The Becoming: Revelations (14 page)

“And when do we leave?” Remy added. She pushed off the post and placed a foot on the steps, as if to start climbing them. “And, for that matter, what are we going to do about the guy in there?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Brandt said. “He’s dead. He was already dying. He hung on long enough to give me the information I needed.” He dropped his head back into his hands for a moment before standing abruptly. “Let’s get our shit together. I want to be out of here within the hour.”

“What about the bodies?” Gray asked tentatively as the other man began to climb the stairs.

“Search them, then leave them,” Brandt bit out. “I don’t have time to deal with some assholes who tried to kill one of us. They don’t deserve anything we can give them at this point.”

Cade was in that pleasant haze somewhere between asleep and awake, where not everything seemed quite real, where the dream world intersected with the real one, brushing against the edges of her consciousness. She’d been like this for almost an hour, ever since Brandt had reluctantly rolled off her and dragged the sheets over both their bodies. She imagined she could still feel Brandt’s body against hers, his hands loosely gripping her waist. She shivered, and almost immediately, Brandt’s arms were around her, tugging her closer. She lay on her side, and he was just behind her, his nose buried against her hair as she hovered just shy of wakefulness, content. She could imagine that the infected didn’t exist, that the two of them weren’t fighting for their lives every day. It wasn’t hard to do.

Brandt’s stubbled chin brushed against her bare shoulder as he dropped a light kiss on her skin. Cade smiled and closed her eyes, forcing herself to relax for the first time in over a year.
That
was hard to do. Her back and shoulder muscles felt like they’d never be relaxed again, not after the tension and weight they’d carried. Brandt’s fingers found her side, tracing her ribs lightly before he spoke.

“
Cade?” His voice was soft, hoarse with lack of sleep.

“
Hmm?” she managed to hum out. She was too tired for anything else.

“
Are you okay?”

Something in the man’s voice made Cade raise an eyebrow. She opened her eyes and shifted onto her back to get a look at him. In the faint moonlight coming from the second-story window, she could just make out his eyes, soft and dark and a little droopy. He looked exhausted, but at the same time, he seemed oddly alert.

“
What makes you ask?”

“
Just thinking about tomorrow,” Brandt admitted. His grip on her tightened. “Everything that can go wrong. All the bad shit that could happen. How I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Cade let a faint smile drift across her lips as she smoothed her fingers down his arm, tracing the knot of bone at his wrist. “I’m not going to get hurt,” she said assuredly. “Do I ever?”

“
Well, there was that time with your knee in Biloxi,” Brandt pointed out.

Cade rolled her eyes and shifted until she lay on her other side, facing him. “Hey, that wasn’t my fault,” she protested. “You’re the one who threw me down, if you do recall.”

“
I
do
recall,” he agreed with a soft chuckle. “I also recall making you jump out the fifth floor of an office building.”

“
Let’s not go there,” Cade warned. “The thought
still
scares me.”

Brandt chuckled again, the sound vibrating through his chest. He smiled and nuzzled his nose against hers affectionately, pressing a kiss to her lips, a soft noise escaping his throat as he twisted his fingers into her hair. She returned it, of course; Brandt was a fantastic kisser, and she’d have been a liar if she said she didn’t enjoy it.

When he finally pulled away, his fingers still threaded in her hair, Brandt’s eyes were serious. “I don’t want to go to sleep,” he confessed.

“
Why not?” Cade asked. She smoothed a hand over his cheek, her fingers caressing his skin idly.

“
Because sleep is for the weak,” he attempted to joke, but Cade could tell his heart wasn’t quite in it.

“
Seriously, Brandt,” she persisted.

“
Because I’d rather stay awake and talk to you,” he said, catching her around the waist again and pulling her more firmly against him.

Cade raised an eyebrow. “Oh? And what exactly should we talk about?”

Brandt shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m sure you could come up with something.”

Cade mulled over and rejected an entire list of possible topics of discussion before settling on an old standard she used when she wanted to know more about someone. “Tell me something about you that I don’t already know,” she requested.

“
Something you don’t know about me,” Brandt repeated. “What kind of something are you thinking of?”

Cade shrugged. “I don’t know. Just … something you haven’t told the others. Something no one in the world today knows about you.”

Brandt fell silent at the request, staying that way for so long that Cade lifted her head to check whether he’d fallen asleep. But no, he still lay awake, staring at the ceiling, his hand rubbing slowly up and down her back as he thought the question over. Finally, when he spoke, his words were surprisingly hushed.

“
I was married once,” he started. Cade looked at him in surprise, her eyebrows rising, but he didn’t seem to notice the look. “Long time ago, back when I was young and pretty stupid. Thought we were in love. Maybe we were, I don’t know. I’d accidentally gotten her pregnant. Usual sad story, you know?”

“
How old were you?” Cade asked softly, wondering why he’d never mentioned any of this.

“
Seventeen when I got her pregnant,” Brandt said. “Eighteen when I finally married her. Shit was good for a while. She had a boy. We stayed in Atlanta, mainly because I didn’t want to live anywhere else.”

“
So what happened?”

“
There was an accident,” Brandt said. “Baby died. And Kayla wasn’t quite the same after that. Things got really bad. She asked for a divorce when I was nineteen. I gave it to her.” Cade heard the sadness in his voice as he uttered those last five words.

“
It wasn’t what you wanted though, was it?” she asked softly. “You didn’t want a divorce.”

“
No, I didn’t,” Brandt confirmed. “But it was what she wanted, and I wanted to see her happy, so …” He trailed off and shrugged. “What else could I do?” He closed his eyes. “So we divorced. She went her way, and I went mine. Never heard from her again.” He traced a circle along Cade’s spine, and she dropped her head onto his chest again. “After that, I drifted aimlessly for about six years. Worked shitty dead-end jobs, barely scraped by. I finally decided to join the military when I was twenty-five and entered Marine boot camp a few months before I turned twenty-six. I’m sure you can guess the rest.”

“
Yeah, I think I can,” Cade murmured in agreement. She closed her own eyes, just listening to his heartbeat. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

“
I’m not. If it hadn’t happened, it’d never have set off the chain of events that led to where we are now,” Brandt said. “While the circumstances suck unbelievably, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

Cade lifted her head so Brandt could see the disbelieving look on her face. “Are you serious?”

“
Well, yeah,” Brandt said, not sounding the least bit uncomfortable with his own statement. “I’ve always been a firm believer in the idea that things happen for a reason. Might not be things we
like
, and it might not be for reasons we like, but all the same, they happen. And I firmly believe I’d not be right here right now if all the shit that happened before hadn’t happened.”

Cade’s head banged against the side window as the van struck a pothole in the road. She jerked awake, blinking rapidly and trying to orient herself. It took her several moments to remember where she was,
when
she was, and who the hell she was with. When it all rushed back, her anger came with it. She quickly fought back the urge to lunge at the nearest warm body. Knowing her luck, she’d be promptly shot to death by the man watching her over the back of the seat in front of her—the man holding
her
rifle.

As she came more fully awake, the soreness in her body slammed into the forefront of her mind, and she shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Her jaw ached, both from the swelling and bruising on the side of her face and the apparent grinding of her teeth in her sleep. But none of it could compete with the overwhelming disappointment she’d experienced when she’d been so rudely woken from the wonderful dream—
memory
—she’d experienced in her heavy doze.

That redheaded bitch sat directly in front of her; the back of her head was presented to Cade as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Cade wondered how easily it’d be to go on the attack. Every fiber of her being desired to rip this woman a new one. She clenched her fists tightly.

No. Not yet. No matter how much Cade’s body screamed to make these people pay for Remy’s death—because she had no doubt that the younger woman was dead—she still needed answers, still needed to know what they wanted with her. And, for that matter, what they wanted with Brandt. The redhead’s line of questioning back at the safe house had indicated that whatever the woman wanted had something to do with Brandt. Cade wanted to know what that something was. She wouldn’t find out if she came out of her nap with fists swinging.

Cade sucked up her courage, stomped down her anger, and finally spoke.

“Hey,” she started, trying to get the redhead’s attention. The woman didn’t move, didn’t react to Cade’s voice. Cade grimaced and kicked the back of the woman’s seat. The redhead sucked in what sounded like a pained breath as she turned around, and Cade caught a glimpse of a needle in the woman’s arm.
Oh great, I’ve been kidnapped by a bunch of fucking junkies,
she thought irritably.

“
What?
” the woman snarled. There was so much venom in her voice that Cade instinctively recoiled from her. She swallowed the deep-seated
kill, kill
impulse she’d developed over the past year and soldiered on. She refused to be cowed into submission by this bitch.

“What the hell do you want with me?” Cade demanded without preamble. If she was going to go on the attack—verbally, anyway—then she was going to aim right for the jugular.

“You think I’m going to answer your questions with a shitty attitude like that?” the woman shot back. She expertly deposited the needle in a plastic sharps box stashed between the seats and, as Cade watched, took a quick swig of water and two painkillers.

“You’d better tell me
something
before I kick all your asses,” Cade grumbled.

“I don’t
have
to tell you jack shit.”

Cade fought to not kick the woman’s seat again and instead folded her arms over her chest, glaring at them all. “Well, it’d sure be incredibly helpful, so when I
do
kick all your asses, I’ll at least know
why
. Besides the obvious, that is.”

The redhead’s brilliant green eyes—almost as green as Ethan’s, Cade observed fleetingly—rolled once. “You think this has something to do with you?”

“Well, considering I’m the one you
kidnapped,
I figure it has a lot to do with me,” Cade argued.

“It has almost nothing to do with you,” the woman snapped. Cade saw a glimpse of anger flare up in the woman’s eyes again. The woman squeezed her eyes closed momentarily before she continued. “But it has everything to do with Michael Brandt Evans.”

The way the woman said Brandt’s name, carefully enunciating each word, raised Cade’s curiosity to new levels. “What about Brandt? What do you want with him?”

The redhead scoffed and faced the front again. “Yeah, like I have any reason to tell you anything right now.”

Cade crossed her arms again, digging her nails into her sides so she wouldn’t punch the woman in the back of her head. “So what’s your name, anyway?”

“Why do you need to know my name?” the redhead asked placidly.

“So I have something to call you other than redheaded bitch,” Cade replied. “Though I have to admit that has a nice ring to it.”

Disdain rolled off the woman in front of her. “Alicia Day,” the woman finally said. “Now shut the hell up. I have a headache, and your voice isn’t helping me get rid of it.”

It took an hour longer than Brandt would have liked to set out on their journey, but it couldn’t be helped—they’d taken time to search not only the van, but the bodies of the men Remy had killed, and had recovered a couple of guns and a few spare magazines of ammunition. Remy could tell Brandt wasn’t happy about the delay by the expression on his face. Blazing anger flamed in his eyes, and his jaw was set in determination, a determination she shared. They were going after Cade, and they’d let nothing stop them from rescuing her.