2. Hunter

TWO

HUNTER

I follow Luna in a daze, but part of me feels it’s important to be hypervigilant to my surroundings.

Everything you know is a lie.

Well, fuck if that isn’t the truth.

We continue walking and move past a dining area. There’s a buffet set up with various dishes on display, and it’s the most bizarre sight in the context of what we’ve just gone through in the six hours since Leo and I departed Amelia Manor for the first time.

It’s as if Martha Stewart decided to show up and play hostess for our gaggle of vigilantes.

I return my focus to Winter and try not to break down at the reality that I almost lost her tonight.

Again. I almost lost her again. When am I going to be enough to keep her safe?

Control. Control yourself, Hunter.

Her hand moves up and down on her stomach.

I will keep them safe.

My focus on my surroundings continues to go in and out, and the only thing anchoring me to this moment is Winter’s hand in mine.

Her skin has a sickly cast, and I’m concerned at how her chin trembles with each step. She was so strong as I broke down in front of my….

I open my mouth to ask Winter how she’s doing when Luna interrupts the moment.

“Here y’all go,” she drawls, using her hand to open one of the medical-grade double doors. We all cross the threshold, and Luna goes to one end of the room where two people in black scrubs stand next to a medical device. The clinic is pristine, and there are several more people milling around the triage area.

In one of the bays is my son.

“August!” Winter rushes toward him. As she approaches, August puts one hand up to his ear and uses the other to point at Winter’s bloodied arm.

Winter draws up short and says, “August, are you all right?” She frowns, and I force myself to unglue my feet from my spot.

“August,” I say, rushing toward him. “Shit, I’m sorry I handed you off back there.”

August rocks from side to side and then turns away to sit on the floor with his back to the wall.

Winter turns to the medical staff surrounding August.

“Has he been assessed? Who is in charge here? Where the fuck is the communication tablet he just had?” Winter’s voice rises with each question, and I swing my gaze from her to August.

The tablet I watched him take when he got off the helicopter is gone.

“Hi, I’m Alison. We had a little mishap with his tablet, but we’re working on getting a replacement within the hour.”

“A mishap?” Winter presses, emphasizing each syllable. “How? Why? When? Where?”

The short brunette grimaces against the force of Winter’s demands.

I walk toward my son but speak to Winter. “Breathe, Sunbeam.”

I settle into a crouch in front of August. Pulling out my phone that’s miraculously still functional, I tap into the app that connects with August’s AAC account.

“August,” I say with a soft voice, “what do you need?”

Winter moves from person to person, interrogating each one about August.

I hand him my phone, and he takes it with a trembling hand.

Rocking back and forth several times, he taps his thoughts out on the smaller screen.

After a few strenuous minutes, he taps the “talk” button.

“I am scared.”

His words hit me in my chest, and it takes me a moment to start breathing again.

“August, I’m so sorry all of this happened,” I say, and the words are thick in my throat.

Sorry. I’m always saying fucking “sorry.”

He releases a deep, keening sound, bending over so tightly it’s almost like he’s trying to make himself into a ball.

It breaks my fucking heart.

“August—” I rasp, and he surprises the fuck out of me when he jumps into my arms. He squeezes me tight, and the tremor that wracks his body makes me want to kill people.

I band my arm across his back, giving him firm pressure to orient himself like Winter taught me.

“We are safe right now,” I vow to him.

Please let this be true.

“Let go of me!” Winter’s pained scream causes me to jerk to a stand, August still in my arms.

“Hey!” I yell, and someone who looks like a medical assistant drops her uninjured arm. Another person in scrubs stands behind Winter with a wheelchair. Luna stares at Winter with a strange look from her place in the corner.

I shift my attention back to August when he makes a distressed sound, and I follow his gaze to the blood tracking down Winter’s arm.

He’s beyond overwhelmed and heading into meltdown territory.

In a snap, he pushes away from me and runs out the door, taking my phone with him. He can have it.

The people assigned to him rush out in pursuit.

“August, wait!” Winter moves to follow him, but the medical assistant who tried to muscle her into the wheelchair steps in front of her.

“Ma’am, you’re hurt. Please let us help you,” the man says.

“He’s my...That’s my—get the hell out of my way!” Winter yells as she groans. She tried to use her injured arm to push the man aside.

When her legs buckle, I lurch to catch her.

“H, you have to go after August,” she says. Her skin pales even more, and there’s a distant look in her glassy eyes. “You have to go. He’s alone and scared!”

Her eyes start to twitch from side to side, her breaths coming more rapidly.

“Sunbeam?” I rasp, grabbing her uninjured arm. I feel her muscles twitch beneath her skin as she begins to pant.

“Panic…attack,” she says with broken breaths. She grabs her chest, bending over. “Just give me—” She puts her bloodied arm straight out in front of her, backing away from all of us. I see it on her face when the pain registers. Her strangled, pained roar causes a primitive part of my brain to rebel.

“Sunbeam, breathe,” I command, hoping to force her out of her attack, even though I know it doesn’t work that way.

“Go with August, Hunter!” she screams at me, still backing away from all of us until she’s tucked into a corner of the room—the same space August vacated.

I put my hands up in front of me. “Let’s get you okay first. We need to get you stitched up and check on the baby.”

Winter’s eyes go wide as she says, “The baby…” and then collapses into my arms.

“Fuck,” I mutter, picking her up in a bridal hold. Winter groans, squeezing her eyes shut tight.

I spin to the wheelchair guy. “Fucking help us!” I shout, my voice reverberating off the tiles. A second later, Winter leaves my arms and lands in the chair.

I follow, only to have a mean-looking woman in surgical scrubs stop me.

“You need to wait here. There’s limited space and we need to triage and stabilize Winter before we can let you back.”

Red haze covers my field of vision.

“The. Fuck. You. Will,” I spit at the woman, and I question for the first time tonight if I’m losing my mind.

Mom. August. Winter. Mom. August. Winter. Winter, Winter, Winter….

The nurse crosses her arms, and I spot a tattoo on her forearm that marks her as special forces.

“The. Fuck. I. Will,” she snaps back. We’re in a stare-off, but when two huge figures—Nameless One and Nameless Two from our trip to Isla Cara—come into view, I feel my chest getting tight again.

Isla Cara.

Father. Dead.

Bile rushes up my throat as the cellular memory of the stench of rotting flesh assaults me.

I nod sharply, spinning around.

“C’mon, Brigham.” Luna sighs as if she’s over the drama in front of her. Then, in three quick steps, she’s in front of me, pulling me by the armpit.

“Here you go,” she adds.

“The fuck?” I mutter as she drags me away.

She sighs again and anger flashes in her eyes. “Listen, we can do this the simple way, or we can do this the way that causes you to lose a few ounces of blood.”

She looks me up and down.

“Well, hopefully only a few ounces. You never know,” Luna says.

She’s deceptively strong because it seems as if it costs her nothing to pull me alongside her and down the corridor.

We move back through the mansion for several minutes before she happens upon a door that looks just like the one we used to enter Misha’s office hours ago.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a matter of hours, not days, since Leo and I left Amelia Manor with every intention of returning to our normal lives there.

She ushers me into the room, releasing her grip on my upper arm.

“So!” she says, clapping her hands once and spinning around to face me where I stand near the entrance. “Sit down for a spell.”

I bite back the grunt I want to emit from escaping my throat. “Any way I can convince you to take me back to Winter?”

She rolls her eyes. “Winter is fine. She’ll be all right without you for a few minutes. Plus, before you go in there, I need you to chill out.”

“Chill?” Is she out of her mind?

“Yes. In case you haven’t clocked it, there’s a helluva lot going on. Ya know, since a whole bunch of people just died on your front step?” She sits on a plush leather loveseat, kicking her legs out to set them on the low glass coffee table in front of her. “I don’t need any infighting going on right now. So yes, you need to sit ya’ ass down and chill.”

I blink at her.

This office is smaller—not the same size as the one Misha’d taken us to. There are touches of feminine accents around, and I realize this is Luna’s sanctum.

“Sit,” she says, nodding to the chair across from her. I do what she tells me and plop into the leather seat. It takes everything within me to resist telling her to fuck off.

“How do you know how Winter is doing?” It’s been all of ten minutes since I last saw her, and it feels ten minutes too long.

She points at her smartwatch. “I got a text from Dr. Whitney with her status.”

“Who the fuck is Dr. Whitney?” I look from left to right, expecting something to stick out in the unsettling normalcy.

Everything you know is a lie.

Luna gives me an annoyed look. “Dr. Whitney is a doctor. A physician. A medical provider.” She sighs shortly. “Listen, Hunter. I promise I’ll take you to your woman in a few minutes. But you look like a deer in headlights with a lethal bent to ya, so I want you to at least have a baseline of what’s going on.”

She raises her eyebrow again, as if daring me to contradict her.

“Fine,” I say, my voice hoarse.

“Great!” She cracks the knuckles on her right hand with her thumb. “So surprise number one, your mother isn’t dead.”

“So that’s not a clone hanging out in your foyer then?”

Luna chuffs.

“No, Hunter. That’s Amelia Brigham in the flesh.”

I grind my teeth as the image of her blemished skin materializes in my consciousness. “Right,” I reply.

“Your next question, I suppose, is how the hell did she get here?” Luna speaks while analyzing her cuticles.

When I’m silent for a moment too long, she looks at me. I nod.

“Well, all of the details of what happened between then and now are for your mother to divulge. However, I can tell you that she came to be with us about five years after she ‘passed.’”

“Why then?” I ask.

Luna shrugs. “Another mystery, I suppose,” she says.

I highly doubt that Luna doesn’t know the answer to that question too.

I nod again, rubbing my hands on my thighs. It’s only been a few minutes since Luna led me to this room, and I’m getting antsier, not calmer, the longer we’re in here.

I stand, anxious to get this energy out of my body. I want to go to Winter. I need to go to August. I have to know what the fuck is going on.

“Surprise number two. Misha is your brother.” Luna sits up, leaning to put her elbows on her now-bent knees. “Well, your half-brother, to be accurate.”

The confession hits me in the chest, but so does massive confusion. I focus on the tick of the second hand on the massive clock on the far wall.

“Uh-huh,” is all I can make myself say.

“You’re probably wondering why and how that all happened too, right? Well, not how it happened. I’m sure you know how that works?—”

“Why,” I bite out, “am I just now learning that I have a half-brother? The head of the Ukrainian mob, no less?”

“It’s a mindfuck, I know. I could kick Misha for not telling you earlier. He planned to, you know. As for the mafiya,” she waves her hand in the air dismissively, “That’s been running on its own for at least the last decade since he took it straight. He never wanted to be pakhan, but if he weren’t in charge…well, the alternative is intolerable.”

I run a hand across my mouth when she finishes, my brain whirring like an old, overworked computer. Misha’s reputation presents him as a deadly, unmoving mafiya leader, but now Luna is suggesting that his organized crime unit is something altogether different.

“I see,” I reply. “And the rest of it?”

Luna works her jaw to the side for a second before continuing. “He was unsure where you stood with everything after he saw you still planned to marry Blair Winthrope. Things were…unclear. He wanted to wait until you got back from Isla Cara and was going to tell you tonight…or last night? But?—”

“But we were raided,” I finish for her.

“Exactly,” she confirms.

“All right, so Misha is my brother. How is that logistically possible? Seeing as he’s Ukrainian and my mother and I are not.”

The stories begin to spin in my head.

“When your mother was a child, she was promised to a Soviet nomenklatura as part of a silent pact between the United States and the USSR.”

“A pact between the US and the Soviet Union? They were adversaries.”

The look Luna gives me clearly telegraphs how idiotic she views my statement.

“Right,” she replies coolly. “Anyway, the Politburo was essentially like our Congress, but over in the Soviet states back then. The end of General Secretary Brezhnev’s term and the beginning of Andropov’s saw a lot of corruption. Like, a special amount of corruption. So no one knew what the Politburo was doing or who really was in charge.”

I nod my head to signal that I’m following her.

“Dimitri Hroshko, Misha’s father, was the de-facto leader of the Politburo. And he wanted Amelia Brigham.” She shrugs. “Amelia’s father, Lance, was so sure the USSR was going to take over the world, so he allied himself with the Soviets. Dimitri and Lance met in Vienna when Amelia was a child, and Dimitri was immediately infatuated. So in a deal with her father, Dimitri took her.”

I think about my grandfather’s insistence on having tunnels built in the walls of Amelia Manor, and the safe room that I recently updated following Winter’s disappearance. His fear that the USSR was going to take over the world tracks.

“How old was she when they met?” I say, feeling a rising sense of dread.

“She was nine,” Luna says simply.

I gape at her.

“Her parents kept her in the States until she came ‘of age.’ They were traditional like that, I guess,” she says.

“When was she considered ‘of age,’ then?” I ask.

“Fifteen.”

I expel a breath. “How was that even legal?”

“Well, she had her parents’ permission. Plus, who was she to go against the entirety of the USSR?” Luna shrugs, but the haunted look in her eyes doesn’t match her ambivalent pose.

“So then she had Misha and…what? Dropped him in the tundra and hopped back over to the States?”

Her chuckle is humorless. “Not quite. Dimitri immediately got Amelia pregnant, and she gave birth to Misha within a year of arriving in Kyiv. She was miserable to hear her tell it, but then along came your father.”

Wow.

“So my father just…took her too?”

Luna gives a noncommittal shrug.

“Why did he take her?”

She raises her eyebrow in response to my question.

“My father, why did he take my mom from Misha’s dad?”

Luna sighs. “I suspect because he loved her.”

The thought is appalling.

Luna stands up. “I just want you to know that this may be confusing as fuck right now, but this is the best part of everything that’s going on right now.”

This is the best part?

A knock sounds at the door, and in a second, Misha’s in the room, sucking up all the air.

“Come with me, Brigham. There’s much to discuss.” Misha sports a small tan band-aid where I cut him, and the sight makes me smile. With the quirk of an eyebrow, he turns and heads for the door without waiting for my response.

“Go where? I’m going back to my family.” I lean back in the chair, applying unspoken resistance against Misha’s command.

I need to find August. He needs me. And I need to get back to Winter. She needs me too.

He pauses in the doorway but looks over his shoulder at me. “Your woman is fine. Your son is being tended to. Don’t you want to know what’s happening before you face her? Don’t you want to give her more certainty rather than more questions?”

I want to punch him in his too-straight teeth. But instead, I stand without a word.

“Excellent,” he says in a flat tone. Then he’s out the door.

I take a step to follow him when Luna puts her hand on my forearm.

“Remember that this is bigger than you or me. This is about all of humanity.” She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

“No pressure then,” I reply in a dry voice.

She smiles wider.