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He tried calling Jem, too, but the fucker didn’t pick up.

Black hadn’t wanted to admit it to Nick, but he’d been surprised when Nick made it clear Jem hadn’t told him he was going to New York. Black thoughthewas generally the fuck-up when it came to being a secretive, uncommunicative fuck with his bonded mate. Now he wondered if Jem might be a contender for that spot.

It was fucking weird he’d fly all the way across the country and not tell Nick.

That was weird, right?

He’d wanted to talk to Miri about it, but there hadn’t been a good time.

Were the two of them fighting? Was this afuck youto Nick? Black glanced sideways at vampire, knowing he’d never ask, but damned tempted to ask anyway.

Truly, though, it was none of his business.

Like most seers, Black believed mate bonds were sacred. Most seers would only involve themselves in the affairs of a bonded pair if they believed some form of abuse might be taking place. Black certainly didn’t have any reason to thinkthatwas an issue.

He walked back to the front door, jerked his jaw for Nick to follow, and re-entered Lucian Rucker’s San Francisco home.

Nick glared at him a little as he passed, like he might have been thinking his own thoughts about Black’s silence, but he didn’t say a word as he turned to follow.

17

THE HORROR

“There’s something here,” Nick muttered.

His voice vibrated with a hard edge of menace.

He knocked lightly on what looked like a stretch of unbroken corridor wall.

They were standing in the lowest level of the house, the basement, another area they’d been warned to stay away from by Rania Gorren.

By now, they had a pretty good idea why.

Three areas of the basement had apparently been recently refurbished. One appeared to be a gaming room filled with couches and screens and a refrigerator full of sodas and snacks. Cabinets were stocked with every type of chip and cookie and cracker imaginable, along with beef jerky, tea, and coffee. The second room was a personal movie theater, complete with popcorn machines and real, plush, movie theater-type seats done in soft red material.

The third space consisted of a lounge-like area done up mostly in mid-century furniture, including a fifties-style drink cart stocked with expensive bottles and a variety of different types of glasses. They’d found another humidor on the coffeetable, a box of Cuban cigars, another box filled with rolled joints, another filled with cocaine, and a third filled with pot gummies.

In the wooden cabinets against one wall, Nick found mirrored trays, more bottles of expensive booze, rolled up one hundred dollar bills, and shelf after shelf crammed with more narcotics in a variety of different forms: pills, powders, gummies, pastes, stickers, gum, liquids and sugar cubes.

The only thing in the room that didn’t exactly “fit” was an augmented and virtual reality station so loaded with cutting-edge tech, including what looked like primitive semi-organic circuitry to Black’saleimiclight, Black doubted it was available for commercial purchase. It consisted of a desk console, an odd-looking reclining chair with an elaborate headset built into the headrest, heart and pulse monitors, goggles, and separate appendages for each limb.

Nick and Black each briefly experimented with the chair.

Once they had, its reason for being there became much more clear.

A few dozen “scenarios” had been pre-programmed, including: flight, swimming deep underwater, a speed boat, a space walk, bungee jumping, hang-gliding, walks on Mars, Jupiter, Mount Everest, standing inside a live volcano, cave diving. The chair used various physical enhancements to make the virtual experience feel more “real,” including vibration, wind, muscle manipulation, temperature, and motion controls.

Black clicked out immediately when he found a virtual recording that Rucker had apparently filmed himself. He saw the girl’s blue-green eyes (which looked even more like Miri’s than he’d initially thought), and ended the program at once.

Afterwards, he felt sick.

He broke the chip associated with that one, cracking it in half with his fingers. He second-guessed whether that had been agood idea after he did it, and shoved the two pieces in a pocket. He hadn’t told Nick about that.

In the end, it hadn’t mattered; they found a lot more memory cards.

Black hadn’t broken any more of them, but he and Nick piled them all in a box they’d emptied of gummies.

The thought of watching what that unbelievable fucker, Luc, had done to that child made Black feel sicker than he could stand, but he didn’t trust those recordings in the hands of other humans, particularly not any human who’d ever worked for Lucian Rucker. He also didn’t quite feel he had the right to destroy them all himself.