by Moore, E. M.
“He got in another fight with Father last night. He seems to think he may have took off in search of Dumont by himself.”
Christian pulled me forward. Before he led me through the doorway, I looked back at Isabelle. She was clearly unhappy, her eyes set in worry, but at the same time, I didn’t see any of the surprise or excitement that a missing son would’ve gathered in her. One last look at her downturned eyes, and I was pulled away from all her secrets.
21
Christian and I ran through the hallways and burst into the Council room once more. Everything was in a flurry. Calls still came in and were being answered orderly by the volunteers, but Gregor was in the center of the room, pacing, his hands on his hips. When he saw us enter the room, he stopped and ordered me to call Nicolai at that moment. With a shaking hand, I pulled out my cell phone and clicked on “Dark, Sexy, & Badass.” I didn’t know what I expected. I supposed I expected that he wouldn’t pick up for me since he hadn’t picked up for his brothers or his father. But, at the second ring, Nic said, “Hey.”
My mouth dropped. “Hey? Are you serious? Where are you?”
“I’m in Christian’s car.”
I peeked at Christian. I had no doubt all the vampires in the room could hear this conversation, but luckily enough, it was only Gregor and the princes in the room with that special trait. Christian didn’t even bat an eye. “And why are you in Christian’s car?”
“I had a hunch on where Dumont might be. Listen, I know everyone’s there and they’re probably all pissed at me, even more so now than before, but I think I’m onto something. I’m going to lure Dumont out by being myself. I think I can play with him, tell him I’m sick of my father, and I want to be on his side as long as he’ll give me a spot in the leadership of his Council when they overtake my family. Then, I can move in and take him just like we’ve all been wanting to do. I can be of use, Ri, and I think this is the way to do it.”
“This is stupid,” Christian said. I repeated that to Nicolai.
“And reckless,” Connor said. I also repeated that to Nicolai.
He chuckled. “Well, that’s kind of my thing, isn’t it?”
Gregor looked too furious to talk, to comment on anything. I turned my back and cupped the cell phone to try and make the conversation more private. “You’re not doing this for any other reason, are you, Nic? I mean, you’re not doing this because you made that mistake, are you? I promise you, your brothers wouldn’t have wanted you to do this no matter what you did to them. It’s not worth it.”
“You don’t think I can do it?”
“I didn’t say that. I just think when people go rogue, bad things can happen. I wished you’d brought the idea to Lex, so that we could expand on it and send you in with backup at the very least to make sure you were safe.”
“But that’s the thing,” he said, his voice getting stronger. “I can’t do that because you guys would give me away. It has to really seem like I’m doing this on my own.”
“That’s what you want to do now? You want to go off on your own? You could’ve at least told me, Nic.”
“You would’ve tried to stop me.”
“I’m not sure that I would’ve.”
“That’s what my mom said.”
I closed my eyes, my shoulders dropping. So Isabelle had helped him out with this plan. That was probably why she asked me how I felt about Nicolai participating in this fight against Dumont too. “You know I’m always behind you.”
“Listen, I’m almost there. I have to go.”
“Can you at least just tell me where you are so that we can go there now? What if you get into trouble and you need us to come save you?”
“Sorry. Can’t do that.”
“Nic…”
“I said I’m sorry.”
The phone paused for a few seconds. Dead air filled the expanse between us. I gripped the phone tighter in my hands. “Don’t you dare hang up on me.”
There was another few seconds of pause before Nicolai said, “I really do have to go. Bye, Ri.”
Rage spurred inside me. I’d done some things that were considered dangerous, but I’d never put myself this much at risk without others, without having qualified people there that I knew would help me if something had gone wrong. I meant what I said. When people went rogue, bad things could happen. “I’ll never forgive you for this, Nic. Turn around now.”
“Don’t say that, Ri.”
“Turn around…”
The phone clicked. The dead air was real this time. I pulled the phone out and checked the screen. “Call ended.” I sat down where I was, the phone coming up to my face as I clasped my hands around my ears. Within a few moments, hands were around me. Stephan. He picked me up, jostled me for a second, and then I closed my eyes tight as we whizzed through the house. It was only a few seconds before a soft mattress was at my back. I opened my eyes, praying the room didn’t spin above me. It didn’t. Stephan’s face was there to ground me. “He hung up on me.”
“He thinks he’s helping.”
“I’m going to kill him.”
“You don’t mean that.”
The door to Stephan’s room opened, and Christian and Connor were right there, their brows furrowed as if they couldn’t quite understand what happened. “He wants to bring Dumont in himself.”
“We heard,” Connor said.
“I should’ve realized he’d do something like this,” Christian said.
“Something like this? I thought he’d beg to get on one of the missions Lex set up, but I didn’t think he’d do anything like this. It’s a freaking suicide mission. What if Dumont doesn’t believe a word he’s saying? He’ll be a sitting duck. Dumont wants to take out the Ravana Clan, and Nic just made it so easy by giving himself up to him.” I pushed myself off the bed as a thousand scenarios filtered through my head. “Someone has to tell Lex.”
“Gregor’s doing that right now,” Christian said. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do other than sit back and wait. See if he calls back.”
“Do you think he’s doing this to prove something?” Stephan asked. “Is it because he marked Ariana? I don’t get it.”
“Nic’s always been a gut instinct type of person,” Connor admitted.
“I don’t know. He hasn’t been talking to any of us. Not even Ariana,” Stephan countered.
“Bite me,” I said.
Three pairs of eyes glared at me.
“No, not like that. Bite me,” I told them, motioning toward my neck. “If he’s worried he ruined my relationship with you all and we can prove to him that nothing is wrong by you guys biting me, then we should do it. If it works, I can call him back right now and tell him that he doesn’t have to do this.”
“I don’t think that’s why he’s doing this,” Christian said. “Gregor told him he couldn’t, so he’s doing it anyway. It’s his MO.”
“But not for me,” I said, my voice tight. “He wouldn’t do this to me unless there was a reason. He wouldn’t make me worry unnecessarily.”
Christian looked at his remaining brothers. “No, I still think you’re wrong. He thinks he’s helping all of us in the long run so he decided to do this. I don’t think it’s related to him marking you at all.”
“Will someone just bite me?” I snapped. I didn’t want to hear anymore thoughts on why Nicolai did this, I just wanted to do something about it, and this was the only thing I could think of. This was the only thing I had control over right here and right now.
Connor lunged forward. The last thing I saw was the sharp glint of his fangs before they sliced through my delicate skin, only entering the same amount Nic’s had. My mouth dropped open, and a small moan escaped my lips before he quickly pulled away. I looked at my shoulder and a trickle of blood ran from the two puncture spots.
I looked up to find Connor wiping his mouth. “Kiss me,” I instructed. I pulled his shirt hard, and he came tumbling down over me. I captured his lips in a kiss and held on. I kissed hi
m with everything I had, every last worry for his brother melted into that kiss. I wasn’t going to let this not work. I kissed him and kissed him until I realized he’d never pulled away. He was still there, his tongue prying my lips apart so he could get more.
A throat cleared behind me. Connor pulled away, a smile pulling his lips wide. “It worked. I can’t feel Nic’s power over you anymore.”
I looked up at Christian. “Bite me.”
He shook his head. “You’re both reckless. I guess that’s the attraction between you two.”
“What’s your attraction to me then?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Too many to count.”
I smiled and offered him my neck, but he hesitated. “What?”
“If this is working, then I should feel both Connor and Nic’s pull over you when I kiss you. Otherwise, the shift may have just went to Connor if he overpowered Nic’s mark. If that’s all this is doing, I’m not sure it’s a cure.”
“Kiss me first then.”
Christian lowered his head to mine, his lips whispering over my own briefly before he pulled away. He pulled back, then grunted before positioning my neck for him. He groaned before his fangs slid into me, careful not to go any further than the previous puncture wounds. I sighed, feelings of bliss overtaking me until I was on a high. When he was done, he kissed up my neck to my lips where he took control, kissing the life back into me. A week may not sound like a long time, but when you loved these princes as much as I did, a week was a week too long to not be able to express these simple emotions with them.
“Okay, okay,” Connor said, jokingly.
Christian pulled away, the glint in his gray-blue eyes back again. “We’re never going to be able to get anything done again.”
Stephan moved into view. His emerald eyes were scared almost as he regarded me. “You’re sure?” he asked. It wasn’t a question just for me, it was for his brothers too. We all nodded, and he leaned over. His sharp fangs teased my skin until he found the holes his brothers had left. I clung to him, the anticipation of his fangs sinking into my body was too much. He did so, nice and slow, entering me on a high that I wanted to last forever. I held on to him, my hips coming off the bed on instinct. They said biting was a sexual thing, but I didn’t realize they’d meant it in this sense too. He wasn’t even touching me between my legs, but it was flooding with heat, and that tell-tale feeling of needing just that much more stimulation before slipping off the edge and dropping into the undulations of pleasure lapped at me.
Hands pried mine out from around him and then Stephan stepped back, his hands in mine and a smear of blood on his lips. He wiped it quickly away, his eyes determined as he swooped in for his kiss. As detail oriented as Stephan was, he hit all my right buttons, leaving me breathless and gasping before he pulled away.
Connor laughed. “Damn Stephan. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
I lay on the bed, still trying to regain my composure when a phone slipped into my hand. Christian looked down on me. “Call Nic.”
I did so, my hands shaking as I clicked on his name and held the phone to my ear. It rang, twice, three, four times when the voicemail clicked over. I blinked, waiting for the beep, but when I started to talk, my voice came out slurred.
Christian pulled it from my grasp. “Ariana wants to tell you that everything’s okay here. We all bit her, and she’s no longer marked just for you. She’s all of ours again. Oh, and we probably won’t be biting her ever again because she kind of can’t talk right now. You don’t have to do this, Nicolai. We’re good here.”
He hung up the phone, and I smiled at him. “Thank you. Now text him that same thing. Please. In case he won’t check his voicemail, but he’ll read a text.”
As Christian did as I asked, Connor said, “He’s probably already there. That’s what he said, right? He said he was almost there. He might not get it, Princess.”
The haze started to fade away, and panic once again took over. Christian handed me my cell back, and I dropped it on the bed next to me, my hands coming up to rest on my head.
“At least we settled one problem,” Christian said.
“But we have another bigger problem,” Stephan countered. “Nicolai’s off by himself, and there’s not much we can do. Connor couldn’t get the GPS to locate his phone.”
“At least we can all deal with it as a whole again,” Connor said. “I missed my Princess, and I’m not afraid to admit it.”
I listened as they discussed everything around me, but there was just one thing weighing on my mind. “Your mom knows.”
“What?” Christian barked.
“Your mom knows where Nic went. I’m almost one-hundred percent sure.”
He shook his head. “That’s not possible. She wouldn’t let him do this.”
“She did,” I told him, sitting up now. “And I think what she was trying to tell me was that we should just let this play out. She said everything would work out in the end. Maybe this wasn’t about the marking thing at all for Nic. I don’t know. Isabelle and I talked about a lot of things.”
“You’re sure she knew?” Stephan asked.
I nodded. “Christian was there. He saw her reaction when he told us. She wasn’t surprised at all.”
“She’s always giving in to us,” Connor said, sighing heavily. “Kind of like you, Princess.”
“If by giving in you mean I know you’re all separate people with your own wishes and desires and interests, then yes, I guess I always do. I just wish he’d told me how badly his not being involved was affecting him. I didn’t think he would pull anything like this.”
“None of us did.”
“Except your mom,” I corrected.
“Yeah, but she’s a mom. She knows everything.”
Despite myself, I smiled. If she knew everything, which I was starting to think was very true, then she was probably right about all this working out in the end. No matter how much I hated to wait and see, that was what we needed to do. Nicolai wasn’t stupid. He was brash, sure, but he wouldn’t have put himself in so much danger if he knew he couldn’t get out of it. I just had to learn to trust him, and in some ways, I guess I hadn’t been trusting him all along. I’d been taking charge in this guardian thing, agreeing with Nic that he should be allowed to do what he wanted, but not actively pursuing it with him. I should’ve been behind him. Strike that, I should’ve been right there next to him confronting Gregor with him. If that was the case, he might’ve confided in me on what he planned to do, and then I would be beside him right now. When he really needed it. Instead, I was sitting at home, worrying my hands over when my phone would ring.
It better ring.
And it better be Nic’s voice on the other side, telling me at the very least that he was uninjured, or at the very best, that he was uninjured, and he also had Dumont.
I breathed out a heavy breath and pulled my princes down next to me. I was never very good at waiting, but I’d have to get used to it. I didn’t know when Nic would be calling us back, and what information he’d have to share.
“He’ll be okay,” Christian promised. “He’s Nic.”
I smirked. Sounded about right. It would be just like him to go rogue and then come out of it unscathed No doubt he’d be walking up to the Ravana Estate with a huge smile on his face with an easy, breezy air, like ‘What? You were worried? I had it under control the whole time.’
One could only hope… And hope was infinitely more powerful than fear.
22
I laid my head against the pillow and brought my phone to my ear, briefly catching the name I’d been dialing over and over again for the past two days. My calls had gone from ringing then voicemail, to going directly to voicemail. I didn’t know why I expected Nic to just waltz right in there, do what he was going to do, and then hear from him again after a few hours. A few hours? I wanted to slap my past self for even putting that thought into my head.
Two days. The longest two days of my life.
The door to my room creaked open, and Stephan peered in. The princes had responded to all this with sending Connor in to cheer me up, so seeing Stephan’s face peek around the door was a bit of a shock. Nic’s voice punched through the short silence, his brief ‘Leave me a message’ monotone bounced through my head, pulling my attention away from the brown-haired prince across the room. I ended the call and threw the phone down next to me on the bed. Stephan frowned. “Nothing yet?”
I shook my head and pulled the pillow toward me, getting into another comfortable position before I called him again in fifteen minutes.
“Do you know how many missed calls he’s going to have when he finally turns his phone back on? He’s going to think you’re stalking him…”
He tried for the light, airy tone, but it was too late. Connor had already tried to pull that one on me and even though I smiled for Connor, humor wasn’t Stephan’s forte. I frowned at him, and looked away, once again wondering why no one else seemed to be taking this as seriously as I was. Nicolai was gone. He left. He basically walked right into our number one enemy’s lair and hasn’t come out since.
The bed depressed next to me and Stephan put his hand on my hip. “I’m sorry. You know we’re all worried.”
I clenched my jaw tight together to keep from spouting anything that would hurt him. It wasn’t his fault. I was just in a mood. Stephan was just too sweet and always put up with my crap.
He laid down facing me, keeping his hand on my hip. His emerald eyes were like two shining spheres, drawing me in. “I know you’re mad at…everyone.”
“That’s an understatement.”
Just the thought of it made me want to throw something. A few hours after Nic left, Isabelle told us where he was going. She gave us all the information we needed to go there, and sure, I tried to be understanding and let Nic do what he was going to do, but when we had his location, and the people, to ensure his safety, what was the problem? We could’ve been in Georgia by now just keeping an eye on things. But no.