Page 57 of Missing Piece (Neon Scars #2)
Matteo’s back, a landscape of scars and sallow skin, quivered as he sat hunched on a yoga mat.
The basement air was thick with the scent of wooden decay, and the dim candlelight cast an eerie glow on his twitching shoulders.
Adam’s knock on the wooden paneling echoed in the space, reverberating like a warning bell.
The vampire’s reaction was immediate and feral.
He spun around, his eyes two pits of abyssal blackness, fangs bared in a snarl that was more animal than man.
Adam recoiled, instinct screaming at him to flee, but he suppressed the urge.
His fingers tightened around the knife handle behind his back as Matteo lurched forward.
Taking a deep breath, Adam forced himself to meet Matteo’s predatory stare. He slid the knife into his back pocket and made the sign for help with deliberate calmness.
Matteo growled low in his throat, pointing toward the stairs with urgency. ?You need to go. Not safe,? he signed back, desperation etching his movements.
Adam refused to relent. He signed help again, injecting every ounce of pleading into his eyes. They held each other’s stare for a moment that stretched too long.
Matteo slapped the ground next to him—a clear command for Adam to leave. But Adam shook his head, miming please against his chest with an open palm. He needed answers, and time was slipping through his fingers like sand in an hourglass.
His eyes flicked around the room, locking onto a whiteboard and marker on a shelf.
Pointing at it, he conveyed his intention to Matteo before moving with painstaking slowness toward it.
The vampire watched him like a hawk tracking its prey, his nostrils flaring and muscles tensing with each of Adam’s careful steps.
With the whiteboard in hand, Adam scribbled quickly: “I know Vincent went after Richard. Tell me where he went.”
Matteo’s twitch became more pronounced as he pointed once more toward the stairs, a guttural growl escaping him.
A thud from above made Adam’s heart skip a beat—Tariq trying to break in. Shit. The urgency bore down on him like an avalanche as he tapped the board insistently, locking eyes with Matteo again.
?No,? came Matteo’s stark refusal through stiff fingers.
Adam wiped the board clean and wrote with renewed fervor: “I’m not leaving til you tell me.” The message hung between them like a challenge.
In a flash that betrayed his vampiric speed, Matteo closed the distance between them. He towered over Adam now, shaking with barely contained violence as he repeated the sign for please.
Adam knew what he was about to do was reckless, but he could no longer ignore the sound of Tariq trying to get back into the house. Time had run out.
Vincent would do this for me. He’d do something even stupider.
He slammed the whiteboard down onto the ground and whipped out the knife from his pocket.
Matteo’s eyes flicked down to the blade for a second as Adam’s hand trembled.
He hadn’t wanted it to come to this, but Matteo’s refusal left him no choice.
He had to do something drastic to get the information he needed .
With a swift motion, Adam drew the blade across his forearm, wincing as it split his skin. Blood welled up from the shallow cut, quickly spilling in fat droplets onto the concrete below.
Matteo’s reaction was instantaneous. He recoiled as the metallic scent hit his nostrils, black eyes blown wide. His fangs receded slightly even as his fingers curled into rigid claws at his sides. Adam watched the war play out on the vampire’s face—the man struggling against the monster inside.
“I’m not leaving without that address,” Adam said, mostly to himself.
Matteo took another step back, his hands fluttering in front of him as if he wanted to sign something, but they only trembled harder the longer he stared at the blood dripping onto the floor. A snarl ripped from his throat, feral and desperate.
In a flash, Matteo dropped to his knees beside the whiteboard and scrawled out an address in shaky letters. But the moment his task was done, his focus snapped back to the tantalizing blood splatter.
Adam committed the address to memory, mouthing it silently until he was certain he wouldn’t forget.
When he looked up, Matteo was lapping at the droplets on the concrete, consumed by bloodlust. The sight turned Adam’s stomach.
He took a step back from the ravenous vampire, dropping the knife with a clatter.
Jesus Christ. Adam suppressed a gag, unsure if it was from the gruesome display or the fact that he was allowing Matteo to consume some of his blood.
Above them, the basement door flew open with a resounding crack as Tariq came barreling down the steps. “Adam!” he yelled, panic lacing his voice. “Get away from him!”
Matteo glanced up, lips and chin smeared with blood, sneering as Tariq shoved Adam back and placed himself between the two. “Eyes on me, eyes on me,” Tariq said aloud to him, beginning to sign at Matteo as he rose to his feet.
Matteo’s features softened as he looked past Tariq, meeting Adam’s eyes. There was a little nod there, just for a second, before he emitted another low growl at Tariq. Maybe Adam had imagined it, but it seemed like Matteo was telling him to go.
“Adam, get out of here,” Tariq said, glancing back at him.
He didn’t need to be told twice. Adam bolted for the stairs, glancing back only enough to see Matteo lunge forward again and knock Tariq to the ground.
He didn’t manage to take a breath until he reached the basement door and slammed it shut behind him, sliding all three locks back into place as he heard Tariq yelling something indecipherable. “Sorry,” he muttered.
I hope they don’t kill each other. He grabbed a kitchen towel as he moved through, wrapping it around his bleeding forearm, and went to the door, whipping it open.
He paused staring at his reflection in the glass of that creaky storm door he had once listened to open and close, waiting with baited breath throughout the day to plot his escape.
Am I really doing this? Am I going to undoubtedly get myself killed for someone who wanted to torture me into being his pet blood bank? He closed his hand around the handle of the storm door, the worn metal glacial in his sweaty palm.
He had spent his whole life being selfish and hiding.
Hiding from his mother’s pain, and his father’s indifference, numbing himself in anger and acting out for a stray neuron of dopamine to fill the painful void in himself where love and affection should have been.
And when that void metastasized, he filled it with drugs and rage until the line between himself and the void vanished and all that was left was a self-loathing leech waiting for a bad batch to take him out of the world once and for all.
But then Vincent appeared in his life and upended all that with a smirk and a syringe full of ketamine.
Somehow, through all the pain and lust and isolation out in the country, Vincent had filled that void.
He didn’t dream about getting high or wake up angry anymore.
He could feel. Really feel. He had wasted so much of his life being numb, but the endless pit inside him was finally shrinking and he wanted nothing more than to learn how to enjoy life again.
He didn’t want to do any of that without Vincent.