And in that deep dark place, there was no one.
I was completely and utterly alone.
They’d left me here, abandoned me when I needed them most . . . and for that, they were dead to me. Perhaps more so given death was not the end for some. The whisperings of that voice in my mind agreed.
“What message did she send you with?” Victor asked. The lowly Born at my feet visibly trembled. I knew then that whatever Selena said, he didn’t want to repeat it because everyone knew that Victor was prone to shooting the messenger.
His lips pinched together, and that mild pause was enough.
“Lily,” my master said, oh so softly. The Born jumped to his feet, backing away further, and the two guards posted at the door simply stepped in front of it.
“Please—” He begged as I came to stand behind him. The idiot had the bad sense to look at me, and not the man whose lips curled back in disgust. Oh no, he’d rather stare at the hand that would deal the blow rather than the one controlling it.
How predictable. How stupid.
I lifted a delicate hand when the words left him in a rush. “Next time one of yours steps on Shifter land with the intention to use force, I will not be this merciful. Tell your liege —”
“She thinks of that as mercy?” Victor asked, his expression thoughtful. He looked from the soon-to-be dead man to me. A ghost of something tender crossed over him before it was gone. “The rumors have always portrayed her as quite bloodthirsty. Is it true?” he asked.
“There was a time when no one was safe from her, but Alexandra or me.” There was no inflection in the words, nor emotion on my face that might give away anything. Certainly not the boiling hatred I felt inside.
“And now?” he prompted. I stared into the endless depths of silver that were not my own. He had beautiful eyes. He always had. It was that face of an angel that fooled me once, but the devil was once an angel too—or so the saying went.
“She will defend those she loves with all her might. If you sent her into a rage over a child, then she’s gone soft.” It was the truth as I knew it, and it would damn her.
“Was there anything more to the message?” he asked without looking to the Born Vampire.
“Tell your liege if he wishes to talk, a letter will suffice. Allowing you to return is a kindness. Tread lightly. You may have just started a war.”
Silence.
“I might have started a war?” Victor asked, softly. Deceptively.
“I mean—” I never looked away, but I barely saw it when Victor pulled a dagger from his jacket and threw.
The messenger only six inches from me tilted forward. His lips parted as gray bled through his veins and his skin began to crack. He stepped back, touching a hand to his chest before dropping to his knees and collapsing on his side.
Dead. A true death.
The strike must have been a hit to his heart.
Blackened blood splattered Victor’s suit, but he didn’t seem to even notice or care as he said, “Are you angry with her, flower?” He didn’t elaborate, but the cruel twist of his lips said more than his words.
His question would have stilled me had I not already been frozen. Looking away was not an option now. He would see that for what it was. Telling him the truth though . . .
“I was,” I told him. Surprise flicked through his gaze so fast I might have missed it had I not spent the last few months memorizing every facet and feature of his face. Victor hadn’t expected the truth. “I was angry with her when I’d awoken. I expected her to come for me.”
“But she never did,” he said.
“She never did,” I agreed.
“And now?”
“No. I’m not angry anymore,” I paused, lowering my eyes to his chin. It was easier to look there than into the pits of Hell where I was going when all was said and done and the scheming and games and lies finally caught up to us. I knew what awaited me now, and I embraced it all in the name of survival—and revenge. “The longer that went on, the more I realized that she did me a favor.”
“Oh?”
“In leaving me, I was forced to find my own strength and learn that I could rely on no one but myself. Her greatest strength and weakness is her love for others, but in forsaking me, I learned to know better than to love or to hope. I realized that no matter what comes, I will survive it.”
I felt his unflinching gaze on me as he slowly crossed the room. His oxfords left blackened footprints in his wake as he stepped through the pool of blood without care.
Two pale fingers came up under my chin, lifting my face and forcing my gaze back up to his.
What I saw there confused me.
After all the hours and all the days I’d spent watching him, there was an intensity to his features, but it wasn’t the sort he had when in a rage. No, it was something else. Something I didn’t want to put a name to.
Because this time when he looked at me, I saw it for what it was.
“Would you ever lie to me, Lily?” he asked, and that red line between us pulsed. I didn’t grit my teeth for fear that would give me away. He was using the bond to manipulate me. To try to force the truth.
He didn’t realize the more he gave me, the stronger I grew.
He didn’t know that no matter how tight he squeezed, it wasn’t tight enough to force veracity from my lips.
He didn’t know that in this silent game of tug-of-war, I’d already won.
“No.”
My answer wasn’t too quick, nor was there any hesitation, and still the edge of his jaw clenched.
“Why is that?” he asked and then continued before I could respond. “If love does not fuel you, as you say. If fear does not intimidate you, as I know, then what is it that drives you? What is it that makes you loyal to me, Lily?”
And it was then that I understood both where I’d went wrong and what I had to do. I’d straddled too close to the edge of not needing him. In giving him the slight truth to stay under suspicion, I’d inadvertently led him toward something far more ruinous.
Once again Victor placed me on that precarious knife’s edge, but this time I wouldn’t simply straddle it. No. There was another way. A better way that could make the price of my truths worthwhile.
I took a step closer to him, and he didn’t flinch away. I knew he wouldn’t, not as I finally gave him what he wanted to hear more than anything. “The line between salvation and damnation is thinner than many like to think. You pushed me to desperation, and yet you taught me what it means to survive. Love and fear have no bearing because you taught me to think past those emotions. They were without use.”
The more I spoke the more the ice in his expression thawed. Not an ounce of intensity was lost, but his rapt attention was shifting. Changing. “You forced me to walk that line and learn that I could. You made me into what I am. Anastasia signed my death, but you gave me a life again. I’m loyal to you because you have earned it, not just because you’re my master.”
The wind howled, sending flurries of snow about through the tiny window. The dead of winter had come, and the fief was at its fullest, but not a sound traveled through the corridors. It was utter silence as he stared at me.
The fingers under my chin disappeared as he ran a hand up my jaw and swiped his thumb under my bottom lip. A fat droplet of black blood sat swollen on the end. He paused and then lifted it to my lips.
There was a challenge in his gaze. He didn’t want to say it. Victor preferred to command with silence, especially when it came to me.
It was just another game we played.
A game I couldn’t lose.
My tongue darted out, sweeping over the pad of his finger to lick the drop away. Vampire’s blood wasn’t as bitter as one might think. While it wasn’t as succulent as humans or the living, it was still a taste I’d acquired when I’d gorged myself on it after killing a guard.
A slight shudder ran through me at the memory, and Victor smiled. Misinterpretation was simply a manipulated miscomm
unication with the right gesture to guide it.
“Oh flower, you have no idea what you do to me.” He leaned forward, his hand cupping my jaw. His lips loomed close, only a hairsbreadth away. “But you will.”
Then he was striding away. The guards opened the door of his suite as he started down the corridor, not waiting for me but still expecting, nonetheless.
The blood seeping into my shoes was the least of my worries as I tried to separate what exactly was truth from lie.
The problem wasn’t that I didn’t know anymore.
It was that I didn’t care, because in that small concession I’d found my endgame.
And with that, I turned on my heel and followed Victor out the door—the makings of a dark smile on my face.
With a single play, I’d just won this war of survival.
“Soon.” The dark voice inside whispered. “Soon we strike.”
Chapter 9
Cold sweat clung to my skin as I trembled from the dreadful reality I wished I could wake from. Gentle fingers brushed over my shoulder, but I didn’t turn into him. I wouldn’t console myself with his warmth, knowing that deep down, there might be no coming back for her. Not now.
“You saw her again, didn’t you?” Ash asked. I pressed my lips together and took a deep inhale through my nose, trying to suffocate the terrible emotion lashing through my chest.
Failure. I knew it well.
Ash sat up, the sheets pooling at his waist as he leaned over and clicked on the bedside lamp. Outside the quiet night was coming to an end as the light of a dying star broke over the horizon, signaling a new day.
“I saw her,” I nodded, brushing my hands over the cotton sheets before running them through my hair, fisting it and pulling tight. I didn’t know whether it was Lily’s emotions or my own riding the action. Probably both.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked, trying not to push even though the same demons that plagued me would now be eating at him. Desperation. Depravity. Death.
I cursed the former because they made me crave the latter.
“She’s changing,” I told him, relinquishing my fisted grip on my hair to push the sheets aside. “For so long she wanted someone to save her, but I was too late. She had to save herself.” I kicked my legs over the edge of the bed and slipped to the cool marble ground. “It twisted something in her. The things she’s had to do to survive . . . I don’t know if she can come back from them.”
And there it was. The truth I didn’t want to admit.
I’d abandoned my sister when I could have saved her and now finding her may be for nothing, because Lily didn’t want to be saved.
“Being Made has changed her,” he said, nodding slowly.
“Being Made, being tortured, being forced to become—” I broke off, swallowing those words down. “She’s killed children, Ash. She murders with very little thought, because her only drive in life is to be free and then to get revenge against everyone.”
His dark eyes saw my soul as the corners of his mouth tightened. “What happened to her isn’t your fault.”
Nothing. I said nothing because he was right, but also not. Anastasia brought it about, but I was the one that sent that wild shot that snapped her neck. My own grief had consumed me long enough that it was too late by the time I realized she’d survived Daizlei and was still alive, at least in some capacity. I searched for her without knowing where to look, and as the days turned into weeks followed by months . . . she’d lost hope.
I didn’t blame her for that because I’d lost hope in her long before she did me. I didn’t think to look for a Vampire. I didn’t let myself entertain the thought because I assumed her being dead was the worst thing.
But she was turned, and I didn’t realize until too late. That assumption cost her everything.
Maybe it wasn’t my fault, but I was the one that pulled the trigger and then left her to face the consequences alone. That was on me.
“Selena,” Ash said, his voice hard as if he’d been saying my name for some time. I blinked, and the press of his lips and heavy sigh told me he probably was. “What’s happening to Lily is tragic.” I paused, opening my mouth, but he barreled on. “It’s more than tragic, and I am so sorry that she is dealing with this. But you—” I took a step away, and he slipped from the sheets and padded silently around the bed to stand before me. “You need to stop punishing yourself for sins you didn’t commit.”
“I killed her.”
“You were aiming for Anastasia and missed,” he grit his teeth. Warm hands wrapped around my forearms. “And you’ve been killing yourself since. I can’t keep watching you tear yourself apart because of the actions of others. You may be a matter manipulator and the most powerful person on this planet—but you can’t be everywhere, and you can’t be everything.” His words made sense logically, but the head didn’t always think with logic. Sometimes it listened to the heart, and try as I might to be cold and uncaring and not feel so damn much—I couldn’t stop blaming myself any more than the next person whose actions brought about the death of someone they loved so dearly.
“I know that,” I told him. “I know I can’t be everywhere and control everything—but in this one thing I wish I could. I wish that it had been me who died that day instead. I wish that Tori had never compromised our mission for her brother, but I know that in her place I would have done the same. I would pick Lily over the thousands that might die from that choice.” I swallowed hard, my mouth dry and throat sore. “But she won’t pick me, Ash. If this comes to a war, nothing will stop her because I’m the only one that can. But I won’t do it.” He pulled me to him and held me tight, holding my broken pieces together. I was thankful for his warmth when all I felt was cold and empty and numb. I was thankful for his steady presence when I didn’t know what I did to deserve this kindness.
I was thankful for him.
But it didn’t change that I wished it had been me.
Tonight showed me the stark clarity of truth that I hadn’t wanted to face.
There was no saving Lily because she didn’t want to be saved.
Chapter 10
I stood outside the elevator. Ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds.
Thinking—struggling—with the need in me to press the button and step inside. One command. That’s all it would take, and I could march right into Vilicky Novgorod, the Vampire capital of the world, and make my demands.
I could ask for my sister back and begin exploding heads. One for every second Lily wasn’t standing before me. I was strong enough to do it. I knew I was.
I was strong enough to bring even the most powerful of beings to their knees.
But what if she said no?
What if I went, going against everything I promised I wouldn’t do . . . and she didn’t come back with me?
I wasn’t sure if I could face it, because if I went—if she said no—there was a line in the sand between us.
One that would divide us forever. One that would be the death of one sister so that the other may rise.
I couldn’t kill her. For all she’d done, for all she would do, she was one of the only people I would not be the end of. Not again.
My hands clenched into fists, knuckles white and nails biting into my palm as my arms shook slightly from tensing so hard.
“Selena?” a voice behind me asked. I blinked. I’d been so absorbed in my own thoughts I hadn’t sensed the woman approaching behind me.
“Amber,” I said without turning. My fingers uncurled as I stiffly stepped toward the elevator.
“I was looking for you. Aaron said you’d already headed out for your morning run, but Jo hadn’t seen you . . .” The pause in her voice said it all. I could practically feel her gaze on my back, drilling holes through me.
“I was just on my way out,” I said, taking too long to make it believable.
“Uh huh . . .” she drawled, stepping up to my side. She reached past me to click the button for the elevator. “Well, that’
ll have to wait for the moment,” she said. The doors dinged before sliding open.
“Why is that?” I asked, stepping inside and turning to face her. Amber followed my suit, her gold eyes narrowing in suspicion.
“You’ve been summoned.”
I froze, tilting my chin to stare at her. She lifted both eyebrows as I asked, “By whom?”
“The Shifter Alpha.”
My lips parted as I inhaled sharply. Ash’s father summoned me. His father never summoned anyone, not unless it was critical. He preferred to let the local leaders of each pack handle their issues in house, so to speak, and if they needed more, they were to defer to Ash. For him to summon me. . . this couldn’t be good.
“Why?” I asked her, narrowing my eyes.
She shrugged. “Hell if I know.”
“Does Ash know?”
Her lips pressed together. “No.”
“No?” One of my eyebrows shot up. “Why not?”
Amber sighed. “I don’t know, Selena. All I know is my mother gave me a direct order handed down to her by the Alpha, and when the Alpha gives an order, you don’t refuse. Please don’t make this difficult.”
The doors dinged and slid open again.
We were on the lowest level.
Wood paneling and the scent of pine enveloped us as she stepped out first and began striding down the hall. I cursed under my breath and then followed after her.
“Doesn’t this seem a little odd that after months of us being here, he wants to suddenly meet with me now? Alone?” I asked, lowering my voice so that it wouldn’t carry down the empty hallways.
“I don’t know, Selena,” she said, sounding unconvinced that this was a problem in any way. She kept walking, her copper ringlets bouncing with every step. Gone were the makeup and miniskirts she’d worn at Daizlei. Here she dressed in cargo pants and T-shirts that didn’t quite touch her navel. “My uncle’s an odd guy. Not all there if you ask me, but nobody does.”
Vessel of Destruction (Daizlei Academy Book 4) Page 7