Page 46 of I Dream of Danger (Ghost Ops #2)

Flynn stood, staggered, righted himself, watching as a big red flower blossomed out from the handle, covering his pristine white Armani shirt. He staggered again, fell to one knee, head hanging. Straining sounds came from his throat though he wasn’t able to formulate any words.

Good. Flynn talked too much anyway.

Part of Lee admired the fact that from six feet away, having had to turn around and pass by his desk, he’d still instinctively been able to punch it straight between the ribs and bury it directly into Flynn’s heart.

Lee stood above the man, watching as the other knee gave out and he fell prone onto the floor. Flynn’s heart continued pumping blood for another two minutes, then the flow slowed, then stopped.

Lee looked at his reflection in the window, brightly lit against the snowy night sky as darkness descended in his mind.

His eyes were wide, a slight smile on his lips.

He watched for a moment, his ability to recognize the creature in the reflection draining away as quickly as Flynn’s blood had drained from his body.

Lee looked around, not recognizing anything familiar in his surroundings.

He moved into a slight crouch, hands pulling up toward his chest, hands open like claws.

Walls…he had to get out. Move. His body craved movement, craved blood.

It was sheer chance that he moved toward the wall with the door and not to one of the other three walls.

He walked forward and the door, biomorphic and primed to recognize his profile, opened.

He didn’t question that. There was very little reasoning ability left in him, just enough to recognize a door with an image of stairs and to realize that it led to an exit. The stairs led to the outside world, a world that awaited him.

He started loping for the stairs.

A woman stepped out from a door. Her eyes widened when she saw Lee, a binder dropping from her nerveless fingers.

“Dr. Lee—” The tone was a question but it was never answered.

Lee jumped to her, hands out to hold her shoulders still as he sank his teeth into her neck.

In two strong bites he’d chewed her ear off then dropped her at his feet, bleeding and twitching.

Out. He wanted to be out. He was strong and he wanted—no he needed —to hunt. To kill.

He scrambled down the stairs while he still recognized the concept of stairs. By the time he reached the lobby teeming with people, he’d lost the concept. But it didn’t matter because there was plenty of meat here.

He still recognized the concept of prey.

In the hallway, the woman slowly rose. She raised a hand to the side of her head and frowned.

Pain, wet…She had no words for the sensations she could only feel.

Her hands drew up to her chest, formed claws.

Kill. She wanted to kill. There was prey around, she could smell it.

Unsteady but unyielding, she loped down the corridor where two creatures had appeared.

Prey.

Mount Blue

“Eat,” Stella Cummings said, pushing a plate of potato gratin across to Lucius.

A very small slice, since he’d only begun to tolerate food.

She looked across at him, tortured, suffering yet upright and determined.

Any other man would have died a hundred times with what had been done to him.

What had been done to her by her stalker was a fraction of what had been done to him, and it had almost destroyed her.

He was an extraordinary man.

“That’s all you ever say to me. Eat,” he replied, dark eyes fixed on her. “You’d think I was five years old.”

Even in his weakened and emaciated state, Lucius Ward was a man to be reckoned with. She definitely didn’t think he was five years old.

“Eat,” she repeated, and smiled at him.

His face suddenly sharpened. His huge hand covered hers. “God, Stella. You are so beautiful.”

You are so beautiful. She’d heard versions of that phrase all her life.

The word had been pretty when she was a child actress, but turned into beautiful right about puberty.

Through some accident of bones and hormones she hadn’t gone through an awkward pubescent phase at all.

She’d continued working as an actress all the way through.

By the time she was 35, she’d made 120 films and had been considered one of the most beautiful women in the world.

What had that gotten her? Not much, besides more work. And more work. The men who’d courted her had courted the face, not the person behind it. When they discovered that her life was work, work, work, and very little play, the infatuation disappeared.

It certainly hadn’t brought her love.

And now the face was gone.

“Not so beautiful any more, Lucius,” she said, without any sadness. Crazily, her lost beauty had freed something up in her. Everyone in her life now liked her , not her face. Liked Stella, the member of an underground community, and not Stella, the remote movie star.

She was no movie star now. She could never be in the business again.

The stalker had sliced her up too badly.

Ninety-seven slashes all over, fourteen to her face.

One slice had gone right through her cheek, making it impossible to smile on the right side of her face.

She looked like someone had put her into a kaleidoscope and shaken it.

His hand tightened on hers. “Beautiful,” he repeated forcefully.

Oh God.

Sex, love—those were things that had completely fled her life after the stalker.

There’d been lots of sex before, though not love.

But afterward, both had been out of the question.

She’d taken refuge in anonymity while her scars had healed as much as they ever would, cooking in a small diner near Mount Blue belonging to the cousin of her former housekeeper.

She’d needed to do something, something tangible, with her hands, the way she’d needed to breathe.

And Elena had sent her to her cousin, where she’d buried herself in the kitchen in the back and started creating.

The greasy spoon became a diner, and was on its way to becoming a restaurant when the news told her that her stalker had escaped.

She’d been on a break, chatting with a customer, a good-looking, mysterious guy who showed up from time to time and who never told her his name.

If there was one thing Stella had learned in her life to respect, it was privacy.

‘Don’t ask don’t tell’ covered a lot of things, not just one’s sexuality.

She didn’t want to talk about herself and he didn’t want to talk about himself and that suited them both.

And then the news flash—Steve Gardiner, stalker, slasher, and all-round psycho who’d convinced the judge to put him in a mental institution instead of the deepest darkest cell on earth, had escaped.

She’d been talking to Jon when she heard. Suddenly she began to shake all over, the trembles coming from deep in her core. A fear so great she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

He’d taken one look at her, seen how terrified and broken she was, and simply brought her up to Mount Blue, to Haven, where she’d joined the community of misfits and runaways and had been happy ever since.

Here in Haven she’d found companionship and purpose. But love? It hadn’t even occurred to her that she might find it here, of all places.

She looked down at the large hand covering hers.

She remembered well that terrible night three months ago when Lucius and Miguel Romero, Larry Lundquist, and Bob Pelton had been rescued from a lab that had been like something out of a Nazi concentration camp, and brought to Haven.

The four men had been starved, full of surgical scars, so weak they couldn’t walk.

It had taken Catherine a week of IVs just to get them to be able to sit up in bed.

That’s when Stella had taken over, making it her personal mission to get them to eat as much good nourishing food as they could hold down.

Particularly their leader. Lucius Ward. Captain as Mac, Nick, and Jon called him.

Their respect for him had been evident in every line of their bodies, and once she got to know him, even the terrible tortured version of him, a strong man who had been rendered down to bedrock, she understood why. This was a formidable man in every sense.

She’d seen him put himself together inch by agonizing inch. If Catherine said to walk ten steps, he’d walk fifty. Grimacing with pain every inch of the way.

And though he never smiled and the lines in his face clearly showed he’d never been a smiling kind of man, his face lit up when she entered a room.

So, yes, sex seemed to be on the table.

But something needed to be said first. “You don’t have to call me beautiful, Lucius,” Stella said gently. “I know I’m not beautiful, not any more. And if you don’t care, I sure don’t.”

While she talked his dark eyes roamed over her face, over every inch of it.

It was something she was used to. When she’d been beautiful, men had stared openly at her, as if she were something rare and different, belonging to a different species.

After she’d been sliced open, people had stared for a different reason, the way you’d stare at a train wreck.

One of the many things she loved about Haven was that no one seemed even to notice her scars.

Lucius smiled, pulling at the burn scar on his right cheekbone.

He brought her hand to his mouth and placed his lips in the palm of her hand.

He kept it there for a long time, so long that she moved the tips of her fingers over the skin around his mouth, feeling a few scars, feeling the small bite of his heavy beard.

He finally lowered her hand to the table, but kept it in his.

“I never missed a movie of yours. I think I’ve seen every one since you were a kid. You had a rare beauty and a rare talent. But I find you more beautiful now, and your talent is one that everyone here appreciates.”