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“You ruined our wedding,” I said. “Are our friends all right?”

“Of course, of course. They are completely fine, Miriam.” Brick waved off my words with the hand holding the gun, like I was being hysterical, overreacting to something that really wasn’t a big deal at all. “Your friends are all quite well. They are, of course, quite occupied at the moment with a task I needed of them… but I have not harmed a single hair on any one of their very attractive heads.”

Black turned his gold eyes on the vampire, his voice hard.

“You threatened them with us––” Black began angrily.

“––Just like you threatened us with them,” I finished for him.

Brick held up his hands.

Still, his expression remained mostly impatient.

From his eyes, I could tell he’d already lost interest in our anger, viewing it as a somewhat boring inconvenience that was slowing down our entire discussion. Studying that indifferent stare, those cold eyes, I saw his mother there. It hit me that everything we’d seen upstairs had been true. Regardless of the rest of it, Brick had wanted us to see that for some reason. He’d shown us his family, his parents, the horrors he’d grown up with.

He’d shown us things I wouldn’t have thought he’d show anyone.

I couldn’t believe that was simply how he’d chosen to distract us for the past however-many hours. That stretched credulity, even for Brick.

“Why?” I asked finally, at a loss. “Why did you show us all of that?”

Brick met my gaze.

A shrewdness rose to his expression.

“Do you not want life to go back to how it was, lovely Miriam? Before your uncle decided to burn down our world?” The vampire king looked around at all of us, focusing most of all on me, and then Black. “Wouldn’t you prefer to go back to that, my friends? The anonymity? The freedom? Humans who treat us ashumansagain, without excessive drama or the rampant paranoia their race is so wont to manifest?”

Black and I exchanged puzzled looks again.

“Would you not get that back, if you could?” Brick pressed.

Black frowned, looking between those crystal eyes.

All of us were lost, but somehow, I got the sense that Black was closest to getting it.

“Sure,” Black said finally. “Of course we’d want that. But that ship has sailed, Brick. You can’t erase an entire world. Believe me, my people have tried. Charles is in custody now. The humans have him. That has to be enough. A big show trial. Some kind of catharsis. Then, if we keep our heads down––”

“There isn’t going to be a trial,” Brick said.

He lowered the gun a second time, his full mouth pursed.

I couldn’t help comparing how he looked now to the human version I’d seen in those recordings. His chalk-white skin now appeared as smooth as marble. No five o’clock shadow contoured his cheeks. His face wore no sweat, no patches of sunburn or acne. He didn’t have a flushed neck from the heat. He looked like a porcelain statue, one of the delicate figurines on the mantle over his parents’ fireplace.

“I disposed of Charles,” Brick said with utter indifference. “Killing him as I did gave me a very short window to act. I needed the help of your people… mine would never have been enough, not for the dramatic nature of what I intended to do. And I did not have time to argue with you about the ethics of this, Quentin. I know how difficult you can be when it comes to your precious humans. Your wife isn’t much better, frankly. You’ve been a horrible influence on her in that regard, my friend… horrible.”

Brick gave me a flat look, his cold eyes swiveling back to Black’s.

“Anyway.” He shrugged. “This seemed the easiest way.”

“The easiest way…” Black trailed, staring at the vampire in utter disbelief. He motioned around at the house overhead. “In what fuckinguniverseis any of this easy, Brick? You tricked out this house. You crashed my wedding. You threw us in here, dosed to the gills on seer hallucinogens and forced us to watch your mother… assuming thatisyour mother… murder a bunch of people with a fucking farming instrument…”

Brick gave him a thin smile.

“She is quite a memorable woman, is she not?”

“She’s a fucking looney-toon psycho demon,” Dexter retorted.

Jax stifled a laugh.