Fated in Stone, page 1
Seven Families Series
Wolf Family
Darkness in Stone
Redemption in Stone
Fated in Stone
FATED IN STONE
A SEVEN FAMILIES NOVEL: WOLF
BOOK THREE
KAT SIMONS
Will one mistake destroy their future…
Benjamin Logan has fought monsters for more than three hundred years, knowing one day he’ll be granted his promised mate, his true love, the one fated to break his curse. But meeting her in the middle of a deadly battle with a monster and its human minions topples all Ben’s plans. To save her, he makes one of the biggest mistakes of his life. A mistake that could cost him everything.
Elle Barker finds people for a living, tracking down missing loved ones for people out of options. Using her psychic skills, Elle discovers her newest target held captive in a compound that holds terrifying monsters unlike anything she’s ever seen. Out of her depth and desperate, Elle must overcome her suspicious nature to trust the one man who knows how to survive the deadly creatures. Only to learn he’s not what he seems either.
To survive, Ben and Elle must work together even as the building attraction between them overwhelms their common sense. With the world at risk, and the monsters getting stronger, their own feelings must take a backseat. But saving their future and stopping a horrifying plot, means accepting their bond…
Before it’s too late.
FATED IN STONE
Copyright © 2023 by Katrina Tipton
Cover design: © 2023 T&D Publishing
Cover Art: © Jim Cumming, © Photosvit | Dreamstime.com
Published by: T&D Publishing
T&D Publishing: https://www.tanddpublishing.com
Kat Simons Website: https://www.katsimons.com
Kat Simons Newsletter: https://bit.ly/KatSimonsNewsletter
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Thank You
Books By Kat Simons
About the Author
Kat’s Newsletter
To my family. I choose you, every day. And I wouldn’t change anything.
CHAPTER ONE
Benjamin Logan remained deep in the woods as he watched the woman, staying far enough in the shadows to avoid her sensing him in any way as she studied the house. It was just after sunset, but even in the dark, he wouldn’t have had trouble seeing her.
She was an average looking woman. Not too tall but not short. Dark blond hair cut into a short, loose style. Pale skin. Cargo pants, hiking boots, and a t-shirt. No jacket, even though it was still early enough in spring to be cold in the woods after dark. She was too far away for him to see details, like eye color, but his general impression was one of efficient movements and watchfulness. He was upwind of her so couldn’t catch her scent. Unfortunate. That would have made it easier to figure out what side of all this she was on.
The way she scanned the area, slowly, taking in the house, the surrounding woods. She didn’t approach the place like she belonged here. She stuck close to the tree line as she studied things, not moving out into the narrow clearing circling the house. She hadn’t come in a car. He’d have heard that. So she must have walked in from somewhere. Which hinted that she didn’t want anyone to know she was approaching.
There were two black SUVs parked against one side of the house. If the woman had belonged here, wouldn’t she have just driven up and parked with the other cars?
When she finally moved toward the house, she did so carefully, slowly, furtively. Her gaze continually scanning the surroundings as she headed for the side of the building instead of the front door.
The others went in through the front.
She wasn’t with the others, then. Not one of the Elemental’s humans.
So what was she doing here?
He started toward the house, only to stop in place again when something else caught his attention. A movement through the trees. A flickering of…something. Something gray.
A scent reached him.
Monster.
Without pausing to think, Ben raced toward the house. The woman was still on the side of the building, approaching carefully. He moved too fast for her to see and reached the back door before she rounded the corner. With a hard twist, he turned the handle, breaking the lock. A lock designed to slow humans down, not someone like him. An oversight by the Elemental’s people.
He edged inside, keeping his senses alert. Stacks of crates made the interior of the building more like a storage unit than a house. Using those crates as cover, he headed in the direction of the single light source at the center of the building. Toward the smells of reagents and cleaners and human sweat.
He heard the woman ease inside the building moments later. But his focus was on the people ahead. The geneticist.
A monster was approaching the house.
Ben had to get the geneticist out before the monster got him.
Elle Barker stared at the house from just inside the tree line. It wasn’t what she’d been expecting. Especially since it wasn’t a real house.
From the outside, the building—roughly the size of a three-bedroom, single story ranch—looked a little rundown, maybe not used for a few years. The surrounding north Michigan woods moved in close, encroaching on any yard space. There was some room at the front of the house, with two black SUVs parked along the side, and a little clearing between the back of the house and the woods. A boxy building with a slate roof and worn walls in desperate need of a paint.
But that was where the resemblance to a home ended. No windows. No light leaking out of the wooden slate sides, though it was dark now and if there were people inside, there should be some light. But, most telling, was the steel front door that looked more solid than the walls. No way to confuse this for a slightly rundown family home.
The door being more solid than the walls was interesting, and it nearly threw her off the scent. The look of the place from the outside made her distrust her information. How could this be the place?
She’d seen places like this in her years of tracking people. Especially in the early days, when she’d specialized in finding men that were like her father. Back then she’d been working with various law enforcement agencies. Now she worked for herself, and she went looking for who she wanted, when she wanted. No more hunting down budding domestic terrorists. Now she found people whose families actually wanted them back.
She liked this work better. Much better.
But being up north again and seeing this particular building brought her back to those early years and made her doubt her instincts, her information, and her skills. This couldn’t possibly be where the professor was being kept.
Circling the outside of the house, she took note of the generator, humming quietly, that kept the building in electricity but off the grid. And there was a small hole in the wall, high, near the roof, that leaked some faint light. That hole was interesting. An anomaly, like walls that weren’t as strong as the steel door in the front of the building. Or the steel door in the back of the house.
That was open.
Her tracking sense started to tingle. This was the place. This had to be the place.
Finding lost things, specifically lost people—even if they were “lost” because they wanted to be unfindable—was a skill she’d had for as long as she could remember. She’d been ten years old before she realized not everyone had that particular sense of where things and people were.
But Elle didn’t rely on her unique talent for finding things when she worked. She did her research. She used more conventional methods. Especially when she’d worked with law enforcement, because she had to ensure she could explain how she’d tracked someone, could provide information that went onto official records and sometimes got introduced into court cases. She rarely had to go to court these days. That was for the lawyers and cops and federal agents. But she did sometimes have to give testimony or be deposed, sometimes file a police repo
Telling a skeptical judge or lawyer that she’d “just known” didn’t go over well. Telling anyone she had a psychic sense that helped her track people was not going to happen.
Those conventional methods reassured her as well, most of the time. She trusted that other sense…to a degree. Because it had always worked for her. But she worried that one day, it wouldn’t, and she’d be unable to find someone who was the light and life of the people looking for them. Failure wasn’t an option in those cases. So she ensured she used every skill at her disposal to find the people she was hired to find.
In this case, a beloved husband and father. Kidnapped from his university office more than a year ago. His family were desperate. They knew he was still alive. He was allowed to call once a month to speak to his wife and kids. No one ever asked his family for money—which they didn’t have enough of to pay a huge ransom, but they would have found it among friends and associates if they had to—and there was no sign of the professor being returned. The police had put the case onto a backburner because nothing had changed and the man was still alive.
After talking to the officer in charge of the case, Elle realized why they’d backburnered things. They were convinced the man had left his family, of his own volition, and just wasn’t ready to admit it to them yet. The police assumed Professor Gabe Arron was living with a mistress or second family or something and faking the whole “kidnapped” thing for shits and giggles.
Elle knew better. The minute Sherry Arron had walked into her Detroit office, Elle had known the truth. But with no help from the police, Sherry was desperate. She’d come to Elle. And Elle had promised to find her husband.
A search which had led Elle to this seemingly old and abandoned house in the middle of the northern Michigan woods.
With an open back door.
The open door had alarm klaxons screaming in her head. It wasn’t wide open. Just enough to look like someone had either forgotten to close it fully or had purposefully left it ajar. Just enough to get back out without making noise, but not so open as to be obvious.
Whatever the reason, that open door gave Elle her way inside.
After a last check of the surroundings, ensuring no one spotted her entering the building, she slid quietly past the heavy steel door. Just inside, she paused. The building felt very large. A lot larger than it had looked from the outside. Even the roof felt higher, peaked and with no attic or anything to lower the ceiling. The building was one big open space, as far as she could tell. Turned into a maze by stacks and stacks of wooden crates that piled almost to, but not quite as high as, the roof. Like a warehouse.
There wasn’t much light either. Without windows, the shadows beneath the crates were deep enough she could have used a flashlight. She wasn’t going to turn one on, but it would have helped. There seemed to be a single light source coming from somewhere in the middle of the maze, which gave just enough illumination throughout the building she could see to navigate. That light source also gave her a direction to head.
She made her way silently through the maze of crates, pausing often to listen. The soft whirring sounds of a machine of some kind echoed through the building. And a faint hint of something dripping. The smells caught her attention, too. A medicinal smell like strong bleach softened by lemons. She also picked up a hint of something burning? Not like a campfire, or fire in a fireplace, or even a gas stove. Something a little more… She wasn’t sure. She wanted to say metallic, like metal was burning. She squinted at a few of the wood crates as she passed, looking for hints as to what they held. But they were either plain with no writing on them, or the marks were things she didn’t understand and the language used one she didn’t know.
As she neared the source of light, she saw a single bulb hanging from an unadorned wire dropping down from the roof. Except for that slow drip of some liquid and soft whirring of a machine, the house was silent. A silence that made her nerves jangle. Once again, she might have doubted her information and her instincts. If that back door hadn’t been open. That opened door set off all her tracking instincts. She was in the right place.
But she was a little worried she was going to find a body instead of a living man.
Her heart hammered hard, way beyond the effort it had taken her to hike up to this house from where she’d parked her car. She steadied her breathing, carefully controlled the rush of adrenaline that whispered she had to hurry. Eased through the boxes, her hiking boots quiet on the scuffed wooden floor.
A sound. A creak of wood and a whoosh. Behind her.
She spun, prepared to dive for cover. But nothing appeared in the shadows. No movement. She stared into the dimness back the way she’d come. No one rushed her. No strange glints, like the light hitting metal on a gun. No shadows changed sizes.
She scanned the tops of the stacked crates. Nothing up there either.
Releasing a slow, calming breath, she faced the lightbulb and the machine noise again. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled.
She was almost to the part of the maze where she could see what the lightbulb illuminated when she finally heard voices.
“Hurry.” A man, his voice deep and urgent.
“I’m doing the best I can. You didn’t give me any warning. If I leave this…everything will be lost.” Another man. A nice tenor rumble to his voice. A crisp clip of vowels. The second man sounded only a little less panicked than the first.
“We don’t have time to worry about that,” the first man said. “You’ll just have to redo everything.”
“I have been working on this for eight months. I can’t just redo everything. Not in the timeline I’ve been given.”
“You don’t, professor, you die. So I suggest you figure it out. But not now. Once we get to the next location.”
“I can’t work like this,” the second man muttered. The “professor.”
That was her target. Sherry Arron’s husband. Professor Gabe Arron.
Elle eased forward, careful of her steps so she didn’t make the wooden floor creak, careful of her breathing so she didn’t give herself away in the mostly quiet building. The high ceiling ensured sound carried, echoed. Like the voices ahead of her.
“Stop that,” the second man snapped. Professor Arron. “You’ll destroy it. That won’t make your boss happy.”
“The boss wants you in a new location immediately. That’ll make the boss happy. Move it.”
The sound of footsteps. Heavy and thudding. From the direction of the front door. “We gotta move,” a third voice. Yet another man. “Someone’s here.”
Shit. She must have left a footprint or something that a scout had found. She’d tried to be careful. But it had rained two days ago and there were still muddy spots in places under the trees.
A rush of fear froze her in place. What did she do now? If they ran, she was too far away from her car to follow immediately. She’d have to hurry back to her car and pick up the trail from there. More time. More chance the ones holding Professor Arron would panic and kill him. Not a chance she wanted to take.
But there were at least two men guarding the professor, and there could be more in here who just hadn’t spoken yet. She was one unarmed person. If the guards had guns…
She shook her head. She’d worry about that when she spotted the guns. For the moment, she needed to get closer, see what she was working with. See exactly how much danger the professor was in.
