I imagined Dr. Oxford had never used his hands for more than a handshake or the construction of a science project, so the thought of a couple of thugs dragging him out of the room made me sick to my stomach.
The struggle was over in less than a minute. The door to my room opened as the sounds from Oxford’s room went silent. Daemon entered and carried a tray of food toward the nightstand.
“You son of a bitch!” I screamed as I flew at him and knocked the tray out of his hands. “What are they doing to him?”
He took a step back and caught my arms, nearly stumbling over the dropped tray. Two more men came through the door. One was huge and made Greer and his men seem small in comparison. The other had a nasty expression on his face as he leered at me and sniffed the air.
Daemon shoved me behind him, nearly sending me to the floor. He put his hand up to stop the two steamrollers who were coming straight at us. “Get. Out!” he roared at them.
They stopped cold and began to back their way out of the room. When they crossed the threshold, the door shut on its own with a loud slam.
Daemon turned and delivered a blow to me next. Not to my head, to my mind.
TWENTY-FIVE
I’m one of those people with an internal clock that can usually predict the time of day with reasonable accuracy. Mine was telling me it was early evening, but since there were no windows in the room to confirm that, it could have just as easily been morning or the middle of the night.
I checked to make sure I still had the amulet and the bone charm. Both were where they belonged. I’d triggered Daemon’s anger, and he’d rewarded me with some kind of mind assault that knocked me out cold. Confiscating the two things that meant the most to me would have been clever payback. And though he chose not to, I had no doubt he would take them the minute it served his purpose to do so.
My brain felt like a lump of fruit in a blender, spinning wildly when I tried to get up. I rolled back on the bed, my throat and stomach throbbing with hunger, dreaming of that food I’d knocked out of his hands.
As if on cue, the door opened and in walked my captor with a freshly prepared tray of something fragrant and amazing. I think a loaf of stale bread slathered with rancid butter would have tasted like a three-star Michelin meal.
He set the tray on the table next to the bed and waited for me to dig in, but I kept my eyes on him instead.
“I know you’re hungry. Two days without food will make you weak, and we can’t have you weak when Maelcolm arrives. He’ll think we’ve been mistreating you.”
“Two days?”
“Yes. You’ve been here for two days. Who knows how long it’s been since you’ve actually eaten.”
The last thing I put in my mouth was a shot of whiskey when I went to see Ava. The subsequent fight with Greer had killed my appetite, so I refused dinner before we left for Battery Park.
He brought me a plate of stuffed pasta with cream sauce, a salad, and a basket of warm bread. There was even a glass of red wine.
I swung my legs over the mattress and attempted to eat without looking like a pig. “Who is this Maelcolm?” I asked as I caved in to my hunger and stuffed a huge bite of pasta in my mouth.
“This Maelcolm is the Chairman of the Board.”
“So you’ve organized the exploitation of women and children,” I stated without looking up from my plate, without sarcasm.
He continued with his half-formed grin and humorless eyes. “He’s my chief. And he will be yours, too. I mean no disrespect, Alex, but I’d suggest you lose the smug attitude and learn to curtsy.”
Having suddenly lost my appetite, I pushed the tray away. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I think we can do without the curtsy, but that mouth of yours might get you killed.” He leaned down and looked me square in the eye. “When your usefulness has worn off, you’ll want Maelcolm to enjoy your company enough to keep you around.”
The fork balancing on the edge of the plate fell and drew Daemon’s attention to the uneaten food. “Finish your dinner. I’ll be back for the tray later.” His eyes roamed over the shirt I’d worn for days. “There are towels in the bath and some fresh clothes on the chair.”
“Wait,” I blurted as he turned to leave. “Where is Dr. Oxford?” He hesitated as he reached for the doorknob, but then he continued out of the room without answering my question.
It’s surprising how effective four white walls and utter silence can be at torturing you into submission. The isolation was making me batshit. Even a dungeon or a jail cell had sounds, but with the absence of Dr. Oxford’s sobs on the other side of the wall, the room was a torturous void. Even the smell of baking flour and yeast had ceased.
The uneaten food was still on the table. It was cold now, but that’s when Italian food tasted best, when all the flavors had time to relax and marry into perfection.
There was a parchment paper bag on the tray with the word ADELINA’S stamped in small capital letters. I opened it, and the smell of citrus and ricotta cheese filled my nose. I’d eaten sfogliatelle before but forgot how special they were. An Italian classic—golden seashells of paper-thin pastry, filled with sweetened ricotta and semolina—hard to find outside of an authentic Italian bakery. The one above me, I assumed.
I ate the rest of the pasta and bread, and then devoured the pastry, running my finger along the inside of the bag to capture the sugar trapped in the creases. When I was finished, I folded the paper into a small square, framing the letters, more out of boredom than anything else.
I tossed the paper on the tray when I heard the doorknob turn. A man I hadn’t seen before walked in the room. No knock, no request to enter, he just barreled his way in and looked around the room. His eyes landed on the target, and he headed for the tray on the table.
“I could have been naked, you know.” He ignored my comment. With his shaved head and tattooed limbs, he looked like a typical skinhead. “Sure, I’m done,” I said as he rudely reached over me. I got the feeling he was avoiding eye contact, like I was beneath him and not worth his acknowledgement. He leaned closer to lift the tray and went completely still except for the deep contractions of his chest. His lungs inflated sharply as his eyes went from brown to black.
My warning bells went off when his head twisted in a mechanical motion, and those void eyes zeroed in on mine. Only a few inches separated us, and I was overwhelmed by the discomfort of my own heartbeat throbbing painfully against the walls of my chest.
He straightened back up, and the tray began to shake. I realized it was his trembling hand causing the cutlery to jump and rattle against the china. I moved as far back on the mattress as my seated legs would allow, and then I did what a predator usually doesn’t expect—I met his eyes. It was all bluff.
“Where’s Daemon?” I mustered underneath all the adrenaline threatening to give me away.
His mouth spread into a wicked grin, and then it collapsed and his jaw went slack. I could hear his breath quicken and rush through his parted lips.
The tray hit the floor. My arms flattened above my head as he wrestled me to the mattress. “Get off of me!” I jabbed him with my knee, but the fight seemed to excite him even more. He came down on me harder and started pulling on the edge of my jeans, and I let out a piercing scream loud enough to get the attention of the whole damn building.
He lifted off of me and flew back against the wall as Daemon took his place in front of me. “Get up,” he snarled.
I jump off the bed as two more men came through the door.
“You’ll be learning to share,” said my attacker. “Maelcolm will see to that.”
Daemon pulled something from his pocket and threw it in the air with a broad stroke. The substance seemed to take on a life of its own as it swirled and darkened into a ball of black mist in the center of the room, cutting off my view of the three men on the other side.
When all I could see was the dark cloud snaking around my body like a dense fog, Daemon wrapped himself around me a
nd closed my eyelids with his fingertips.
When I opened my eyes, I expected to see the black fog still filling the room. But I wasn’t in the windowless room with the monotonous white walls; I was sitting on a black leather sofa with my head leaning against the cushion. My shoes were gone, but I was still wearing the same clothes.
The room was sparse and clean, modern and monochrome with a view to die for. I approached the floor-to-ceiling windows spanning the wall and looked out at the millions of lights dappling the city. The familiar shapes of landmarks confirmed we were definitely in New York, an important detail to note considering my history of finding myself in swank rooms overlooking strange cities.
It could have been worse. I could have been looking at all those lights from a dirty, abandoned warehouse somewhere across the river, with my hands bound and my mouth taped shut. Abducted women usually didn’t find themselves in places like this.
The amulet was still around my neck, but when I reached in my pocket and felt for the bone charm, it was gone. I felt around the sofa cushions to see if it had slipped out. I found a nickel and a few pennies, but no charm.
I walked back to the window, scanning the surrounding buildings to get an idea of what part of town I was in.
“Do you like it?”
Daemon was standing on the other side of the room when I turned around.
“What?” I asked, not entirely sure what he meant.
“The view.”
I ignored the question, refusing to make small talk with him. He’d attacked me, stalked me, kidnapped me, and now he was asking me how I liked the view? How the fuck do you like it?
The shine left his eyes as my thoughts bled into his. He took a few steps but stopped when I began to move back toward the window. I tried to pull my eyes from his, but he wouldn’t let up on that damn hold he had on me. I couldn’t manage the simple task of averting my eyes, even though all my instincts told me to look away.
He came closer and extended his hand.
I looked at his open palm in disbelief. “Are you kidding me?”
“Our dinner is getting cold.” The trace of warmth in his face disappeared when I refused his hand.
“Take it,” he said in a deceptively calm voice.
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll drag you into that dining room and sit you down myself.”
I followed his eyes as he glanced toward the right side of the room. The open space contained an elegant table and chairs, complete with a meal on top of it.
Continuing to ignore his outstretched hand, I walked past him and seated myself.
“You need food.” He sat at the opposite end, looking pleased with the spread on top of the table.
I had no idea how long I’d been sleeping on that sofa or when I ate that plate of cold pasta, but the sight of the food triggered my hunger.
I’d given up on trying to track time, and my internal clock had failed me. It could have been a few days or a week since Daemon took me. I was banking on the former because the longer he had me, the less confident I was that Greer was coming.
Daemon leaned back in his chair and waited for me to commence eating. “What is this place?” I asked without touching the platter of roasted chicken sitting in the center of the table.
“This is my home.”
“You mean you don’t live in your…what did you call it? Your castle?”
Maybe he was a successful entrepreneur outside of his nasty double life, or had some high-powered benefactors like Greer. Apartments like this were for the filthy rich, so a boatload of money was coming from somewhere.
“Distraction won’t work, Alex. Now be a good girl and eat.”
I held his stare and refused to move. I would not eat another bite of his food or drink another drop of liquid. Dead, I wouldn’t be of much use to him or his people. Maybe he’d get that message and bargain with something useful.
“Where’s the piece of bone I had in my pocket? The one you were thinking about taking from me the other day.”
I noticed a slight hitch in his expression, a momentary tensing of his jaw and a contraction of his nose. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It was in my pocket before you brought me here, and now it’s gone.”
“Then I guess you lost it.”
I glared at the thief and made a vow to myself to get it back as soon as this was over.
He stood up and towered over the table. “I am many things, but I am not a liar or a thief.”
“You stole me,” I retorted with a sort of satisfaction for getting the last word. “Didn’t you?”
He sat back down and eased into his chair. “I cannot steal what is mine.”
I was speechless. Was that why he’d been stalking me? Because he thought he owned me?
Greer had told me in very blunt terms what they were; males like him, who had gone Rogue, raping human women and then stealing their offspring to build their own Rogue army. When I asked Greer why they didn’t breed with their own kind, he said they weren’t capable of producing female offspring. They needed human women, and what could be more powerful than the offspring of a demigod and a Fitheach witch who also happened to be the Oracle?
I looked back up at Daemon who was feasting on my thoughts.
You can’t work for the gods if you want to be the gods. Those were Greer’s words when he described the Rogues to me. That statement made perfect sense now.
Daemon was a demigod with an identity crisis—a very dangerous one.
He straightened in his chair and reached for his plate, topping it with a chicken breast, a dinner roll, and a generous portion of caramelized carrots and potatoes. Then he stood up and placed the full plate on top of my empty one. “Eat,” he barked.
My own temper was beginning to flare—a very Irish temper—and I stared back at him with a defiant go-to-hell look stamped across my face.
I wasn’t a dog, and I was getting tired of men telling me where and when to eat.
“Eat the fucking food or I’ll force it down your throat!”
The plate hit the wall so hard it sent bits of chicken ricocheting back at the table. I looked at my hand in disbelief that I’d actually done it.
“Eat it yourself!” I growled back. My entire body shook from the adrenaline raging through it.
Daemon came around the table and grabbed the empty plate under the one I’d just hurled across the room. He piled it with just as much food as the previous one and shoved it in front of me. “We can do this all night, if you’d like.”
He stepped behind my chair and placed his hands on my shoulders, spreading his fingers across my tensed muscles until they reached my clavicle. Then he bent down and spoke in my ear. “But I must warn you. All this foreplay gets me very excited. I’d like to save that for later, but if you’d like to play now, we can—”
“I’ll eat,” I said.
His hands softened around the cuffs of my shoulders. Then he removed them and walked leisurely back to his chair, resuming his seat with a thick intake of air. The ball was in my court.
I gave him a last defiant look and then reached for my fork. The chicken pulled away from the bone effortlessly as I forced myself to assemble a bite and place it in my mouth. I chewed mechanically, and despite the bitter taste of adrenaline mixing with the small amount of saliva left in my mouth, it was delicious.
Thick like a lump of dry clay in the back of my throat, but delicious.
TWENTY-SIX
Greer paced the long stretch of room under the watchful eyes of the mounted boar head. He’d gone down to Den of Oddities and Antiquities to see if Ava had picked up anything on the astral grapevine, because his sense of Alex was fading, and they were running out of time.
Isabetta Falcone had turned out to be nothing but a backstabbing power junkie, working every angle to get a piece of the pie. First with Alasdair Templeton, but when Greer’s threats to destroy his house sent him back into the shadows, she wasted no time forming an
idiot’s alliance with the Rogues. And they played her like the fool she was.
“She’s gone, Ava. She’s just fucking gone!”
Ava reached for his arm as he made his hundredth pass in front of her. “We’ll find her, Greer. I know that with absolute certainty.”
“How could I just stand there and let him take her?”
“You had no choice, Greer.”
He turned to look at her like she’d rattled off some ridiculous rhetoric. “Don’t patronize me, Ava. There’s always a choice. You know that as well as anyone.”
The comment stung. He was referring to the choice she’d made eighteen years earlier when she sent her car off a bridge into the Wabash River to fake her own death, leaving Alex an orphan with an assumed name.
Alex kept her promise and never revealed her real identity, and it wasn’t until she stepped foot back on New York soil that she became Alex Kelley again.
“You’re right. I did have a choice.” She owned that choice, knowing she would be judged for what seemed like selfishness. She could have stayed the course, given up her own existence for the sake of a child. But no one knew what she knew. She made a promise, and if she had to take all that judgment to the grave, she gladly would. “But I made the right choice, Greer. Had I gone with the alternative, we wouldn’t be here right now.”
“Exactly,” he replied sharply.
“Because she’d already be dead—or worse!”
“Something worse than death?” He eyed her suspiciously. “What could possibly be worse?”
Ava headed for the counter and began rearranging objects around the thick glass top: a cardholder containing the shop’s business cards went from the left side of the cash register to the right, a vase with a few spring flowers took its place, and an old book moved a few inches to the left.
His hand grasped her wrist. “Stop.”
“You did the right thing, Greer.” She continued nervously searching for distractions on the countertop. “She would have never forgiven you if that monster had destroyed her face.”
The Blood Thief (The Fitheach Trilogy Book 2) Page 24