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The tip of an old-looking bronze spear pointed directly at his chest.

Directly at his heart.

Nick followed the spear down, and realized he hadn’t even seen it before, he’d been so lost in the male vampire’s appearance. But now he saw it clearly. His mind put the rest of the situation together like a series of broken puzzle pieces.

The other “Nick” gripped the end of that spear in one muscular, chalk-white hand.

He pointed it up at Damon’s chest without taking his eyes off Nick’s face.

Something in the way he did it was almost casual, indifferent.

Taking in the length of the medieval weapon in a second quick glance, Nick realized the vampire must have yanked it off the wall downstairs. Nick remembered the empty hooks on the wall covered in ancient weapons and scowled.

Fuck.

Nick looked back up at Damon.

For the first time he really looked at the condition he was in.

Damon Jordan been drained of blood.

A lot of blood.

His muscles stood out sharply, strangely, disturbingly from the dehydration, defined in that vein-y, hyper-exaggerated way of a bodybuilder before a competition. Nick knew professional bodybuilders used to deliberately dehydrate themselves to obtain that look for competitions. Actors sometimes did it for shirtless scenes, too.

This asshole doppelganger of Nick’s had nearly killed him.

He’d drained Nick’s partner just short of heart-failure.

He drained Jordan just short of death.

Nick felt his jaw clench as he took that much in.

He still hadn’t spoken.

The other vampire hadn’t spoken, either.

Nick felt that fucker with the spear waiting for Nick to absorb the entirety of the scene he’d prepared. He waited for Nick to get it fully, every detail.

Fighting an irrational surge of fury, Nick shifted his gaze up to his friend’s face.

He saw the wide-eyed but glazed look there.

He saw the last vestiges of his terror there.

Yet none of that remained in the rest of Damon’s body.

Hanging from the ceiling, even with the stress of having his weight sunk into the metal-coated rope, Damon Jordan looked relaxed to the point of being unconscious. His whole face had gone completely slack, everything apart from his eyelids, which receded a few millimeters too far into his skull, making his eyes bulge.

The bulging eyes made Damon look stricken, lost. That expression coupled with the utterly relaxed muscles of his face was disturbing as hell.

He wasn’t fighting. No part of him strained against the metal rope.

He didn’t acknowledge Nick or Morley in any way.

He just hung there, returning Nick’s gaze.

Nick knew exactly what he was looking at.