Reckoning

Book 3: Valentine Shepherd

by Shana Figueroa

Genres: Women's Fiction; Private Investigators; Female Sleuths; Action & Adventure Romance; Contemporary Romance; Fantasy Romance; Paranormal Romance; Romantic Suspense; Paranormal; Romantic Fantasy; Urban Fantasy

Synopsis

"Shana Figueroa is an exciting new voice in the paranormal genre." -- Opal Carew, New York Times bestselling author Hell hath no fury like Valentine . . . Five years. It's been five years of blissful peace for private eye Valentine Shepherd and her hot-ass husband, Max Carressa. Five years of watching their twins grow up healthy and happy, even as Val waits for Hell to unleash its fury. Her enemies have been planning, and Val knows she doesn't have nearly enough weapons to protect her family . . . Yet Val and Max have one advantage---their insatiable desire for each other allows them to see into the future, and the visions they share may just give them a chance. But as events are set into motion that endanger everyone Val's ever loved, she'll do whatever it takes to stop the horror she's already seen---even if it means her end.

Release date: July 11, 2017

Publisher: Forever Yours

Print pages: 354

Sample

Prologue

When Kat lifted her head up from between Stacey’s thighs, she said in a tone not unlike one might use to remark on the weather, “We’re going back to Seattle.”

“What?” Stacey panted, still catching her breath from the explosion of bliss that had seized her only a moment ago.

“I said we’re going back to Seattle.”

“You mean a city in France called Seattle, right?”

Kat crawled forward, flipping her lustrous blond hair over her shoulder as she lay down next to Stacey. “Why do you care if we go back?”

“Come on, you know why I care.” Stacey hadn’t been back to her hometown in almost five years, not since her former best friend dumped her for a rich piece of ass. Even that might not have been a deal-breaker—chicks before dicks, after all—but for the fact that her “friend” had used knowledge of the future to save her life…and then never told her. Never gave her an option to choose if she wanted to defy fate or not, or to come to terms with whatever that decision might have been. She should be dead. She was dead. How many times had the universe killed her, only to have its will thwarted by a woman who fucks to see the future?

Stacey wasn’t one to hold a grudge, but…okay, she held a grudge. She had her own hot piece of ass now, her own soul mate, a reason for living even though she wasn’t supposed to be alive. Kat made room in her hectic life for Stacey, had brought her girlfriend into the fold so they could be together. For over five years they’d been a team, doing odd jobs for Kat’s employers, an organization Stacey knew only as Northwalk. Kat admitted she had blood relations with the top echelon of the group—their leader was her mother—but they weren’t close, and only communicated when business required it. Stacey and Kat had traveled the world together, occasionally doing something as grand as stealing a piece of fine art from a wealthy asshole (Kat excelled at the honeypot con), or something as simple as picking up a person’s mail. Maybe fate had decreed she and Kat should be together, too.

Now they lay in a ridiculously fancy hotel room in a posh resort on the French Riviera, and Kat wanted to go back to goddamn Seattle, where it had all begun. The place she’d run away from, the place where she’d died, and where the person she had trusted the most, who’d lied to her for years, still lived.

“So what if you run into her?” Kat skimmed a finger along Stacey’s sweaty collarbone, working her usual magic. It wasn’t a coincidence Kat dropped this bombshell in the middle of their lovemaking. Sex was her greatest weapon and she wasn’t afraid to use it, even against her own girlfriend. “You don’t owe her an explanation.”

“I know that,” Stacey snapped. “But she owes me one, and she’ll dance around it instead, all, ‘I did what I thought was right,’ and ‘I knew you wouldn’t take it well, blah, blah, blah.’” She pushed herself to the head of the four-post bed and hugged her knees. “You know Seattle sucks this time of year. Cold and rainy doesn’t inspire holiday cheer. I never had a white Christmas growing up, not once.”

“You won’t have a white Christmas here, either.”

“The white sands of the Mediterranean are close enough.” She sighed. “Why do we have to go back?”

“Something big is about to go down.”

Stacey cringed. Shit. This was what she’d been hired for, but still she had hoped this day would be much farther into the future. She didn’t know or care what Northwalk’s ultimate goals were, as long as she and Kat could be together. Her gaze raked over their five-star hotel room, the midafternoon sun glinting off bay windows framing an azure sky, Kat’s naked, tanned body coiled across the white bedspread. Paradise—like she’d died and gone to heaven. She shuddered, thinking of all she was about to lose. “But why do we have to go back?”

Kat sat up. She put a hand on Stacey’s arm and squeezed reassuringly. Then her grip tightened, until her fingers dug into her girlfriend’s flesh. Stacey yelped and tried to pull her arm away, but Kat held it fast. She was stronger than she looked; quicker, too. And meaner.

What was Kat doing? Her ice blue eyes cut into Stacey’s with a ferocious intensity Stacey had never seen before.

“We need to go because Cassandra says it has to be now,” Kat said, her voice pitch-black velvet. “And I want my goddamn inheritance.”

*  *  *

You will walk up the stairs until you reach the eighteenth floor. You’ll use the security badge you procured from your lover to exit the stairwell and gain access to the inner offices. If you stay flush with the outer walls, you’ll avoid the cameras. After you reach the executive suites, you will spot a conference room under construction. You will find a cluster of boxes filled with nails and other construction supplies in the corner of the room.

That is where you will plant the bomb.

Obey my divine will, as you, my child, are my agent of flesh, commanded to break apart the ebony fox and red raven. Love me as I love you, and fear me as they will fear you.

Chapter One

Valentine Shepherd sat cross-legged on her son’s squat bed, gritting her teeth as she watched Simon dig through a pile of brightly colored books with cardboard pages and huge fonts. The kids’ room sported an abundance of short bookcases, but still they had too many books to fit, the excess strewn across the floor as miniature mountains of knowledge. Like father, like son.

“Just pick one, Simon.”

He kept rooting. Val took a deep breath and tried to control her annoyance. It was already an hour past the twin’s usual bedtime, as they’d insisted on “helping” her bake a batch of gingersnaps for the holiday cookie exchange between her group of playdate moms—well, mostly nannies—the following day. As she juggled cookie trays, they decided to have a raw egg fight in the living room. She’d ordered them upstairs, then cleaned up the slimy mess. Toby, their Jack Russell terrier, helped by licking egg yolks off the walls. Then he puked them up onto the carpet. At that point, she’d smelled the cookies burning.

“Just pick one, Simon.”

After a minute he snatched up a book he liked, sprinted back to Val, and dropped it into her lap.

Val read the cover. “The Night Before Christmas. Appropriate enough.”

Simon launched himself onto the bed and snuggled up to his mother. He beamed up at her, beautiful hazel eyes with starbursts of emerald green at their centers radiating the pure love of a devoted four-year-old. Val’s irritation ebbed, her love for her children an aloe that always soothed her most frayed nerves. She ruffled his blond hair and kissed his head.

“Lydia, come on,” Val called out.

A moment later her daughter wandered into the room, head down and eyes glued to a tablet computer.

“Turn that off. It’s time for a story, then bed.”

Lydia looked up and pushed black hair out of her big gray eyes. “But Mommy,” she whined. She turned the tablet toward Val. Flashing stars danced across the screen; some kind of numbers game. “I almost have the high score.”

“That’s great, honey. Turn it off.”

Lydia’s delicate pink lips curled into a pout, then she pressed the power button until the screen went black. She dropped it on top of a book pile and curled up next to Val, opposite her brother.

“Okay.” God, finally.“The Night Before Christmas, here we go…” Val flipped to the first page. “‘’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house—’”

“How does Santa get down the chimney?” Simon asked.

“It’s a trade secret.”

“Santa’s not real,” Lydia told Simon in her usual serious tone.

“Lydia!” Val frowned at her daughter.

Simon’s lips trembled and he looked at his mother with big doe eyes.

“Of course Santa’s real,” she said to Simon. “In a way. He lives in our hearts.” She smiled at her son, and his wounded innocence turned to confusion. It was good enough. “Okay, so where were we…” She cleared her throat and tried to read with the practiced animation Max was so good at when he usually did this. Her exhaustion made it a hard sell. “‘’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even—’”

“When’s Daddy coming home?” Lydia asked.

“In two days.”

Simon: “Where is he?”

“Fort Lauderdale. That’s in Florida, America’s flaccid wang.” Val cracked a smile. They wouldn’t know what that meant for years. There was no shame in enjoying a dirty inside joke with herself. Reminded her that she technically still belonged to the adult world despite being consumed by the daily grind of four-year-old affairs. She took her small pleasures wherever she could get them.

Lydia and Simon peered around their mother and at each other. Their eyes widened and misted over with a glaze Val recognized, the one that sent a cold chill racing up her spine.

Simon said, “Daddy was in Florida—”

“But he’s not there now,” Lydia finished.

Val swallowed hard. She wished they wouldn’t do this. More than wished—she prayed to God they wouldn’t do this. She’d hoped the twins had escaped the curse that afflicted her and Max, but since their verbal skills had exploded over the last six months, it was becoming clearer by the day they hadn’t. They knew things they shouldn’t, and they didn’t need to be in a trance to see it, like Max and Val—they were Alphas, like Cassandra, the woman in white she’d seen only in her visions. Other parents expressed amazement at how advanced Lydia and Simon were, sometimes through teeth clenched together in jealousy at their own child’s implied inferiority.

But what made them special made them vulnerable. They would be coming for her children. Maybe someday soon. Sten Ander, her sometimes enemy/sometimes ally, had told her they called themselves Northwalk. They owned Cassandra, and they wanted Simon and Lydia as well. She would burn down the world before she let her children be stolen from her.

Val began again, her throat suddenly dry and sapped of the meager enthusiasm she’d worked to channel a minute ago. “‘’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house—’”

“Daddy reads it better,” Simon said.

“Well, Daddy’s not here, so do you want me to read the story or not?”

Simon nodded, resigned to his fate of a subpar book reading. A long sigh escaped Val’s chest. She flipped through the book and cringed at the walls of text. Ten pages of this? She didn’t remember the poem being so long.

“‘’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…’ Except Santa was there! He spread gifts everywhere for all the good little boys and girls, and when he left, he said, ‘Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!’” Val snapped the book shut.

Lydia frowned. “That’s not what it said.”

“That’s the abridged version. And since when do you know how to read?”

“I’ve always known how to read.”

“Jesus Christ,” Val muttered to herself. To Lydia: “Don’t tell anyone else that.” She clapped her hands. “Time for bed. Chop, chop.”

Lydia scrambled off Simon’s bed and slipped into her own, kitty-cornered to Simon’s in the same room. Val tucked them in with hugs and kisses.

“I love you, my beautiful babies,” she said as she held Simon’s tiny body against hers, then Lydia’s. “Love, love, love you.”

“We love you, too, Mommy,” Simon said as Val walked to the doorway. “And Nana.”

She froze. “Who?”

“Nana,” Lydia answered. “She’s the best grandma ever.”

They didn’t have a Nana…Well, technically they did, but she might as well be dead. Val hadn’t seen or heard from her mother in almost thirty years—until recently, that was. To choose not to have contact with your own children for decades, even after one of them took her own life…she was certainly not the best Nana ever. The kids must be referring to someone else. Maybe one of their friends’ grandmothers. That must be it.

Val flipped off the light, a constellation of blue stars from a nightlight making slow circles across the ceiling as she shut the door. It was nothing. She didn’t want to see her mother again anyway. She couldn’t even remember what the woman looked like. All she could recall was red hair like Val’s—probably gray now—and the acrid odor of the menthol cigarettes her mother liked to smoke. And her mom’s eyes, the same steely blue as Val’s, that crinkled at the edges every time she laughed. And her mom’s voice, shrill and frantic as she screamed about the injustice of the Gulf War. And she remembered the feel of cold hardwood on her knees as she knelt at the foot of her bed, praying for her mother to return. What kind of person abandons their own children? How could she—

Val leaned against the hallway’s wall and blinked back tears. She was working herself up over nothing. Who knew what the twins really saw? They didn’t know themselves half the time—a blessing for their poor four-year-old minds. Her own children would grow up with a loving mother and father, and that was all that mattered.

Nana wasn’t real. Her mother was dead to her. Or might as well have been.

Val pushed herself off the wall in the hallway, took a deep breath, and fought the urge to walk straight to her bedroom and read the letter again. No, she wouldn’t let it distract her. She had more important things to do, good-mother things. Instead she made her nightly round through the condo: first the kitchen, then the indoor pool and surrounding patio, then the living room, the study, the den, each bathroom, and ending at the guest room—checking all the guns she’d hidden out of the children’s reach but within her own. For when they came. She and Max had enjoyed a crazy-conspiracy dry spell since the twins had been born, but it couldn’t last forever. With all the effort Max and Val’s tormentors had put into bringing the two of them together, it was only a matter of time until they resurfaced to resume their torture. This time, she’d be prepared.

Rounds completed, she considered watching some TV, maybe the Real Housewives of Something, to numb her mind. But if she stumbled on a news report involving Delilah Barrister, Seattle’s ex-mayor and Washington State’s newest Congresswoman, she was already pissed enough she might punch the television. It’d taken a massive amount of willpower to resist going after the woman who’d murdered Val’s fiancé and manipulated Val into killing Delilah’s husband, the late, terrible Norman Barrister, in order to fuel her political ambitions and assist Northwalk in forcing Val and Max together to create their special children. But Val had left Delilah alone to rule Seattle and climb the political ladder, because her family’s lives depended on it. Delilah had proven she was capable of killing anyone to get what she wanted. The fate of poor Zach, the teenaged hacker who’d helped Val almost nail Delilah and had “committed suicide” for his trouble, still gave her nightmares. She wouldn’t put her family in danger of a similar situation, even if it meant backing off her enemy—for now. Delilah would get hers someday. Val fucking swore it.

Yep, no TV tonight. She went to the laundry room and collected warm clothes from the dryer, carried the load to her bedroom, and dumped it on the mattress. She stared at the pile for a moment. Goddamn laundry. There were many techniques a person could use to fold a four-year-old’s underwear, though she’d been told by another stay-at-home mom only one was correct. If she didn’t fold the clothes now, they’d wrinkle, and she’d get disapproving looks from the other mothers in her kids’ play group. What a tragedy. Her hands balled into and out of fists. Dammit. Of all the ways she could be torturing herself at that moment, she could think of at least one better than laundry. Turning her back on the pile, she made a beeline to her nightstand, yanked open the drawer, and took out a worn envelope.

Val stared hard at the letter gripped between her fingers, an unassuming piece of mail holding only one piece of paper and sliced open along the top. It was just a rectangle of white with her address scrawled on the front in loopy cursive, ordinary to anyone but Val. What normal person sent personal letters via snail mail these days? Her eyes traced the path of those handwritten letters and cut between her name in the center and the sender’s in the corner—Danielle Shepherd.

She’d read the short letter dozens of times. Sorry I haven’t kept in touch, it’s a long story, I’d love to tell you all about it, can I come visit? Could her long-lost mother come visit? Was she serious? Silence for over thirty years and now she wanted to reconnect? Did Danielle’s sudden interest in Val’s life have something to do with her new, rich husband? Or the conspiracy that surrounded their lives, lurking out of sight, haunting her dreams and her visions, waiting for the right moment to close in on them? Be nice if she could get a second opinion from someone else, a real friend maybe, but the last one she had took off after Val imploded a few years ago. She hadn’t connected with any of the other rich, stuck-up moms and their nannies in her kids’ play group, and they weren’t interested in connecting with her. She and Max were tabloid fodder with a salacious history, after all, though they’d kept a fairly low profile since the Lucien Christophe nightmare five years ago. Maybe she should put out a personal ad: Looking for a no-frills, down-to-earth, big-hearted bestie with a bohemian streak who likes to watch bad movies, solve mysteries, and can keep a secret. Yeah, right. There was no replacing Stacey.

Val would never let a stranger into their home, because that’s what Danielle was…but the twins had seen her, knew her—

Val froze when she realized someone was standing right behind her.

Chapter Two

An arm wrapped around her waist. In a flash she dropped the letter, seized the wrist, and cocked it hard to the side. Half a second later she smelled the delectable aroma of bay rum aftershave, and her grip slackened.

“Ow,” Max said, though he slipped his other arm around her waist.

She took a deep breath and tried to slow her heart, jackhammering with the spike of adrenaline she would’ve used to fight. “Jesus, Max, I could’ve killed you.”

“I know, my love.” His lips touched her neck and he mumbled into her skin, “But you didn’t. Thanks.”

Val leaned her head back, exposed more of her neck for him. With each kiss, she felt her foul mood lifting, a warm, erotic blanket wrapping around her. “I thought your conference didn’t end for another couple days.”

“It was boring. I left early.” His hands drifted underneath her sweatshirt and slid up her rib cage, onto the mounds of her breasts, where his fingers took turns gliding over her nipples. Horny bastard. She bit her lip and smiled.

“The board will be angry you played hooky from yet another financial conference. They might consider firing you, for real this time.”

He laughed. “God no. If they had the stones to do it, I might be worried. I’d have to find another hobby.” His hands stopped their sensuous path across her chest; one slipped out of her sweatshirt and picked up the letter she’d dropped on the bed. “Second thoughts?”

“No.” She sighed. “I don’t know. The kids…saw her. I assume it was her anyway. They said, ‘We love Nana.’”

He rested his head on her shoulder and hugged her from behind. It was meant to be comforting; in almost any other situation, it would’ve worked. “That’s good, right? Maybe you should give her a chance.”

“Because you’ve had such good luck trusting your family?”

She felt his breath catch for half a second and immediately regretted her words. Even alluding to his horribly abusive father was a low blow. Sometimes she wished she considered and dissected her words more before she spoke, like Max did. “I’m sorry,” she said to him.

He kissed her cheek—apology accepted. “I wish I had the chance to reconnect with my mother, is all I’m saying. But I know the circumstances are different—your mom had a choice, and mine didn’t. Do whatever you’re comfortable with.”

How could he be so sensible about family after the nightmare that was his childhood? Well, she was tired of staring at the letter and wondering what could be. “I guess I could ask her to stay for a couple weeks. If it gets weird or she asks for money, I’ll kick her out.”

Max chuckled. “There’s my mushy-hearted wife.”

Dropping Danielle’s letter on the nightstand, he lifted her gingerbread batter–stained sweater over her head and tossed it to the side. Val’s skin prickled where his fine dress shirt and thousand-dollar suit vest pressed against the bare skin of her back. He pulled out the elastic band holding her strawberry-colored hair in a messy ponytail, and it spilled across her bare shoulder in loose waves.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” he said as wound her hair around his hand, then gently pushed her head down until her naked torso lay atop the bed’s foot.

“It’ll be a disaster,” she muttered into the comforter, her mouth beginning to water in anticipation of what he’d do next.

Max leaned over her, his clothed chest against her bare back. He wedged his hands between her skin and the sheets, slid his fingers across her breasts and down to her hips as he made a trail of agonizingly slow kisses along her spine. “If you’re nervous, I could stay home. Quit my job. We could do this all day.”

“We could not do this all day.” But God, she wished they could. He eased her sweatpants and panties off, dragging her socks and slippers along with them, until she lay half on, half off the bed, completely nude. “If you stayed home, you’d be even more bored, but also exhausted—”

She gasped when he reached between her legs and caressed her clitoris, already wet for him. He leaned over her again and kissed the back of her neck, his fingers stoking a fire in her belly that threatened to immolate her when they’d barely begun. She hadn’t even seen his face yet since he’d returned, but she didn’t need to. She knew him—his scent, his taste, his touch, his voice, his walk, his thoughts, his past, his secrets, his everything. He was a collage of everything good and a little bad in the world, all the most interesting parts, as if brought to life by some force that made him just for her, and she for him.

He whispered, though his voice was clear with his lips against her ear. “I’ll do the dishes, you’ll take out the garbage. We’ll sneak away, once, maybe twice a day—”

A long sigh flowed from her lips. She clutched the sheets as all rational thought fled her mind.

“And fuck our brains out.”

Oh, that sounded nice. His chest slid up and down her back, his breath burning her neck in rhythmic puffs. His tongue flicked her ear. A moan rushed from her chest and out her mouth in a gush of lust. He excelled at pleasing the woman before himself, using everything he had besides his own manhood to delay his own climax and the trance that followed, which seemed like a strange sexual dysfunction to anyone who didn’t understand what they could do. Already she was close to falling over the edge into one of her visions, but this was the best part—the act of lovemaking. At its most primitive level, her body craved the finale, but her mind begged to stay in this moment, with Max. Yet he excited every inch of her flesh with his touch, pulling her further toward the climax as she fought with herself to remain in the present.

“Yes…I’d like that,” she said, breathless. “Every day—”

In a blink, her cheek left the mattress when he lifted her upright, his hand stoking the fire between her legs into an inferno. She leaned back against him, her moans growing into screams she couldn’t control as the passion inside her grew unbearable. With his free hand, he turned her head toward him and smothered her mouth with his, muffling her cries—can’t wake the kids—and the taste of him was enough to send her over the edge—

“Get up!” Sten yells in my face as sirens blare all around us. “Goddammit, Shepherd, GET UP!”

I struggle to stand but my legs won’t hold my weight. Blood trickles down my forehead and into my eyes. I can’t get up.

Sten is frantic. He pulls on my arm but can’t drag me far. He’s limping. Specs of blood splatter the body armor he’s wearing.

“Get up—” Sten’s head jerks sideways as a bullet strikes his temple.

Blur.

Max grabs fistfuls of clothes from a dresser drawer and shoves them into a duffle bag.

“Fine, just run away,” I say, my voice shaking. I tremble with rage, and there are tears on my cheeks. I don’t know why. “Run away like you always do.”

“I can’t do this anymore,” he says. His face is haggard and his eyes are red like he’s been crying, too, though his anger has overwhelmed his sadness. “We’re never going to find her. They will al. . .