Page 118 of Vampire So Vengeful

Belle’s tone sharpened. “Are you saying you think she’s in danger?”

“That’s what it feels like.”

“Then I’m coming with you.”

He paused with a hand on the door. “What?”

“We’ll take my car,” she said, walking past him with purpose and a hint of jasmine and vanilla. “Yours doesn’t have enough seats for us all.”

Thirty-Three

Cally strained against the handcuffs that bound her wrists behind her chair, testing their strength without making it obvious. The cuffs bit into her skin, but she could snap the chain given time. Yet what good would it do her?

Darian paced before her, using the space of the room to let off his negative energy. Just him, her chair, and a room with white-painted concrete walls and floor.

The Order does stark really well. That seemed like an insight into their mindset, and Cally almost smiled.

She knew she was dissociating. Two hours in isolation, an hour of interrogation, and he wasn’t constrained by the same rules as the Boston police. And what were they doing to Eve for all that time?

Cally reached again for her bond to Antoine, wishing he knew where she was, that he would come. But he didn’t; he wouldn’t. He thought she was ‘visiting her dad’. He had no reason to even check their bond.

The back of Darian’s hand cracked against her cheek, snapping her head to the side. “Don’t you zone out on me, youharlot.”

Her face felt like one big bruise, her healing unable to keep up with the frequent manifestations of Darian’s anger. But what was there to answer? He’d asked few questions; he already knew what he needed. The rest of the time he’d frothed with Order fervor, spewing bile at her ‘betrayal’. Yes, she’d zoned out. It was worse than Sunday School.

She ran her tongue around her teeth and spat blood onto the white floor, now pink near her chair, and let her head slumpforward. Glaring at him didn’t work; she’d tried that. She got hit again.

“Answer me!”

She couldn’t. She hadn’t heard the question.

His hand clenched in her hair, pulling her head back, his face only a few inches away. Eyes glittering with fanaticism, jaw clenched in anger. No hint of his usual affable charm. It was so tempting to headbutt him; he still didn’t know how much stronger she was than he. But locked in a room deep in the Order’s bunker, armed guards everywhere? It wasn’t an escape plan. She wouldn’t get far.

“How many vampires?” he demanded, biting off each word, his tone making it clear that he had repeated the question.

It wasn’t enough context for an answer. “Sorry, my head’s ringing,” she said, the words slurring through swollen lips. “How many vampireswhat?”

His face darkened, like he thought she was goading him. He held her hair with one hand, slapping her back and forth with the other in time with each word: “How many vampires do you know?”

“Just Antoine,” she gasped through the sting.Quite a few.Gabe. Belle. Tobias, Roberto. The one that had stopped her in the Curia’s house—had Antoine called him Matteo? Minh. Hell, that was a lot of vampires. “And Nico.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Perceptive. “It’s true. It’s all I know.”I don’t reallyknowGabe. Met him a few times. Belle? Still mostly an enigma.

“What is Nico to you?”

He’d already asked that. “The vampire that killed my mother.”Except he didn’t. So who did? Had it really been Antoine, all this time, despite his assertions to the contrary?

The thought brought tears to her eyes, and a muscle twitched in Darian’s jaw as he saw them.

No. I refuse to believe that. He told me he didn’t, and I trust him.

“How can you sit there crying over the death of your mother at the hands of a vampire, and thenallywith them?” He jerked her head back, releasing his grip. “You disgust me.”

I mean… fair.Vampires were vampires, after all. But was Antoine any worse than Darian?We all have blood on our hands.

Darian took a step back, staring at her like she was something on the sole of his shoe. “You’re nothing to me anymore. Just an asset.”