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He was smart too, though, and didn’t say a fucking word.

Nick knew his only chance for getting out of this was St. Maarten. She didn’t seem particularly interested in helping him right now, though. Maybe she thought he’d outlived his usefulness. Even more likely, maybe she had less control over what the H.R.A. and The Leash did now that they were out here than she’d thought she did when she called them.

Either way, Nick realized appealing to her was a waste of time.

He shut his mouth and stopped shouting at her.

He knew how easy it would be for him to get Wynter and everyone else out here killed.

He knew how easy it would be to cross that invisible and constantly moving line.

And yes, he knew they might not even listen to Lara St. Maarten, despite who she was. He might know that better than she did, given what he was.

He continued to watch her surreptitiously, anyway.

There wasn’t a lot else he could do.

Nick was already on his knees, arms locked behind his back.

Organic binders shocked him whenever he moved more than a centimeter in any direction. The limits were jacked up to the highest pain settings… again, to get him to overreact, but also to impress upon him his utter powerlessness in the situation.

Nick knew that had been at least part of the message of killing those two vampires, too.

They’d removed the head of Forrest Keanu Walker’s girlfriend first.

Kit had screamed. So had Wynter.

Walker himself had cried out, his voice holding so much pain it shocked Nick.

They’d decapitated the second vampire, the one whose name Nick never got, while everyone was still screaming and staring at the first dead body.

All Nick had known about that other vampire was that she’d shown up with Walker in a helicopter a few hours earlier. She’d been one of the vampires to help when Nick’s doppelgänger tried to drag Wynter and the two seer kids through the portal ahead of them. Like Wynter’s ex-husband, she’d risked her life to help them, and she hadn’t even known them.

The Leash agents removed her head while she stared in disbelief and shock at the dead body of Walker’s girlfriend. Her eyes had gone red, her fangs had just started to extend, probably more in grief than real aggression, but it hadn’t mattered.

The electronic blade hummed through the air a second time, and that was it.

Walker hadn’t even finished screaming in agonized disbelief that his girlfriend was gone, when he immediately lost someone else, someone who’d likely been a friend.

Now, both vampires’ rapidly-decaying corpses lay on the ground in front of Nick.

The message couldn’t be any fucking clearer.

Nick glared up at St. Maarten, knowing he was likely risking his life simply from his own dark red irises, and the razor-sharp fang tips he could feel nicking the edges of his lower lip. He tried to dial back both reactions, but some instincts were too deeply ingrained.

He could only remain physically still, try to keep his more dangerous reactions from sliding out of control.

He stared at the CEO of Archangel Enterprises, not down at the two dead bodies.

Not at Wynter.

Not at either of the young seers, Malek or Tai.

Not at his friend, Damon Jordan, a newborn vamp, who had significantly less control over his reactions than Nick. Not at James Vincent Morley, who wasn’t a young man, and who could easily be killed just for saying the wrong thing. Not at Kit or Charlie, two more humans Nick counted among his close friends.

Only one person in their group was bound even more tightly than Nick.

Nick saw in his peripheral vision as that Forrest Keanu Walker got heaved roughly to his feet by two large, heavily-muscled H.R.A. thugs, both of whom wore the distinctive, black and silver uniforms of The Leash.