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MILLS & BOON
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To all the soldiers fighting for our country
and our freedom—you are the real heroes!
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
May, New Orleans
THE WOMAN HAD NO FACE. No voice. No name.
Dr. Reginald Pace studied her near lifeless form as it lay on the shiny surgical table. The harsh fluorescent lights glared off her charred skin and raw flesh, painting an inhuman picture.
Her silent, vacant eyes begged for mercy. For death.
But the voice inside his head whispered that he could not fulfill her wish. It proclaimed that her body craved the transformation only his gifted hands could offer.
As a plastic surgeon, he saw the ruins of people’s faces and bodies on a daily basis. But never had he beheld a sight like the one before him—the very reason he’d made a deal with a demon to get her. She was the perfect one for his experiment.
Mangled, charred skin had peeled away from the severed tendons. Lips that once held a feminine smile now gaped with blisters and raw flesh. Bloodshot eyes, blinded by pain, had flickered with pleas for death before he had swept her under with the bliss of drugs.
His healing hands would piece her back together.
His healing hands and time…
Layer by layer he would rebuild her. Repair severed nerve endings, damaged cartilage. Replace tissue. Mold the monster into his beauty.
Without a face, a name, a picture, he could shape her into whatever he chose.
The woman of his dreams, God willing. She would be his creation. His to keep forever…
He gently brushed the remnants of her singed hair from her hairline. She would be in agony for a while, but he would be there with her every step of the way to offer her comfort.
And she would recover; he wouldn’t rest until she did.
A smile curled his mouth as he picked up the scalpel to get started. Yes, she would thank him in the end.
CHAPTER ONE
A year later, New Orleans
DAMON DUBOIS WAS A DEAD MAN.
As dead as the soldiers who’d fallen and given their lives for the country. As dead as the ones who’d lost their lives during the terrible hurricane that nearly destroyed New Orleans.
As dead as the woman he had killed.
His own heart did still beat and blood still flowed through his veins, forcing him to go through the motions of life.
A punishment issued by the gods, he was certain.
He could still see the flames licking at her skin, see the smoke swirling above her face, hear the crackle of the house as wood splintered and crumbled down upon her body.
For although his head hadn’t yet touched the pillow this dreary evening, nightmares already haunted him with the cries of that anguished woman screaming in pain.
And the bébé’s ghostlike cry…
“Tite ange,” he whispered. “Little angel, you did not deserve to die.”
Perspiration beaded on his neck and trickled down into the collar of his shirt as he opened the French doors to the hundred-year-old bayou house and breathed in the sultry summer air. The end of May was nearing and already the summer heat was oppressive. Sticky. The air hung thick with the scent of blood and swamp water. Eerie sounds cut through the endless night. The muddy Mississippi slapping at the embankment. A faint breeze stirring the tupelo trees. The gators’ shrill attack cry in the night. Insects buzzing for their next feed. A Louis Armstrong blues tune floated from the stereo, the soul-wrenching words echoing his mood.
Though a thick fog of blessed darkness clouded the waning daylight, forming morbid images to bombard him. A hand outstretched, begging for help. The fingers curled around the tiny bébé’s rattle. The accusing, horror-stricken eyes.
He blinked to stop the damning images, but they flickered in his mind like flashes of lightning splintering the sky.
The scream tore the air again, and he swallowed back bile. Its tormenting sound refused to stop, pounding against his conscience with a will he couldn’t defy. Reminding him of his past. His sins.
His vow of silence.
So many secrets…Tell and you die.
Inside his pocket, his cell phone vibrated, jarring him back to the present. Hauling him away from the pain and self-recriminations clawing at his mind.
He connected the call with sweaty fingers.
“Special Agent Damon Dubois.”
“Damon, thank God you answered.”
His little brother Antwaun’s strained voice rattled unevenly over the line. Something was wrong.
What kind of mess had his youngest sibling gotten into this time?
Hell, not that he had a right to judge anyone.
But the family knew nothing of his secrets. Or his lies…
“You have to come meet me. We found a woman…at least part of one.”
Holy Christ. “I’ll be right there. Where are you?”
Antwaun relayed the GPS coordinates and Damon snapped the phone closed, grabbed his badge and weapon and strapped it onto his shoulder holster. Fifteen minutes later, he parked and headed through a dense stretch of the swamp. The scent of murk floated from the marshy water as the mud sucked at his feet. The voices and faint beams of flashlights ahead served as his guide through the knot of trees, and when he reached the crime-scene tape, he identified himself to the officer in charge.
Through the shadows, he spotted Antwaun and strode toward him. His brother’s forehead was furrowed with worry, the intense anger in his dark eyes warning Damon that this was not an everyday crime scene. Something personal had entered into it.
“What’s going on, Antwaun?” he asked quietly.
Two uniforms frowned and muttered curses at his arrival, already the thread of territorial rights adding tension to an anxiety-ridden situation.
Antwaun leaned in close, his voice a conspiratorial whisper. “Hell, Damon. I think I know the victim.”
Damon’s gaze shot to his brother’s, his pulse racing. “How do you know her?”
“I can’t be sure, but…” His gruff voice cracked. “But if it is who I think it is, we dated.”
The heat thickened, causing a cold clamminess to bead on Damon’s skin. “You recognize her or what?”
Antwaun scrubbed a hand over the back of his scraggly hair, his face as pale as buttermilk. “Like I said, we only found part of her.”
Damon sucked in a sharp breath, then followed Antwaun over to the edge of the swamp. The murk chewed at Damon’s shoes, the stench of blood and a decaying animal hitting him. Somewhere nearby the hiss of gators warned him that hungry creatures lurked at the edges of the rivers. Yellow eyes pierced the inky darkness, scaly predators hiding beneath the water’s surface, taking stock of their prey. Biding their time. Waiting to strike.
Then he saw her. At least the part that was visible.
Her hand.
Just a single hand sticking up through the quicksand.
Brittle, yellowed bones poked through skin that had been gnawed away. The fingertips were half-gone. Blood dotted the remnants of mangled flesh, revealing exposed veins that had been sawed away by the jagged teeth of animals now watching nearby in silent reverie.
“How…” He had to clear his throat, push away the mounting fury and choking bile. No woman deserved to end up like this.
Had she been dead or alive when the gators got her?
“If this is all they found, what makes you think you know her?”
Antwaun’s hand shook as he pointed to what was left of her third finger. “That ring…”
“Yeah?” Damon squinted, moved closer, knelt and caught the thin thread of silver glinting through the mud and debris. Amazingly, the simple silver band still clung to the bone.
“I gave it to her,” Antwaun said in a low, tortured voice. “Right before she went missing.”
SHE LIVED IN THE DARKNESS. Had known nothing but pain for months.
And all that time, she had been missing, but no one had come looking for her. Why?
Clutching the sheets of her hospital bed between bandaged fingers, she begged for relief from the agony of her tormenting thoughts. Time bled and flowed together, sometimes nonexistent, sometimes lipping through the hourglass in slow motion. Sometimes chunks and days, even weeks gone by without notice.
Isolated, starved for human contact, she lay waiting for the doctor’s visit.
The bleep-bleep of hospital machinery became her music. His voice, her salvation.
Gruff. Soothing. Coaxing her to sit up. Eat. Fight for her life. Heal.
His touch offered comfort, compassion. It murmured promises that she might recover one day. Be human. Even beautiful.
His miracle.
Yet as much as his manner evoked concern and care for her, even growing feelings, the scent of medicine and hospital permeated his clothing, reminding her that he was her doctor, she his patient.
She was only one of many he had helped. But she’d heard the rumors. The hushed voices. And she had yet to see her reflection because he had stripped the hospital rehab facility of mirrors.
She was the woman without a face. A human monster.
He had repaired what he could. Endless, countless surgeries over the past few months. Bandages and medication, hours and hours of mind-control techniques to keep from going crazy. Sometimes she feared she walked a tightrope to insanity.
And when he left her room for the night, another man came. A monster like her who whispered in the shadows. The man with the scalelike skin.
Her one and only friend here. Lex Van Wormer.
He seemed to sense when she was teetering on the edge, and reeled her back in, sewing the tethered strands of her mind together with some fanciful story. Silly dreams of a future she had to look forward to.
One he dreamed about as well, but one that eluded them both. Instead they had become prisoners of the darkness.
A gentle knock sounded at the door, and the heavy wooden structure squeaked open. A sliver of light from the hall sliced the black interior, causing her to blink. Slowly over the past months of her imprisonment, her vision had adjusted and returned to near normal, though she still preferred the shadows. Whether this was to shield herself from having to face others and see the disgust or pity in their eyes, or because she’d begun to view the darkness as her best friend, she wasn’t certain.
Her breath lodged in a momentary panic in her throat as she listened to the approaching footsteps. One of the nurses with another round of injections? Dr. Pace with his soothing voice and promises that she would get better? Or Lex, somehow sensing that she had suffered another nightmare?
Nightmares or memories—she could no longer distinguish the difference. She only knew that night after endless night, some fathomless, sightless, black-hearted devil chased her. That he waited around every corner, watching, stalking, breathing down her neck. That she had to escape. That he wanted her dead and would stop at nothing until he achieved his purpose.
The door closed, blanketing the room once again in the gray fog that offered her safety.
It was always twilight in her room.
“Crystal?”
“Lex.” She exhaled a sigh of heartfelt relief. Still, the name felt foreign. The first time he’d seen her, he’d commented that her eyes reminded him of sparkling crystal cut glass, so he’d called her Crystal, and the nurses had latched on to it.
That she’d been blind at first and hadn’t been able to see him hadn’t mattered. She’d relished his company.
Then, finally, on a pain-filled admission to prove to her that she wasn’t alone in her world of shadows, he’d allowed her to touch his hand. She’d felt the scaly dry patches of leatherlike skin and had understood his reason for withdrawing from the world.
The condition, caused by exposure to an unknown chemical he’d been exposed to in the war, had disfigured him and eaten away at his body like battery acid. For a brief time before the bandages from her eyes had been removed, she’d feared she would react to his impairment.
But she had grown accustomed to the sound of his voice as he read her poetry at night, to the cadence of his laugh as he fabricated stories of journeys he’d taken, and his looks hadn’t mattered. In fact, she hadn’t even cringed when she’d finally rested her eyes upon him.
Apparently, he had adjusted to seeing her without a face, and covered in bandages as well. Who else would be so accepting?
He dragged the straight chair against the wall near her bed, then reached for her hand. A light squeeze, and her breathing steadied.
“Thank you for coming.” Heavens, she hated the choked, childish quiver of her voice. But she had been so lonely.
“I’ll always be here for you, Crystal. Always.”
She closed her eyes to stem the tears threatening. Theirs was an odd relationship. Two misfits thrown together, two survivors hanging on to life by a severed thread. Yet they weren’t really living either.
“I’ve missed you since last night, Crystal,” he said in a low voice.
She tensed. She’d sensed that his friendship ran deep, that he wanted more from her. She loved him in a platonic way.
Too many pieces of her past lost. Too many questions unanswered.
Another man…maybe waiting.
The sound of Lex turning his harmonica over in his hands with fingers brittle from his disease forced her to open her eyes again.
“Our quote for the day,” he began, “is from Ecclesiastes 49:10. ‘Two are better than one, for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow.’”
A sliver of unease tickled her spine as his words washed over her. Lex was her friend, but if she healed as Dr. Pace promised, and she had to hold on to the hope that she would recover, she couldn’t imagine Lex as her lover. And she knew that he wanted more from her.
He lifted his harmonica and began to wail out a blues song that gripped her with sadness. Regret fed the flames of her emotions. She loved Lex, and she didn’t want to hurt him.
But she had to find out who she was. Where she’d come from. How she had ended up here.
If she had a family, a husband, other friends. A lover.
And why in the past months, not a single person had cared enough to hunt for her.
DAMON STUDIED HIS BROTHER’S face as he drove toward their family’s house. Of all the confounded nights to have a homey get-together…but his mother had refused to take no for an answer. She’d hinted that his oldest brother, Jean-Paul, a detective with the New Orleans Police Department, had to see them.
God, he hoped that didn’t mean more trouble. Their family had been through hell the past two years. Katrina had nearly destroyed the family home and business—Jean-Paul had lost his first wife during the ordeal—and only a few months ago, their baby sister, Catherine, had almost died at the hands of a serial killer they’d dubbed the Swamp Devil.
Tonight—after witnessing the extraction of the woman’s mutilated hand from the swamp, listening to conjecture about the cause of death and the perp from the officers at the scene, and watching his brother sweat bullets for three hours—Damon’s head throbbed with anxiety.
But his mother insisted the Dubois family needed to celebrate Jean-Paul’s marriage to Britta Berger, the editor of a secret-confession column for a local magazine called Naked Desires, a woman who had drawn the serial killer to New Orleans a few months ago and given his brother the chase of a lifetime.
And the woman of Jean-Paul’s dreams.
Granted, Damon had been suspicious of Britta at first, and with good reason. Britta had a shady past, a traumatized upbringing, had lied and had secrets. But when the truth had been revealed, he’d realized she had been an innocent victim of a sinister cult that had sacrificed humans to a god they called Sobek. Not only had she survived and escaped the cult, and the leader who’d tried to kill her, now she helped teenage prostitutes get off the streets. She also loved his brother dearly.
Lucky bastard.
Damon pulled down the drive to their parents’ house, weaving through the maze of giant live oaks and the moss sweeping downward like spiderwebs. “Tell me about this woman, the one you think is our victim.”
“Her name is Kendra. Kendra Yates.”
“And how did you meet her?”
“She was a dancer at a casino bar. I…didn’t ask questions until later.”
Antwaun coughed into his hand. “Much later.”
So they’d slept together. No big surprise. His brother was quite the ladies’ man, in a hellion, take-me-as-I-am kind of way. “Dammit, Antwaun, when are you going to stop picking up chicks in bars?”
“Look, Damon, not everyone’s the sainted ex-marine that you are.”
Damon gritted his teeth, guilt plaguing him. “I’m not a saint. Never claimed to be.”
Antwaun scowled. “The folks and people in town sure see it that way.”
Damon narrowed his eyes. He didn’t have time for this bullshit. “Just tell me what happened between you and this woman.”
Antwaun flexed his fisted hands and stared at the blunt tips of his fingers. “We saw each other for a while. I…thought we were getting close.”
“You gave her a ring?”
“Yeah.”
He cut his eyes sharply to the side. “And its significance?”
“I didn’t propose, if that’s what you’re asking. But I did think about it, although the ring wasn’t expensive. I bought it from one of those artists on the streets.” He cleared his throat. Hesitated. Looked almost sheepish. Then a frown pulled at his mouth. “Later that night, she disappeared.”
“You reported her missing?”
“No. I thought she’d just left. Me.” His eyes darkened with hurt. “Figured I’d scared her off, or the ring wasn’t expensive enough.”
Damon contemplated his brother’s declaration. He sounded serious.
“I’ve never known you to fall for a woman, Antwaun.”
Antwaun shrugged his blue denim-clad shoulders. “Never thought I would either.”
Damon’s neck tightened as he parked the black FBI-issued sedan in the drive of his parents’ antebellum home. Since his last visit, they’d painted the house a pale yellow, the trim white. Huge ferns swung from the awning, and his dad had built a porch swing at one end and staged rocking chairs between pots of geraniums. Such a domestic setting.
So at odds with the Dubois men and their jobs. And now this trouble…
His mind spun back to Antwaun’s admission. If his little brother had actually fallen in love with Kendra Yates, she must have been pretty damn special.
But now the woman was dead. Murdered—and they both knew that Antwaun’s relationship with her meant he would be interrogated.
“All right, Antwaun. Now tell me the truth. Do you know why someone would kill her?”
“No. Like I told you, I have no idea what happened to her.” His brother shifted, chewed the inside of his cheek, then stared at the woods that backed his parents’ property. A shadow caught Damon’s eye, and he watched a gator slither up onto the bank and settle in the dark bed of weeds, hidden.
Damon’s gut churned. The cops called Antwaun a chameleon. When undercover, he could change colors to blend in with any background. Like the gator who hid in the spiny shadows of the weeping willow.
But Antwaun also had a temper, and a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He also liked to break the rules and push the limits. And sometimes he played the role of undercover bad guy a little too convincingly. His hotheaded temper had landed him in jail a few times when he was younger, and Damon and Jean-Paul had bailed out his ass, although they hadn’t been happy about it. And even in the service, he’d walked a fine line between fighting the enemy on the field and ending up in the brig for insubordinate conduct.
Damon studied the rigid set to his jaw as Antwaun climbed out. There was more to the story than he was telling. Something Antwaun didn’t want him to know. Something about Kendra Yates? Or was it about himself and their relationship? What else had happened between them?
LEX VAN WORMER WATCHED her sleep.
Crystal, he called her, because she had no name. Not that she knew of anyway.
Still, in spite of the way she had come into his life, she was an innocent angel shining light on his darkest hour. Like a rare piece of cut glass or a precious gem he’d discovered buried in graveyard dust.
At a time when he hung in limbo, he’d found a kindred soul.
Restless, tortured sounds erupted from her throat, drawing his aching eyes to the pale column of her neck. Whispers of fear echoed in her cries. Moments of reliving such horrid pain that even he felt like weeping from the misery.
He had known misery himself.
He had also caused it some, for which God would never forgive him.
He tucked the sheet gently around her slender, quivering form, then laid a hand against the silky hair that fanned across the hospital pillow. His breath caught in his throat as he waited for her to turn and scream, then jerk away from his touch. Yet she nestled farther into the bedding and turned to press her cheek against his scaly hand.
Tears of joy dampened his eyes. She trusted him. Needed him. And had accepted that he was grotesque from the disease that chewed away at his flesh. And not with his birth as a dark soul. One that had allowed him to push aside his conscience. One that had allowed the seeds of wrong to fester inside him. His diseased body now bore witness.
And so he lived in a world between heaven and hell, fighting the demons that wanted to take his soul.
Crystal was his salvation. If he could hang on long enough to save her, he just might escape the wrath of Satan….
Yet, even as regrets for the evil he had done burned his throat, the thrill of the blood hunt still seized his soul.
CHAPTER TWO
ANTWAUN DUBOIS HATED THE way his brother was looking at him. As if he didn’t trust him enough to confide the truth.
Dammit, trust had nothing to do with his silence.
If anything, Antwaun had to keep his secrets to himself to protect his brother. Every aspect of undercover police work involved putting up fronts. Pretending to be something you weren’t. Lying.
Sometimes he told so many lies he didn’t know the truth himself.
As the Chameleon, he could change his appearance to blend in anywhere. No job was too dangerous or too edgy for him to tackle. The risks be damned.