Key Of Valor (Key 3)

It had been spring, late spring. She'd admired the gardens, the yards, the settled feel of the place.

She'd spotted the For Sale sign on the scrubby lawn in front of the little brown house. And with a kind of inner click of recognition, she'd known it was the one. She stopped at the curb, as she had then, studied what was hers while trying to see it as it had been.

The houses on either side of it were small, too, but well tended. Nice trees offering shade. There'd been a young girl riding a bike along the sidewalk, and a teenage boy down the block, washing his car while music blasted.

She recalled the thrill of anticipation that had bubbled through her as she'd jotted down the name and number of the realtor on the For Sale sign.

And that's where she'd gone next. So she followed the same route now. The asking price had been too high, but that hadn't discouraged her. She'd known she probably looked like a mark, in her inexpensive shoes and clothes. She probably sounded like one, with that hint of rural West Virginia in her voice.

But she hadn't been a mark, Zoe thought with satisfaction.

She parked, as she had parked then, and got out to walk.

She'd made an appointment to see the house—one she would, shortly, bargain fiercely for—and had walked along this downtown street and straight into the beauty salon to see if they were hiring.

The real estate office was closed for Sunday, as was the salon, but she walked to both, seeing herself as she had been. Full of nerves and excitement, but putting on a cool front, she remembered. She'd bagged the job—maybe quicker, maybe easier than she should have, she thought now. Another one of those things that were meant to be? Or had it just been a matter of taking the right path at the right time?

Better than three years she'd put into that salon, Zoe mused as she stood outside the display window with her hands on her hips. She'd done good work there. Better work than the bitchy owner, Carly. Which had been part of the problem.

Too many of the customers had begun to request Zoe specifically, and her tips had been solid. Carly hadn't liked that, hadn't liked having one of her operators take the spotlight in her own place. So she'd begun to make things difficult—cutting Zoe's hours here, or loading them on there. Complaining that she talked to the customers too much, or didn't talk enough. Anything that would demoralize or scrape away at her pride.

She'd tolerated it, hadn't fought back. Should she have? she wondered. She'd needed the job, the steady clientele and the pay, the tips. If she'd stood up for herself, she'd have been fired all the sooner.

Still, it was demoralizing to realize how much crap she'd put up with for a lousy pay stub.

No. She took a deep breath and pulled back the anger and the shame. No, she had put up with it for her home, her son, her life. It wasn't a battle she could have won. In the end she'd been fired in any case. But it had been the time for her to be fired, to be at one of those crossroads.

And hadn't that anger, that shame, that sense of despair, even panic, when she'd walked out of Carly's for the last time pushed her toward Indulgence? Would she have begun to build her own as long as she'd been drawing a salary, as long as the bills were being paid and the house was secure?

No, she admitted. She would have dreamed it, but she wouldn't have done it. She wouldn't have found the courage. It had taken a kick in the ass for her to risk the next path.

She turned away, stared out at the town she'd come to know as well as her own living room. That way to the grocery store, turn there toward the post office, head left and past the little park, hang a right toward Simon's school.

Up the block to the Main Street Diner and the milk shakes Simon loved. Straight out of town and up the mountain road to Warrior's Peak.

She could find her way from here, blindfolded, to Dana's apartment, to the house where Flynn and Malory lived. To the library, the newspaper, the drugstore, the pizza parlor.

She could follow the river to Bradley's. Different paths, she thought, walking back to her car. Different choices, different destinations. But they were all part of the whole. All, now, part of her.

If the key was here, somewhere in what was her home, she would find it.

She got in the car and took a winding path, the long way around, to Indulgence.

ZOE said nothing to her friends through the morning. She needed to work first, not only physically but mentally, to sort through her theory and to decipher exactly what had happened to her the night before.

She couldn't talk about it until she had it all straight in her head. And it was, she admitted, a different sort of dynamic when the men were around. There were things she could say, and a way she could say them when it was just Malory and Dana that didn't fit the same way when you added men.

Even men she'd come to trust.

She left Brad to the carpentry, and spent her Sunday morning regrouting bathroom tiles. It was the kind of work that left her mind free to tinker with what had happened to her, and what it might mean.

Was it odd that her experience hadn't been like what had happened with Malory or Dana on their first encounters with Kane? Or was it significant?

Choose, he'd told her. That, at least, followed pattern. Each one of them had had to make a choice. And apparently the risk increased with each key.

He hadn't really hurt her. There'd been that moment of pain in the blizzard, but she'd had worse. Why had he shown her three different scenes, barely giving her time to settle into one illusion before tossing her into the next?

The first had been a harmless little fantasy, hardly anything huge and life-changing. The second, more tedious and familiar, and the third…