Page 118 of Samhain Savior

“Those demons aren’t with us.” Archer grit out, losing his own patience. “We’ve tangled with them before, and we are doing our best to end them.”

“Liar!” she hissed, and the vampire holding Mex yanked a little harder on her hair. “You came here to ruin me when all we wanted was peace.”

I blinked, surprised at the sincerity in her words; Genevieve seemed like she truly wanted to live quietly.

Well, as quiet as nightly orgies could be, anyway.

“We mean you no harm,” Archer insisted again. “We only came to talk about the diamond.”

“What?” she replied bluntly, obviously confused.

“I had hoped to enter into negotiations with you, but we have run out of time.” Archer sighed ruefully. “We were recently informed that a man by the name of Jean-François Baptiste gifted you a necklace. We need it.”

Genevieve’s beautiful face contorted into a grotesque mask of hatred, her fangs visible behind her curled lip.

“You dare to come here, to my home—to myNest—and make demands of me?” Rising to her full height, she brought one hand up to stroke the diamond at her throat, almost subconsciously. “You, who have caused nothing but chaos, expect me to just give you the gift from my beloved Sweet Baptiste?”

“If he was so beloved, why didn’t you turn him?” Mex asked, her words strained as she tried to prevent any more damage to her throat.

Genevieve pouted, a look of guilt briefly overtaking her features. “Not every love is meant to be forever.”

“Or you were just toying with him,” Vine put in. “Not very nice, Genevieve, playing with a man’s heart like that.”

“Humans are fickle creatures,” she defended. “How do you know he wasn’t toying with me?”

“Because his soul still pines for you,” I said sadly. “Even in the depths of Hell, that man thinks only of you, his lost love.”

For a moment, Genevieve’s face softened, giving away the lie that she hadn’t cared for Baptiste at all. But that tender expression was quickly replaced with fury once more.

“Enough of this. The diamond is mine. I certainly wouldn’t consider giving it to a pack oftraîtreslike yourselves.”

“It doesn’t belong to you, Dubois,” Archer growled, and I noticed several of the Vampires move toward Genevieve, their shoulders hunched as they readied for a fight. “It was given to you by a man who had no right. It wasn’t his to give.”

Beside me, Vine opened his Rip, reaching inside and pulling out several sharp wooden stakes.

“Iknewthese would come in handy,” he chuckled, flipping one over in his hand and getting a good grip."

“There has to be a way we can talk about this!” I insisted, realizing that we were sorely outnumbered; vampires inside, hell hounds outside, and only the six of us against them all.

“I’m afraid the time for talk has passed,” Genevieve said. Turning, she gathered the alligator, Bijou, off the sofa and handed it off to one of her attendants before she swanned toward the ballroom’s exit. “I’m done with them,” she called casually over her shoulder. “Qu'on leur coupe la tête!”

The vampire holding Mex lunged, yanking her head back to expose her throat further.

He might have been supernaturally fast, but Vine was faster.

Before I could even blink, Vine had thrown his stake, sinking it into the exposed chest of the man holding Mex. He hissed, his eyes wide with shock, before his already pale skin began to take on a sickly gray cast, cheeks hollowing as his body desiccated before my very eyes.

His companions all stared, their mouths slack, as they took in his rapidly decaying body, and I wondered how often it was that someone got the better of them.

“Fucking took you long enough,” Mex grumbled, stepping over the dusty corpse of her captor and moving to stand beside Vine. Reaching down, she picked up the knife that had just been held to her throat, wiping her own blood off with the hem of her skirt before she gripped it tightly and looked at the circle of angry vampires that surrounded us. “I don’t suppose you have a plan forgetting out of here, Archer? One of your fancy shadow gates, perhaps?”

“We can’t leave without that diamond,” he admitted, sounding exceedingly pissed off as he stared at the hallway that Genevieve had just disappeared down.

“Well, what’s a couple dozen vampires anyway?” Mex shrugged, turning to face the snarling mass of angry courtesans. Holding out her free hand, she gestured to Vine until he plunked a stake into her waiting palm. She hefted it, the knife glinting dully in the other as she offered the vampires a dangerous smile. “Alright. Who’s first?”

No one answered. The ballroom was silent except for the hiss of shallow breathing and my heart thudding in my ears. The chandeliers above swayed with ghostly creaks, their crystals casting fractured glimmers across faces now twisted with uncertainty.

That silence was suffocating, thick with unspent violence. Every flicker of movement—fangs clicking, claws flexing—made the tension crawl higher.