Free A Secret to Die For (Secret McQueen) by Sierra Dean

sound.
    “Clementine, we’re not here to shop.”
    “I’m not shopping. I’m stealing.” She slipped the gloss into her jeans pocket.
    There was no sense in fighting stupid battles when we were about to go to war. If she wanted to take used makeup, let her. At this point, I honestly didn’t care.
    We arrived at my father’s apartment complex to find the door had been locked by some intrepid soul within who thought that would be enough to keep the monsters at bay. It might have worked against the risen, since dead fingers weren’t very adept at picking locks.
    Too bad I didn’t have the patience to pick it.
    I withdrew my gun and shot the door, fracturing the lock. Keaty gave me an unimpressed glare and I shrugged, keeping my weapon out in case we ran into any gun-happy residents inside. “What?”
    “Thanks to your signal, I think we ought to keep some people down here in case someone comes to investigate.”
    “The dead, you mean? We don’t know how finely tuned their senses are when it comes to sound.”
    “No better way to find out than to shoot a door, hmm? Were you out of flares?”
    I resisted the urge to roll my eyes, but I did feel guilty. I should have known better than to act in such a rash manner. “Too late to do anything about it now.”
    He was right about leaving people downstairs, though, since this was nothing more than a snatch-and-grab mission. I didn’t need a gaggle of relative strangers coming with me to collect Sutherland. He was likely going to find this situation upsetting as it was, considering what he’d gone through with The Doctor—much like Holden and I had. But he hadn’t been sane to start with, so going through hell hadn’t made him crazy.
    It just hadn’t helped make any improvements.
    Sutherland hadn’t met Desmond yet, and this didn’t seem like the ideal time to introduce my eternally teenage father to his future werewolf son-in-law. “Holden, will you come with me? Everyone else can stay.”
    Though he might have been hurt, in typical Desmond fashion he didn’t complain or question my decision. Holden, on the other hand, looked like he wanted to say no.
    “Please,” I added. “Sutherland knows you. It’ll make things easier.”
    “Fine.” He sounded as if I’d asked him to drink blood from someone with a disease. “Let’s make it quick.”
    He followed me inside, and I debated with myself whether it was worth my time to call him out on his attitude. Yes, things were hard with us right now. Yes, I’d hurt him. But our current situation made me think he might set aside those feelings. In the past we’d always been able to focus on the problem at hand, and that was when we were at our strongest. If he couldn’t overlook his broken heart for a little while, I didn’t know if we would pull through this.
    “We’re in a tough bind,” I started, hoping he’d understand what I was trying to say and fill in the blanks himself.
    He stared at me.
    Okay, this was going to be worse than pulling teeth.
    “Holden, I—”
    “We can talk about it later. Can we find Sutherland and get out of here, please?”
    He said later , not never . I’d take what I could get.
    No one came to meet us in the stairwell, touting a long-untouched rifle or a baseball bat. Apparently everyone in the city had come to the general consensus they should either flee or hide, because no one was getting in our way. When we knocked on Sutherland’s door, it took him a few minutes to answer, and in that time Holden and I stood awkwardly next to each other in the hall, neither of us saying a word.
    When the door opened, my father—forever seventeen—blinked out at us. He was wearing Star Wars pajama bottoms and a rumpled black Henley shirt. His blond hair, something he’d passed on to me, was sticking up in the back like he’d just rolled out of bed.
    “Hello,” he greeted, as if this were a perfectly normal social call.
    “Dad, you need to get changed and come with us.” He could