was the single best source for answers, and you know it.”
A fist squeezed Josh’s heart. “Yeah, I guess I do know it,” he said softly. “Any last requests? No? Good.” He pointed the gun at Marco’s head, his finger slick over the trigger.
It happened in the space of a single blink.
One moment, he was ready to kill the monster who’d spent the past two years of his life torturing Sara because it was his fucking job.
The next, he was staring into familiar brown eyes, pleading with him for mercy.
“Don’t, Josh, please,” Sara begged.
“Change back,” Josh demanded, his hand shaking. He knew it wasn’t Sara, of course. He had lived with shifters long enough to be accustomed to this sort of swift morphing, but didn’t a part of him always wonder if they really became cats, birds, and even other people? “Goddammit, change back.”
She ignored his commands, lifting her hands, palm out, as if to calm him down. “You don’t want to do this,” she said. “I don’t want you to do this. Please, Josh, just…give me the gun.”
Josh backed up, trying to keep as much distance between him and Sara—Marco—that he could.
“Make him change back,” he said, glancing down to Nolan. Nolan only shook his head. Josh wanted to smash his skull. “I have to do this. Do you think I won’t shoot you? I’m about to torch one of my closest friends, I can shoot you.”
“Can you?” The shifter—not Sara, not Sara—took a single step closer. “You would’ve done it already. And you don’t want to, not really. You don’t want me to hurt anymore.”
“That’s why I’m here.” Josh felt the burn behind his eyes and in his sinuses. He told himself it was from the gas. His gaze slid to JD, who was watching the back and forth with wide eyes. When he looked back to the door, there were two Saras.
It was easy to spot the difference. Even without the haircut or the new thinness to her features, the Sara who looked at him now glowed with the radiance that had struck Josh the very first time he’d laid eyes on her. In a million years, Marco could never replicate that.
“I told you we would drag your ass back,” she said.
For the first time since Josh left them in Vegas, something like real panic consumed him. “What the fuck are you doing here? Get out of here. It’s not safe.”
“Not without you.” Cam materialized at Sara’s shoulder. “You should’ve told us, Josh. We would have dealt with this together.”
“No, we are not dealing with this. You were supposed to be gone.” He sent a frantic glance to Marco, his borrowed face twisted in a sickly amused grin. “Somewhere safe. Why didn’t you listen to me?”
“Because we love you,” Sara said. “And safe doesn’t matter if you’re not there with us.”
“That’s all that matters,” Josh shouted. “Goddammit, that’s all that matters. That’s all that ever mattered.”
Marco spun on his heel, as though he was going to take advantage of Josh’s distraction, but Cam caught his shoulders and threw him back to the ground. As Marco hit the cement, he snarled, his face shifting from Sara’s to Cam’s.
Sara froze. She had been poised for a fight upon entering, but now, with her tormentor sprawled at her feet, she looked like a bird preparing to take flight. Her gaze was fixed on Marco, on the clean angles of Cam’s face that he’d shifted to, and it felt like time stood still as she stared at him.
“Sara…” Cam said behind her.
“Sara…” Marco mirrored Cam’s tone, though there was a mocking edge to it that Josh didn’t miss. “You know safe doesn’t matter because you know you’ll never win. You never could.”
If it weren’t for the fact that it would kill Sara and Cam, too, Josh would have emptied his clip into Marco right then. But he was forced to stand and impotently watch as Sara finally began to move.
“You’re right,” she said, still staring at Marco. “But times change.”
Her foot lashed out, slamming into Marco’s jaw. She connected with such force that his head snapped back and hit the concrete floor with a wet thud. The pool of blood began spreading almost immediately.
Nobody moved or made a sound as the blood flowed across the floor. Josh thought he might puke. Cam moved first, wrapping his arms around Sara and pulling her away from the body. The body. There was a body now. A murder, justified as it was. Sara couldn’t be linked to this. Josh hurried across the room, nearly slipping on the wet floor, and gave Cam a hard shove.
“Get out. Please. Just go.”
An iron grip shot up and caught his wrist. “We’re all going.”
Josh shook his head. “No, I can’t. Look around you. Do you think I can walk away from this? It’s too late.”
“Why? Because you’ve spread some gas around? Nothing’s happened here that we can’t fix.”
“Nolan and JD might disagree,” Josh countered, wondering if he was going to puke. He felt very tired. “This is kidnapping and attempted murder. They put you in jail for that.”
“We ran that risk the first time we came here, when we killed those guards to get Sara out.” Cam’s gaze was unwavering. “And I don’t think you’d change that decision, would you?”
Josh looked at them helplessly. “You’re going to be in danger for the rest of your lives. Don’t you want things to be like they were…before?”
“Before you?” Sara shook her head. Pulling away from Cam, she stepped forward and slid her arms around Josh’s waist, nuzzling her cheek against his. “How can you possibly think our lives would be better without you in them?” she said. “We need you, Josh. Just like you need us.”
“Oh, brother,” he heard JD mutter behind them.
Josh silently passed the gun to Cam, kissed the top of Sara’s head, and turned back to JD. Nolan was still staring at Marco’s prone form, but JD looked mostly bored. Josh bent and picked up the tie, then pulled his lighter out of his pocket and dropped to his haunches beside her.
“This place is still going to burn. I’m assuming you’d rather not be here when it happens.”
Her eyes narrowed in shrewd calculation. “What are you suggesting?”
“Let it go, JD. Find something else to do with your time. Because if anything ever happens to Sara again, I’m coming after you. I will hold you personally responsible. I know it sounds like I’m asking you to destroy your career, but I’m not. You keep your mouth shut and redirect your efforts, and I won’t leave you down here.”
Her gaze flickered to Nolan. “And what about him?”
“Leave him to me,” Cam said from the doorway.
“Do we have a deal?” Josh asked. He didn’t want to help Nolan, and he didn’t think he could, but he didn’t want to walk away and leave JD behind. He didn’t know if he could live with himself.
It took a few more glances around the room—at Marco’s dead body, at the empty gas can—before she finally nodded. She didn’t say a word until he’d untied her and she was rising to her feet.
“You’re not the man I thought you were, Josh,” she said.
“That just means you never knew him at all,” Sara interjected. When he glanced up, Sara was holding her hand out to him. “Come on. The sooner we’re out of here, the happier we’re all going to be.”
Josh took Sara’s hand and straightened. Her fingers felt right wrapped around his, and the full weight of what he intended to do hit him. He swayed on his feet, but her grip only tightened, like she didn’t intend to let him go again. She gently tugged him toward the door, and they gave wide berth to Marco’s body.
JD darted out of the room, hurrying around them and up the stairs. He didn’t blame her for wanting to make a quick getaway, but her keys were still in his pocket.
“I’m sorry,” Josh said, to nobody in particular.
“Don’t.” Sara squeezed his hand and pressed closer to his side. “You wouldn’t let me apologize for…for everything after you guys got me out. I’m not going to let you do it now.”
Josh looked over to Cam, trying to find some sort of clue on his impassive face, but there was nothing. Did they think he was crazy? They’d probably be right. He felt hollow. He allowed Sara to lead him out of the small room and up the stairs, and how hard must it have been for her to come back to that place?
Josh stumbled as they stepped into the night, like he wasn’t quite prepared for the force of the cool, fresh air.
Cam’s hand steadied him. “Get him to the car, Sara,” he said. “I’ll meet you outside town.”
Sara nodded and walked him to the vehicle. He looked around for any sign of JD, but she was gone. Maybe she was hiding, or maybe calling the police. Josh didn’t care. Sara opened the car door, and he crawled into the backseat, the fumes from his pants and shoes overwhelming in the closed space.
He didn’t speak as Sara started the car and navigated it through the silent streets to the edge of the town. If he opened his mouth, he’d just apologize again and again and again until he couldn’t form the words anymore.