Lightning Game (GhostWalkers 17)

Rubin knew the controversy raged on about whether or not there were still cougars in the mountains, although sightings were reported all the time. Few people other than those living there believed it. He hadn’t thought he would see one, and certainly not on his property. He turned to look at Jonquille and his heart clenched hard in his chest. Her gaze was riveted to the scene, eyes filled with liquid so they looked silvery and haunting. Tears tracked down her cheeks. It was the last thing he’d expected when she was clearly a warrior.

“Jonquille.” He whispered her name and gathered her up without thinking, needing to hold her more than he needed to remain still and quiet for the wildlife around him.

Rubin pressed his back to the downed tree and put her in his lap, his arms around her. “What is it? Surely you’re not upset because the cougar needed to eat. She has young to feed.”

She rubbed her face against his jacket, trying to get rid of the tears. “I’m sorry. This is silly and I know it. I’m not like this. I’m really not.”

He caught her hand when she went to brush away the tears. “Sweetheart, just tell me what’s going on.”

“I don’t know why the memories are so close right now. That door opened and I can’t seem to force it closed.”

The little break in her voice tore at him. He found he was more susceptible to her emotions than he had first realized he would be. Her laughter. Her pain. When she was upset like this, it was very disturbing to him. When they were together, he wasn’t going to be able to function properly if she was sad or angry with him.

“You don’t want to hear these morbid stories.”

“I do. I want to know everything about you, Jonquille.” He did. The more he knew about her childhood, the more he understood her.

“One spring he brought us puppies. Whitney. We should have known better than to trust him, but he said it was to teach us responsibility. We could each choose one, and we were solely responsible for its care. We could have the puppy in our room, and it could even sleep in our bed with us if we wanted.”

Rubin could hear the way she tried to distance herself, the notes of horror in her voice, the strain when she told him, as if she couldn’t quite believe what had happened. He had studied Whitney the way he did every enemy they went up against. He was a logical man and gathered as much information as possible without emotion in order to better learn. One could look at something from every angle that way. Whitney was a true megalomaniac. He was someone obsessed with his own power. He was both a narcissist and a psychopath. He had no conscience. Rubin would never be surprised by anything anyone told him Whitney did, unless it was betraying his country.

He ran his hand down the back of her head, feeling the thickness of all that soft blond hair before plunging his fingers deep to massage her scalp in an effort to soothe her. Retelling the childhood story after locking it away where she refused to even look at it was obviously reliving it again. He wanted to tell her she didn’t need to tell him, he understood it was going to be bad, but she needed to share it with someone. He wanted to be her someone.

“All of us were so careful with our little charges. We were so happy that spring. We walked them and cuddled with them.” She kept dashing at the tears. “We all loved them so much. We were required to keep up with our studies as well as our training, but we could take our dogs with us as long as they behaved. We trained them even at an early age using the crates provided. All of us worked so hard, and Whitney acted like he was proud of us for the jobs we were doing. We kept them for eighteen months.”

She coughed and cleared her throat before looking up at him with pain-filled eyes. “He introduced a program to us he called survival of the fittest. At first the subject matter was all about nature and the food chain. We were kids, but we understood even though we were shown extremely graphic films. Then one evening instead of curfew, we were told to go to the arena that had been set up. We were to sit in the stands.” She pressed a trembling hand to her mouth.

“Jonquille, sweetheart.” He dropped his hand to the nape of her neck and tried to ease the tension out of her. She seemed so small and lost—very vulnerable—when before, in spite of her diminutive size, she was a little powerhouse. “You don’t have to tell me.”