The Becoming: Revelations (37 page)

“We do?” Cade asked innocently. Nervousness stirred in her gut, though she knew, just by eavesdropping, that Brandt already knew what she had to tell him.

“Yeah, we do,” Brandt agreed. He gave her a smile, his eyes meeting hers, and added softly, “Like the baby?”

Cade sucked in a breath and let it out slowly. She shifted her hands to grip the back of the chair. “Yeah, like that,” she said. “I take it Remy told you?”

“Yeah, right around the same time she stuck a gun in my face,” Brandt said thoughtfully.

Cade snorted before letting out a burst of laughter. “Remy put a gun in your face?” she repeated in surprise.

“Yeah, she was pretty pissed off at the time,” Brandt admitted. “She wasn’t in a good place, I don’t think.” He sighed and sat up straight, picking lightly at the tape holding the cotton ball to his inner elbow. “How are you, Cade? I mean, really.”

Cade considered her words before answering. “I think I’m okay,” she said. “I’m a little scared, if you’d like me to be honest, but it’s not anything I can’t handle.”

“Yeah, I think I’d rather you be honest with me,” Brandt said. He pulled the tape free and wrapped it around the cotton ball. “I’m scared too,” he admitted. “I mean, this is serious.
Really
serious.”

“It is,” Cade said, nodding in agreement. “What’s going to happen if we fail? What if we don’t get to her?”

“Then we’ll be dead,” Brandt said simply, an odd amount of confidence in his voice, considering the subject matter. Cade saw right through it, though, and she studied him as she tilted her head to the side.

“You’re not as confident as you’re trying to sound,” she observed. “That’s a first. I figured you’d never have a moment of self-doubt. You’re always trying to be so … tough.”

Brandt raised an eyebrow, and a smirk spread across his face. “Are you
teasing
me, Cade?”

“Maybe.” Cade reached to the small of her back and slowly drew a survival knife from the sheath at the back of her belt. It was a short-bladed one Isaac had given her, but it would do for her purposes. She studied the blade, flicking her thumb lightly over the edge, testing its sharpness. Then she flipped it over, caught it by the blade, and offered it to Brandt hilt-first. “I need you to do me a favor,” she requested.

Brandt slowly took the knife from her. “Sure, anything within reason,” he agreed.

Cade slipped a hairband from her wrist and braided her hair, snapping the band around the end before pulling the tail over her shoulder so Brandt could see it. “I need you to cut this off.”

“You need me to
what?
” Brandt asked, his voice rising in pitch with surprise. “Cut your hair? But I like your hair!”

“Provided we survive this evening, it’ll grow back,” Cade said. “There’s a high chance we’ll walk into a bad situation and have to do close-quarters fighting. I don’t want to have another handle to be grabbed by.”

“Yeah, I get that, but … your
hair,
” he said forlornly. The disappointment he expressed at her decision to cut her hair off was, honestly, fairly amusing. Cade smirked as she waved the braid at him.

“Come on, Brandt. Get it over with before I change my mind,” she said.

“In that case, maybe I should drag ass until you do,” he joked, even as he slid out of his chair and moved to stand behind her. He took the braid into his hand and ran his fingers over the strands. Cade squeezed her eyes shut and held her breath as he slipped the knife underneath the tail and started to cut. She heard the strands break and snap under the assault from the blade, and she bit down on her lip as the blade broke through the last of the hair. Her shortened locks fell away to brush against the back of her neck. Cade reached up hesitantly to touch the strands that were left, her fingers feeling the coarse ends midway down the back of her neck. She let out a soft breath.

“How does it look?” Cade asked hesitantly, twisting around to look at Brandt. He still held the thick braid in his hand, winding it around his fingers.

“Ragged. It’ll need a trim,” he answered.

Cade shrugged and forced the fleeting sadness she felt over her hair out of her mind. “I’ll worry about evening it out later,” she said.

Brandt sank back into his chair, sliding the braid and knife across the table to Cade. She sheathed the knife and rested her hand loosely on top of the braid before looking at him. His expression was strangely uncertain, as if he wanted to say or ask something. He drew in a deep breath, reaching out for her hand, and forced the words out.

“Cade, are you … are you absolutely sure you’re pregnant?” he asked carefully. “I mean, is there any doubt about it whatsoever?”

Cade understood why he’d be so uncertain over it. After what he’d told her the month before, after the hell he’d gone through losing his first and only child and then looking divorce right in the face, she could grant him some level of uncertainty. She twisted the braid between her fingers and nodded slowly.

“Yeah, Brandt. I’m pretty certain of it,” she said. She let out a soft chuckle. “I took
four
pregnancy tests over the span of a day and drank practically an entire gallon of water. All the tests came back positive.”

“And the chances of a false positive across all four tests would be pretty damn low,” Brandt said. He mulled the news over, tracing his fingers slowly along the scar crossing Cade’s palm, before asking, “So what do you think about it?”

“Honestly, I haven’t had much time to,” Cade confessed. “We had only … I mean, it caught me by surprise. And before I got a chance to really
process
it, the shit with Alicia started, and it got shunted to the side in my mind in favor of survival.” She rolled her eyes. “God knows everybody
else
is fascinated by the news, though.”

“It’s because of me, isn’t it?” Brandt muttered. He sounded so bitter that Cade looked at him in surprise. He had his head in his hands, elbows resting on the edge of the table, his fingers plunged into his dark hair. “I don’t want people to hurt you just because of me. It’s not … I don’t want to see you hurt.”

Cade slid her chair around the table to sit closer to him. “I don’t care, Brandt. I can take whatever they throw at me.”

Brandt slammed his fist against the table, and Cade startled. “You shouldn’t
have
to,” he growled out. “That’s why I want to see the bitch dead. That’s why I want to look her in the fucking eyes before I pull the damned trigger. Because even if I die, she’ll never leave you the fuck alone.”

Cade dropped her head against Brandt’s bicep. She smoothed her hand down his muscular forearm to rest it on top of his hand. “I understand. She put me through hell. I want to see her dead too.” She hesitated and added softly, “I think we need to talk. About what happened before you left the safe house. When we … didn’t get along too well.”

“You mean when we fought,” Brandt murmured.

“Yeah. When we fought,” Cade agreed sadly. “We should talk about that.”

“Can we not?” Brandt asked. “I can think of a million other things I’d rather talk about than what we disagreed on a thousand years ago.” He rose from his seat and went to the hotel room door, easing it open and peering out into the hall. He stood like that for a moment, examining the exterior hallway, before he closed the door and bolted it, flipping the security latch closed. Then he stopped beside her, twisting the ragged ends of her hair between his fingers. “I hope it’s okay for me to do this.” He wrapped his hand around Cade’s wrist and tugged her out of the chair, pulling her to him. Cade stumbled at the sudden motion, but his free arm hooked around her waist to steady her before he pulled her tight against him and took her mouth in a deep kiss.

Cade let out an involuntary squeak of surprise at the suddenness of the kiss, and she returned it for only a moment before she pulled away to give him a look that spoke volumes of just how crazy she thought he was. “What the hell, Brandt?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “I thought we were going to talk?”

“Less talk, more this,” Brandt mumbled against her neck, nipping at her skin.

Cade tried to ignore the way her knees went weak.

“And here I was thinking we’d have a
serious
conversation for once,” she half-joked as Brandt steered her to the bedroom, tugging at the straps and clasps holding the Kevlar vest together. He stopped her by the bed and pulled the Beretta from the waistband of her jeans, depositing it on the bedside table. His dark eyes sparkled with mischievousness as they met hers.

“You must be entirely mistaken if you actually think I’m capable of being serious,” he said. He slipped his hands into her front pockets and dislodged the ammunition magazines from them, dropping them by the Beretta. “Must be some
other guy
you’re talking about.” His fingers found two more magazines in her belt and pulled them free, then slid the Glock from its holster and left it beside the Beretta.

“Oh yeah, can’t you see the line of men at the door?” Cade said with a sarcastic roll of her eyes.

“What, you think you couldn’t make ‘em line up?” Brandt asked. He pulled the survival knife free from its sheath and added it to the growing pile of weapons on the bedside table. “You’re fucking gorgeous, Cade,” he said, starting on her belt buckle. “Absolutely gorgeous. One of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. I’m surprised I’m not having to fight off every guy that looks at you, because they’ve
got
to see it too.” He paused and raised an eyebrow, dislodging a knife with a blade even larger than the survival knife he’d already removed, slipping it out of the sheath she’d hidden in her jeans. “Geez, Cade, exactly how many guns and knives you got hidden on you?”

Cade laughed and took the knife from him, dropping it on the table and shrugging out of the Kevlar vest. “Why don’t you find out?” she suggested with a playful wink, all thoughts of serious discussions banished.

Brandt groaned. “I don’t know whether I should be intrigued or terrified.”

Cade laughed again and grabbed Brandt by the front of his shirt. “Maybe both,” she suggested. “Now get over here. We’ve got a few hours, and I don’t want to waste them blathering like an idiot.”

Remy sat on the end of the bed in the hotel room she’d staked out, her legs tucked underneath her and her bolo knife resting across her knees. She smoothed the corner of an old t-shirt over its naked blade. The weapon didn’t necessarily
need
cleaning; it hadn’t been used against anything, living or dead, in over a month, and its blade was still pristine. Remy polished it anyway, mainly because it calmed her, helped her center her mind, helped her focus on the problem at hand and not on the ones further down the road.

Even if the problem at hand was a stupid one.

Ethan sat in a chair in an unlit corner of the room, partially veiled by the darkness around him. One leg rested against his knee, his hand loosely hanging over his mouth as he propped against it, the broken chain of his dead wife’s locket dangling from the fingers of his other hand. She felt his eyes on her, watching her as she worked on the knife.

“Are you sure it doesn’t bother you?” Ethan asked.

“Oh yeah. Of course.”

She was lying through her teeth.

“You understand?”

“Yeah.”

She didn’t. Not at all.

There was another pause, another heavy silence between them. Ethan didn’t move a fraction. Remy kept sliding the cloth along the blade. When Ethan finally spoke again, his voice was just as gentle as it had been when he’d broken the bad news to her just thirty minutes before.

“You’re lying.”

Busted.

“Fine. I’m lying. Whatever,” Remy muttered, fighting the urge to throw her blade onto the floor.
Focus, focus,
she repeated silently. She took a deep breath and forced herself to continue. “But what else am I supposed to do? Tell you all about how much it bothers me that you were sleeping with that crazy bitch? Tell you about how much it bothers me that
we
can’t be together? How much it
scares
me that you’re probably not going to get better, even with Brandt’s cure?”

“If he’s got one,” Ethan added.

“
If
he’s got one,” Remy conceded hoarsely. She cleared her throat. “I don’t want you to die. Again. It was hard enough losing you once and having to cope with that. Now you’re telling me I’m probably going to have to face it again.”

“Everybody has to die someday, Remy,” Ethan said gently.

“Oh, shove that philosophical bullshit up your ass,” Remy snapped. She flung the knife away from her; it bounced on the edge of the mattress and tumbled to the floor with a clatter. She ignored it and bit out, “How many women have to face the prospect of seeing their lovers die
twice?
”

Ethan barely flinched. Remy couldn’t make out a single flicker of reaction from him. That just made her angrier. “I can imagine not very many,” he said quietly.

“You’re damn fucking right ‘not very many,’” Remy snarled. His lack of emotion was infuriating. She slid off the bed and stormed over to stand in front of him. He still didn’t move, save to tilt his head back just enough to see her. “I’ve already lost almost every single person I care about. Don’t you fucking
dare
make me go through this again.”