The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3)

by Michelle Hazen

  To our right, there’s a whole wall of glass leading to three different rooms, each of which is occupied by a few yuppie-looking vampires. The first room is full of weights and cardio equipment, the second is backed with mirrors and has a floor punctuated with brightly colored yoga mats, and one, unbelievably, is scattered with meditation cushions facing a blank wall with a stylized OM symbol on it.

  You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.

  I map the layout in my head as we pass closed doors that smell like the cedar and heat of home saunas. There’s not a window in sight, but there are no cages, either. Of course not: these people all joined the cult and nobody has to keep them locked in anymore.

  Their sire bonds do that.

  All the walls are painted soothing, warm hues, and there’s a subtle watermarked border of leaves along the top edge of the hallway. But the effect is ruined by the harsh, colorless light that leaves everything feeling vaguely industrial and surreal.

  “You’d think they could have sprung for something other than cheap fluorescents in their fancy lair,” I complain.

  Lia looks sad. “Full-spectrum lights. It helps keep morale up, since we don’t have the luxury of daylight rings.” She glances down at my left hand. “You never figured out how yours was made, did you?”

  “I’m not part of the hocus pocus contingent,” I say evasively, still scanning for possible exits as Lia stops in front of a nondescript door and pulls a fat key ring from the pocket of her slacks.

  She obviously has enough keys to get around inside the facility these days, so all I need to do is get us through the external layer of security, but I can’t do that until I know what they did with Jeremy and Cali. Assuming they didn’t just drain them.

  “Any idea where they’re holding my friends?” I ask, stepping closer and dropping my voice. “Couple of kids barely past puberty, one kind of emo-Abercrombie and one pint-sized punk rocker princess?” I try a smirk, but it feels weak. “About ten seconds after they open their mouths you want to kill them, but they kind of grow on you after a while.”

  They have to be alive. There’s no way the Augustines would spare my life and not theirs. Unless they were killed by accident. I remember with growing nausea how easy it is to break a human’s neck. It would only take a moment’s carelessness in a fight and Jeremy is all out of second chances.

  “They let the humans go,” Lia says, looking concerned as her eyes narrow on my face. “We have no quarrel with humans.”

  My relief is immediately drowned out by the blare of that single word. “We? What the hell do you mean, we? And what about Elena? If you know they let Jeremy go, have you heard if they found any of the others?”

  She’s already shaking her head. “There’s been no sign of them. You’re the only prisoner they brought back.”

  I close my eyes briefly. As stupid as it was for Jeremy to just take off for the bus station, at least he led the Augustines away from his sister. I just hope like hell she has no idea where I am. If she gets so much as a clue, she’ll sign her own death warrant trying to save me and I doubt they’ll go easy on the vampire daughter of one of their former members.

  The rasp of bolts drawing back catches my ears and I open my eyes to find Lia opening a door that looks normal on the outside, but is built like a bank vault when she opens it, two-inch bolts retracting all along both edges that will extend into the thick metal doorframe when she turns her key again. She avoids my eyes as she leads the way inside, and when she closes the door, she doesn’t re-engage the bolts.

  Somehow, I don’t get the idea that makes me any less trapped.

  Chapter 16: Sex and Broken Things

  ELENA

  I can barely feel the bed I’m sitting on, everything that’s left inside of me focused on the ring on my third finger. Lapis lazuli and flawless diamonds, protection and guilt. I love that Damon chose it for me, that the ring I’ll wear for all my immortal life came from him, just like the blood that bought me all those extra years.

  And I hate that this might be the only ring he’ll ever give me.

  He slaughtered the entire Augustine Society and whoever rebuilt it, they’re certainly not going to forgive him for that. They could have already staked him by now and I wouldn’t even know.

  If this were a movie, I’d tragically declare that even if all we got was a summer and part of a fall to be together, it would be enough. That it was all worth it.

  It may have been worth it, but it’s not enough, not by a long shot.

  In all his lifetimes, Damon has never been married, and the gravity of the fact that he was finally ready to change that is not lost on me. He doesn’t promise many things, the man that I love, because he knows how uncertain the world is and he can’t stand to let people down.

  He was going to promise to be with me and now he’s gone, before he could give me the ring to show that vow, before I could live through even the first day of the decades we should have had together.

  It’s not about the jewelry. I’d grind every diamond on the planet to dust for him and everyone knows it. It’s that I wasn’t supposed to know this daylight ring came from him.

  I shoot off the bed, my legs twitching angrily as I pace to the balcony and pull open the doors. This vacation rental is beautiful and private, just the kind of place Damon would have chosen. And I hate it because the air from the courtyard is cold and tastes of lies, like the wind on the roof that dawn with Stefan.

  Bonnie made this for you last night.

  Damon bought me this ring because he loved me enough to look out for me even after I chose his brother and left him to die alone. When I tried to kill myself because of the Hunter’s Curse, he jumped off a bridge with me and searched blindly through the mud while I waited, shivering, in the shadows of the bridge. And he never told me, not even then, that the ring I threw away so cavalierly was one he designed just for me.

  If he dies now, he’ll never get to see the ring that would announce to the world that we chose each other. And I’ll be left with the ring that says he was my dirty little secret, that he loved me too much to let me go and I didn’t love him enough to admit I didn’t want him to.

  Damon Salvatore should never be anyone’s dirty little secret.

  I spread my fingers and grip the railing of the balcony. The stucco is rough under my palms and I can feel its brittle fragility. I’ll crush it against its wire skeleton if I’m not careful. My head falls forward and I watch unseeingly as the breeze swirls and tugs at the long, flat strands of my hair.

  We’ve talked about getting our own place. After that fight we had when I comforted Stefan about compelling Cali, and in little moments over lunch or in bed since then. Never very seriously: we thought we’d always have the boarding house. But we’re vampires so we knew we would have to live other places, too, and it was fun to talk about what we’d want. An apartment high in a city, or a little cottage overgrown with vines, filled with small rooms and crooked ceilings. Damon’s villa in Italy or a bungalow on a beach, with the sound of waves washing through every sun-warmed corner.

  Sometimes we talked about a place just for us, sometimes one big enough for Stefan and Ric and Jeremy, as if they’d always be around though I know they won’t. In my mind, the house was always a little vague but I could see the kitchen perfectly. Our sleek, black coffeemaker and the cabinet above it with Ric’s bottle of aspirin and Jeremy’s comically oversized mug.

  My brother can’t stand the idea of having to come back to the kitchen for a refill but he invariably gets caught up in whatever he’s doing and forgets to finish it. Every day I find the mug half-full somewhere in the house: on top of the piano or precariously tangled with the cords of his Xbox, maybe leaving a wet ring on his cluttered desk next to his sketchbooks.

  To me, the idea of our own place isn’t so much a floor plan as it is Jeremy’s coffee bucket, Ric’s aspirin and crumpled Starbucks receipts and Damon’s favorite black mug with the chip in the bottom that we both use more than any
other dish in the whole house.

  It’s matte black, a dangerous-looking color for such an innocuous object and it was flawless when I first saw it. The chip came from me dropping it when I was human, one of the many times Damon startled me by appearing right behind me, perfectly silent and perfectly beautiful. He loved to catch my first, unguarded reaction, even though it usually ended up with me yelling at him, and sometimes smacking him, too.

  My fingers press painfully against the balustrade, the texture of the stucco imprinting itself on me like new fingerprints.

  Damon’s fingers always toyed with the flaw in the bottom of the cup when he used it, the same way he’d idly run his hand across the chip in the window of the Camaro when he drove. Even though I’m alone, I flush a little thinking of how I damaged the window with the airborne button of his pants that I ripped off when I got a little too excited during the drive home from Whitmore.

  How is it the only mementos that my unsentimental boyfriend treasures are things I broke because I couldn’t control my ridiculous attraction to him?

  But then that’s just me and Damon: magma-hot sex appeal and a trail of broken things in our wake.

  Including the house that used to hold that mug.

  My hair tickles my cheeks and I shove it away impatiently, the scratch of my ring against my cheek suddenly reminding me there is one more thing he kept: the partially-eaten Hostess cupcake, tucked into a Ziploc bag and carefully packed into his suitcase.

  I shoot back into the room, falling to my knees beside his suitcase that I brought in for no good reason, nearly mangling the zipper when I pull it open too fast.

  The cupcake is a handful of crushed crumbs, the disc of hard brown frosting with white curlicues the only thing that’s still recognizable. I open the bag and inhale the slightly industrial scent of sugar and flour and dye, remembering how gently he fed the bite of cake to me.

  In my most secret thoughts, when I fantasized about things I’d never admit to my boyfriend, I figured he would be the kind to playfully smash the wedding cake into my face during the reception, heedless of my makeup and the watching guests.

  But somehow when he placed that bit of cupcake on my tongue in the aisle of a Mini Mart, it felt like the most sacred moment of my life.

  I open the Ziploc bag, a smile touching my lips when I remember how he threw the box on the ground without even looking, but handled this cheap cupcake like it was the only piece of gold in a world sculpted of mud and spit.

  With two fingers I pinch a few chocolate crumbs and bring them to my lips. It tastes like salt, from my earlier tears, and it’s already a little stale. I hold the bite on my tongue until it dissolves, like I can take the memory of Damon into me and hold it safe inside my body until I see him again.

  He’s not dead. I won’t let him be dead.

  It’s been barely a day and a half since we got engaged, less than 24 hours since he was taken from me. We can still find him in time. Can’t we?

  Damon’s phone startles me, rattling against my hipbone with a jarring electrical buzz. I dig it out of the front pocket of Jeremy’s old hoodie. My brother gave it to me the night the boarding house burned and it doesn’t fit at all but I can’t seem to stop wearing it.

  I don’t recognize the name of the person who sent the text, but it must be one of Damon’s compelled human spies because no one else has this number. And when I open the attached picture I nearly drop the phone.

  It’s Katherine, walking across the Whitmore campus with Professor Maxfield. And it was taken yesterday.

  My eyes narrow on the phone until I can’t see anything else, my heartbeat pumping deafeningly in my ears. Katherine must have been so angry with us for not treating her like the queen of the universe that she joined the Augustines, and whatever horrors they have planned to get their revenge on Damon, I know that Katherine will only make them more cruel.

  I close my eyes and press the phone to my forehead, as the taste of our anniversary cupcake fades away to nothing on my tongue.

  * * *

  DAMON

  “So we’re right back where we started,” I say to Lia. “Only this time we have one cell instead of two, and you have a hell of a lot of insider information. You wanna give me the Cliff’s Notes version of how you’re not dead?”

  Lia looks away, her fingers burrowing deeper into the sleeves of her sweater as if she feels like the less of her skin is exposed, the safer she’ll be. There’s a plain foam mattress on the floor in here, but neither of us moves to sit down. The walls are smoothly painted instead of made of open iron bars, and she didn’t lock the reinforced door behind us, but this is no less a prison than where the Augustines kept me the first time.

  “They caught me, that night we tried to escape together,” she begins, fingers fidgeting inside her sleeves. “I didn’t get to open a single cell before the guards nabbed me. They took me out of there and held me at one of the leader’s houses in the country so I couldn’t stir up the other prisoners, who all knew we’d tried to escape. The night you came back and freed the others and burned the lab, they were torturing me to try to find out where you would have gone.”

  I swallow hard. They didn’t kill her for trying to escape. I should have known the Augustines well enough to realize they wouldn’t be that merciful.

  She reaches out, laying a cool hand on my arm and giving me a quick, comforting squeeze before she lets me go. “They didn’t do anything we hadn’t been through a hundred times before, Damon. And I fed them all kinds of nonsense about how you had this safehouse in Florida, and another one up in Maine. By the time they realized I was giving them the runaround and went to check the boarding house, there was no one there, not even the relative supposedly caretaking the place.”

  My lips twitch, but I don’t bother to tell her I’d already killed him. It wouldn’t matter to her anyway. Lia transitioned before blood bags were easy to steal, just like me, and we had both drained enough people to stop counting long before either of us ended up as unwilling guests of the Augustines.

  “After your clean sweep of their old lab, I was the only vampire subject they had left, so they couldn’t kill me.” She drops down on the foam mattress and nudges my leg with one foot, clad in stylish black ankle boots. “Which means you basically saved my life. So stop looking like you just strangled a puppy, okay?”

  I dig up a crooked smile for her. “Hey, when an old friend comes back from the dead, sometimes it takes me a second to reboot.”

  She wrinkles her nose and pokes me a little harder with the toe of her shoe. “Your best friend, jerkface, not just an old one. Don’t even try and tell me I’ve been replaced. You’re not charming enough to scrape up another best friend with only fifty years to work on it, especially without the handicap of having them locked in next door to you.”

  I smirk. “Oh, I’m plenty charming. But I wasn’t going to waste it on the likes of you.”

  She gasps in feigned indignation. “Keep it up, buddy, and I won’t even smuggle you in any bourbon.”

  My shoulders tighten. “Lia, they tortured you to find out where I was, and now you’re somehow close enough to them to escort me to my cell, get your hands on booze, and check on other prisoners? How exactly did that happen?”

  I’m trying to be gentle, because I know none of this is her fault. She can’t be sired to the Augustines’ crazy vampire ally, because she was already well past her transition when they captured her. But they’ve obviously found some way to get inside her head and turn her to their side. I’m going to have to get her to realize that before I’ll be able to get her to escape with me.

  Lia’s face is solemn. “They’re not like that anymore, Damon,” she says quietly. “When you went on the warpath, one of the scientists took me and went underground at one of their safehouses. He was scared, and terribly alone as the rest of the Augustines vanished, one by one. He didn’t have anyone to talk to except for me, and by the time he was the only one left, we were pretty good friends.”<
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  I don’t bother to hide the curl of my lip. Friends? If I were locked up with one of those scientists, I’d have had to be vervained most of the way to paperweight status to keep my fangs out of his jugular, no matter what kind of cage they built for me.

  Lia tilts her head, her hair slipping down over her shoulder. “Dr. Manning knew me too well by then to keep thinking that all vampires were evil, and I helped him realize that it is just our predator instincts that make some of us turn bad. He continued his experiments but changed the focus to finding a way to combat the bloodlust.” She sits a little straighter, her chin lifting as if she’s preparing for a fight. “I volunteered to be his subject.”