Vengeance (18 page)

F
rom where he sat cross-legged and naked on the bed, Max held a couple pages of stationery up to the dim lamplight. He chewed his thumb as his eyes raked over the numbers scrawled across the paper, searching for meaning. After the third vision he'd finally realized he needed to filter out the big numbers—
pi
, a Fibonacci series, the fractals that popped up again for the first time since Ethan—and focus on the numbers in between for useful information.

He recorded the in-between numbers using paper and a pencil he'd found in a kitchen drawer. Then he wrote down what he thought they meant: the intersection of Main and Third Street, 2:33 p.m., white Ford Taurus. Silver SUV—stay to the right. The number 7 kept appearing; it was important for some reason. And of course, he also saw a bunch of financial information he'd been trained since puberty to pay special attention to, no matter how much he tried to ignore it.

He circled the numbers he thought might be related. It was hard to tell without his books for reference. He possessed an impressive memory, but even he couldn't remember every value in every table. It might've been a Fourier series, which usually implied a body of water, like Lake Union, Lake Washington, or the Sound.

“Goddammit,” he muttered and slapped the papers on the bed.

“What's the problem?” Val asked from where she lay next to him underneath the covers.

He thought she'd finally fallen asleep after the half-dozen or more times they'd made love that night, but she looked at him now with clear gray eyes set in heavy lids.

“I'm horrible at this without my textbooks.”

“What are you trying to find out?”

Max showed her the papers. “I think these numbers are connected, but I don't know how.”

She pushed herself up onto one arm, the blue comforter falling away to reveal her naked torso. Despite the many times he'd already done it, he fought the urge to seize her and run his lips across every inch of her soft skin. He had a hard time controlling himself with her, and it bothered him. He feared he might have hurt her in his zeal to be inside her, though she hadn't complained yet.

She touched his bare shoulder. “Do you need help?”

He felt himself harden underneath the sheet across his lap. All it took was her touch. What was he, some kind of sex fiend now? He'd never been this
enthusiastic
about a woman before, and there had been plenty of others. But she knew things about him he'd never told anyone else, and she accepted them all. Maybe that was the heart of his intense attraction to her—she'd seen his dark side and didn't run. No matter what he wanted, though, she looked tired. They'd been fucking pretty much all night.

“Don't worry about it,” he said. “You need some sleep.”

He needed sleep, too. His many bruises ached and his head throbbed. He smirked a little, wondering if his doctor would say he was healthy enough for sex.

Val asked, “What does this mean?” She pointed to the only letters on the paper: “RR.”

“Oh, that's the red raven.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Your sex club?”

“No, I named the club after this. It's the only thing I still see in my visions that's not a number—a red-colored raven. I've seen it sporadically my entire life. I never knew what it meant before I met you.”

“What does it mean?”

“Well, I…I think it's you.”

Val blinked at him, then laughed awkwardly. “I'm not that important.”

“You said before that you've been able to change things that you saw. How?”

She shrugged. “I don't know. It's not special—I mean, apart from being able to see the future to begin with. Sometimes I'll see different versions of the same event—usually someone dying versus not dying—and I try to make the not-dying version happen. Most of the time it doesn't work. Sometimes, very rarely, it does. That's it.”

“What have you changed?” Max asked, hanging on her words.

Val frowned, lost in thought for a moment. “Stacey was one. I saw her drown in a boating accident with some of her community college buddies. I made up a reason for her to stay with me and not go on the boat. She really wanted to go sailing since she'd never been before, so I had to think of something compelling. I told her I still had feelings for her, that maybe we could take our friendship to the next level. I knew she still had feelings for me, so I used that. It was really mean, what I did. Awful. I broke her heart. Our friendship barely survived when I told her I'd changed my mind.” She hung her head and stared at the far wall. “But it worked. She didn't die. I've never told her the truth. I don't think she'd take it well.”

She rested her head on his shoulder like she was suddenly out of energy. “I saw you die, too, and you lived,” she said in almost a whisper. “I saw Robby live, and he died.”

“I've never been able to change anything,” Max said, “and I've tried many, many times. Sometimes I'd lie to my father about what I saw in a vision, like some company was about to declare bankruptcy, so he'd sell all his shares. That alone should have done
something
to change the market or hurt the company, since by that point he was a major player. But it didn't. Everything turned out just as I'd seen it in my vision, and the company was fine. After I tried that a few times, he caught on and made sure I didn't lie to him again.” Max cringed, remembering those awful beatings.

Val hooked her arm around his as if she sensed his unease.

“Then I tried a bunch of non-finance-related experiments, like every day I would lay out a series of random numbers on flash cards and take two numbers out of the deck. Then I'd try to use a vision to see which one I would put back in the deck the next day, and purposely put the other number in to change what I saw. But each time I did it, either my vision would be unclear, or somehow the number I saw would get back in the deck, despite my intention to keep it out. I thought someone was messing with me for a long time, so I'd alter the experiment to eliminate variables, control for outside influence or tampering. The experiments still turned out the same. For years I tried different experiments—trying to outwit Schrodinger's cat, you could say. But nothing changed. Eventually I gave up. I was trapped, a slave to the future.

“After some”—
suicide attempts
—“soul-searching, I accepted it and learned to make the most of a bad situation, be as normal as possible. Kick my drug habit. Have relationships. Enjoy sex. Get some hobbies. I thought I had things under control, as much control as I'd ever have anyway. Until I threw my father off his balcony.”

Val laced her fingers through his and hugged his arm tight. She kissed his shoulder, and he realized she was trying to comfort him. He was blubbering like a sad sack.

“Anyway…” Max cleared his throat, pulling himself together. “The point is, I've never been able to change anything. Ethan admitted the same when I quizzed him on it. That makes you unique, even amongst
our kind
, I think. So what I'm saying is…maybe this whole thing isn't about the mayoral race, or my father, or my money. Maybe it's about you.”

Val scoffed. “Don't say that. It's not true. It doesn't make any sense, because…It just doesn't.”

“Maybe not,” he said, but he was pretty sure it
was
about her. The red raven, finally appearing in the flesh right as his life imploded and everything he thought he knew turned out to be false. His real father was Dean; his half brother was Robby, Val's fiancé. He could have a DNA test done as proof, but the more he thought about it, the more he felt like an idiot for not realizing it sooner. The way his mother would light up when Dean was around, how Dean often asked personal questions that Max mistook for social awkwardness. Lydia and Dean's enduring “friendship” from college until the day she died. All signs pointed to the obvious.

The truth about Max's real father, Lester's embezzlement, Dean's thirst for revenge, or Norman's manipulation of Dean to get at Lester's embezzled money wouldn't have come to light if Val hadn't shown up at his club one night, if her fiancé hadn't been run down. Robby's death was the fuse that had set her off, and brought her and Max together. Add to that someone or some group who had demanded that Lester give them Max's child—a child he wasn't capable of having, not without reversing his vasectomy.

But if he was to one day change his mind…he'd only do it for her. Like Val said earlier, it couldn't be a coincidence that he'd only be willing to have children with one specific person in the entire world, and that person just happened to show up on his club's doorstep. Why their theoretical future offspring were important, he didn't know. In any case, everything depended on her actions in some way. It made sense to him.

In fact, now that he thought about it, the Julia set—one of his fractal tattoos—was defined by its chaotic nature, in which small perturbations caused drastic changes in future functions. Sounded a lot like Val. Could he have had her “name” tattooed on his arm all this time?

“Think what you want,” she said like she knew he placated her. “All I care about is wiping Barrister off the goddamn map and making him and whoever's helping him pay for all the lives they've ruined. Nothing else matters.”

Max wondered if that included him. He frowned, then wiped it away before she could see.

Val picked up his papers. “What part are you having trouble with?”

He pointed to the circled numbers. “I think these are a Fourier series, but I can't tell without referencing a table of integrals. If it is, then I can confirm that it represents a body of water, and the base number will tell me which body of water.”

Val smiled and buried her face in his neck. “You are so nerdy.” Her lips tickled his skin when she talked. “I love it.” She dropped the papers on the nightstand, slid her leg over his lap, and laced her fingers behind his neck.

“I can figure it out later,” he said as heat rushed to his groin. “If you want to sleep, you can—”

Warm wetness enveloped his cock. The heat in his gut shot through the rest of his body, refueling the fire of lust that refused to go out, giving him energy he thought had been sapped.

“How many bases are there?” she asked as she slid up and down him, slow and deep. They'd learned to talk during these sessions, though they often veered off onto random subjects. It helped to focus the visions, as Val had said she'd done with Robby.

“An infinite number.” He cupped her soft breasts in his palms, perfect handfuls, and massaged the flesh. “But I only see the first ten or so. Those are the ones in the Seattle area, for obvious reasons.”

His fingers traced a path over her rib cage and around to her back, running along the valleys of skin made by her shoulder blades. He pulled her chest to him and rolled her nipple with his tongue, savoring the smooth, hard flesh in his mouth. She gave a faint, throaty moan that gained in pitch as she breathed out—the sound she made when she particularly liked something he did to her. He loved that sound.

“Where did you learn all this stuff about numbers?” she asked, her voice strained now, breathy.

He moved his mouth off her breast and focused on rolling his hips in time with hers, thrusting hard in, lazy out. She made the sound he loved again.

He spoke with some difficulty himself. “I'm mostly self-taught, though I took some easy math classes in college.” He breathed in her flesh, ran his lips across her collarbone, up the nape of her neck to her ear. “I hated college. Giant waste of time. Why learn market analysis when you can just look into the future to see what it's going to do? I only bothered to finish because I thought the receipt they hand out on graduation day might be useful.”

She threaded her fingers through his, clasping both his hands with hers. “You know you're probably some kind of genius. Idiot savant, at least.”

If I were a genius, I would've left my father long before I lost my mind and killed him.

“I don't want to talk about me anymore,” Max said.

He pushed against her hands. She pushed back, and they fought in a playful shoving match before he forced her arms behind her back and held them there. Val threw her head back and laughed. He nipped her ear with his teeth, and she yelped in delight.

“Where's your family?” He pulled her arms down so she leaned back, arching her torso toward his. She braced her knees against his hips and closed her eyes as he took full control.

“Mom's in Canada somewhere,” she murmured, her face flushed and lips the color of sweet wine. Her eyelids fluttering like she was dreaming. “She's a radical left-winger. Moved away when I was five to protest the Gulf War. Dad remarried and moved to Oregon. Cousins scattered around.”

He nuzzled her neck. “Tell me why you joined the Army,” he whispered.

“I wanted to shoot something. I was mad about my sister, didn't have money for college—”

She moaned and her fingers clasped harder with his as he picked up speed against his will, the frenzy right before the climax bearing down on him with a passion he couldn't resist. He wanted to be inside her as far as he could go, to taste her and smell her and feel her completely. He wanted her to experience the most intense pleasure she'd ever known. He wanted to know everything about her, to make her happy. He wanted her to feel the same way about him.

“It was either the Army or Walmart—” Val shook her head. “
I can't
,” she whimpered. Her face twisted into what looked like pain.

Oh no
—did he hurt her again? With every ounce of self-control he possessed, at the cusp of orgasm, Max stopped, released her hands, and pulled out. He panted with the effort.

Val gasped. Her eyes popped open. “No! Don't stop!”