I stared at her, encouraging her with my attention more than with words. Anything I said would be inadequate.
Luanne took a shuddering breath, the vibrating tremor of her inhale the only sound in the hollow room. Eventually, she spoke. “When I came home with the groceries, Lucy was already stiff and cold on the kitchen floor, like… well, like you just saw her.”
I pursed my lips, willing my tongue to swallow the question, but this time, I couldn’t help myself. Even with the craving burning my throat, my mind could still discern right from wrong, even if my body couldn’t. “And when you found her, your first thought was to take a picture of her?”
Luanne’s eyes snapped up to meet mine. “Fuck you, you sick shit sack,” she spat. “Kaden took the picture. I found it later, after I’d already cleaned and buried her.”
I frowned. “Why would he—”
“I’d left the phone with her, so she’d have it in an emergency. As if 911 would even work. As if there was anyone to call for help besides me,” Luanne said, her voice nothing but gravel-ground glass. “Kaden messaged the photo to his own phone. A souvenir.”
“He could have used his own phone,” I murmured.
“And spare me the pain of stumbling across the photo and reliving that horror?” She shook her head. “Right.”
I pursed my lips. “When did all this happen?”
“Didn’t you see the date above the photo? Or were you too focused on all the damn blood?” Luanne sneered. “Two days ago. Lucy was attacked and killed by Kaden, my son, her own damn father, two days ago. I buried my baby yesterday.” She met my gaze. “And then I read your article. If Kaden was sentenced to death last month, and if that sentence was carried out, how the fuck did he do this to my Lucy two days ago?” she said, flashing the photo at me again, her hand and the phone visibly shaking.
She was telling the truth. I could tell by the steady contractions of her heart, the cinnamon spice of her constant fear, and the weight in her unyielding eyes. She was frightened by me because I was a vampire, but she wasn’t nervous and she didn’t falter. Even the best, most sadistic, sociopathic liar alive couldn’t lie to me unnoticed anymore; she couldn’t control the flavor of the words as they spilled into the air any more than I could effectively describe their taste, but the taste of her words convinced me like nothing else could of a much harder truth to swallow.
Humans couldn’t lie to me anymore, but vampires could.
Five weeks ago, while I’d recovered in the hospital from our confrontation with Jillian and Kaden, Dominic had assured me that both Jillian and Kaden had been brought before the coven on charges of treason and attempted murder, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He had told me that their sentence had been carried out. Their final death.
Jillian was alive and well, having usurped his coven, but I could understand Dominic’s reluctance to kill Jillian. She had been his Second, and the most trusted and beloved vampire in his coven, right up until the moment when she’d betrayed him. Love was annoying that way; it didn’t matter that she had stabbed him in the back—literally and with her own talons—the love was still there, bitter and biting, but there all the same. So instead of carrying out the full weight of her sentence, he’d condemned her to an eternity in the Underneath, which honestly was a worse sentence than death, but that’s what love does to a person: it confuses right and wrong, hope and the hard truth.
What I couldn’t understand, and in fact resented, was him allowing me to believe that Kaden’s sentence had been carried out. There had been no love lost between those two.
“I don’t know how Kaden could have killed Lucy if he was already dead,” I said, in answer to Luanne’s hanging question. “But I intend to find out.”
Chapter 23
“You said Kaden was dead. You said the coven had found him guilty of treason, and for his crimes against the coven, for his crimes against me, you said he was sentenced to death and that sentence had been carried out.” My words were clipped and hard and echoed hollowly in the interview viewing room I’d dragged Dominic into, the very same room we’d been caught kissing in less than an hour ago, back when I’d thought we’d known everything important about one another. I wasn’t fool enough to think I’d ever know everything about this man—it was impossible to know everything about anyone who’d lived a normal human lifespan, let alone someone who had already been alive for over four hundred years before my birth—but I’d have staked my life on the fact that we no longer withheld secrets from one another.
Dominic had the nerve to meet my eyes. He didn’t even flinch when he spoke. “I know what I said.”
I stared at him, shaking my head slowly from side to side. I couldn’t seem to stop the movement, as if I could deny it all as a nightmare. But this was one truth I couldn’t wake up from. “You let me think you’d killed Jillian, and I spent weeks suffering from her lingering hold on my mind—I suffered through her cravings and pain and constant taunting—”
“Had I known, I could have helped you. You should have told me that you could feel her. I could have—”
“You should have told me that she was still alive! I thought I was going crazy, hearing and feeling the thoughts of a dead woman!”
“We’ve already had this argument. I thought we’d come to terms with all this. We’ve moved on,” Dominic growled, slashing his hand through the air as if he could will away the argument as easily as he forced his will on everything and everyone else.
But not on me. Not anymore. “I thought we had to, but now here we are, weeks later, after I’ve trusted you to transform me, trusted you in my life, inside my body, convinced Greta and Rowens to trust you on this investigation, and you still don’t trust me with the truth.”
“I didn’t mean for you to find out this way. I—”
I could hear the bleat of his backtracking like a lamb being dragged to slaughter, and I realized another truth he’d hidden. “You knew Kaden had been released from his confinement when we rescued Bex from the Underneath,” I said. It wasn’t even a question. It was fact: I could hear it in the desperation of his eyes, in the taste of his words. I knew the truth of it in my bones the way I used to know bread was burning from the living room long before turning to see the flames from the toaster, because I could smell the stink of it.
“Yes,” he admitted.
“You left me vulnerable all over again.” My head was still shaking, still in denial. “Did you learn nothing from what happened with Jillian? Do I mean nothing?”
“You mean everything,” Dominic growled.
I laughed. The sound was bitter and scraped painfully against my own eardrums. Dominic winced.
“Why?” I asked. “After everything we’ve been through and survived together, after all the times I’ve saved you and you’ve saved me, why continue to lie?”
Dominic’s eyes blazed. “You know exactly why. Jillian was my Second, and Kaden a member of my coven, the survival of which I’ve spent the majority of my four hundred years ensuring. As Master, it’s my duty to carry out their death sentences, but I couldn’t, Cassidy. No matter their crimes against the coven, no matter even their crimes against you, no matter their betrayal of me—” Dominic’s voice broke. He shook his head warily, taking a second to regain his composure. “God knows, Kaden is a sick, murdering evil piece of shit,” Dominic said, his tone proper and clipped despite the vulgarity. “But I’m not. I couldn’t give them their final death.”
I nodded, waiting.
“But the coven expected me to uphold the duty of their Master, so I condemned Jillian and Kaden to the Underneath—an arguably worse sentence than final death—and told the coven that their sentence had been carried out.” Dominic stared at me, his eyes pleading. “With the Leveling approaching, I was steadily losing my strength and power over the coven; had the coven discovered my weakness, they would have used that to strip me of what little
power I still maintained. Don’t you see, Cassidy? I had no choice.”
I stopped shaking my head. “You’re right. The coven might have turned your compassion and empathy against you had they discovered your secret. But I’m not concerned about why you’d lie to the coven. Dominic”—I let loose a long, sad sigh—“why did you continue to lie to me?”
Dominic opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again, at a loss.
“I don’t care that you didn’t carry out their execution. I understand exactly why you didn’t, and in fact, I respect you for it. What I can’t understand, or abide, is you not telling me the truth,” I said softly. “Is there anything else I should know? Anything else you’ve been keeping from me that may or may not bite me in the ass tomorrow?”
He shook his head vehemently. “No, there’s nothing else. There are no secrets between us.”
“That’s what I thought, too, until I got into that interrogation room half-hour ago, and she shattered that illusion ‘right quick,’” I said bitterly. “You always saw the potential in me and our relationship. From the first, you wanted me as your night blood, demanded my loyalty, and coerced my aid in your diabolical schemes to save your coven. You had such high expectations for us long before I saw you as anything but a monster. But you”—I shook my head and my finger at him—“you shattered every expectation I had for you. From the first, I thought you were a monster, a murderer, and evil, just like all the others of your kind.” I placed my hand gently on his cheek, and he closed his eyes at the feel of my touch. “I was wrong about nearly everything about you and your kind, but being wrong this time was the first time it broke my heart.”
His eyes flew open. “Cassidy, please, I—”
I gripped his face tighter in my hand. “Promise me, by the final certainty of the sun, that there are no more secrets between us.”
“Jesus Christ, have we really come to this?”
I hadn’t realized how cold my face was until tears overflowed from my eyes and scalded my cheeks. I could only imagine how gaunt and monstrous I looked. “Swear it!”
“I swear by the sun, Cassidy, that there are no secrets between us.” Dominic gripped my shoulders and shook me, gently but firmly. “I swear, Cassidy.”
Part of me expected all the hard-won bonds connecting his soul to mine to snap and fall limp between us with that final lie, the lie that would break us apart permanently, irrevocably. But they didn’t. His promise held true, the bonds between us remained unbreakable, and his promise tied us closer. We were more permanently bound than we had been a moment before, even if I still felt fragile enough to shatter.
“Good,” I murmured, releasing him. “That’s good.”
His hold on my shoulders tightened. “Cassidy—”
“We should go. Everyone’s waiting on us.”
I turned away, but Dominic pulled me back roughly. “They can continue to fucking wait.”
He sealed his lips over mine, stealing my breath along with my sanity. The hearth between us, separate from my hurt and reservations, ignited as bright and scalding as ever. It seemed a simple fundamental action-reaction inside me with this man: he kissed me and I burned. But I wasn’t alone in the reaction. I could smell the electric sting on his skin, the brand my kiss had on his soul as surely as he scorched mine. As unlikely and unequal a paring as we had begun, the force driving us forward and together was equal between us, and in that equality, I couldn’t find purchase to fight back.
I should have raked my talons across his face and told him exactly where to stuff his kisses and excuses, but when the person in your arms has already claimed the very deepest, darkest depths of yourself, where do you dig down to find the strength to pull away?
“I’m sorry,” he murmured against my lips between kisses, so I couldn’t discern where his kiss started and apology ended.
“I know,” I whispered, biting his lip and soothing the bite with a quick lick.
He growled, his grip on my upper arms tightening. “Condemning Kaden to the Underneath was my burden to bear, and by the time it should have been yours as well, we’d become so tangled in the war with Jillian and saving Nathan and transforming you and just surviving that I never found the right moment to share the secret. I didn’t deliberately keep it from you, but I should have found a way to tell you before now.” He leaned back from the kiss and met my eyes. “It won’t happen again.”
I could taste the truth in his words like the final, decadent smears of cream from a cake—no kaleidoscope-confusion of hidden and mixed emotions from him anymore—but my cold heart still felt bruised. Funny, how it could go both ways, the head and the heart refusing to listen to each other. Reason, no matter how reasonable, never could convince emotion.
“Prove it,” I murmured, softening my words with another fierce kiss before finally, agonizingly, pulling away.
Chapter 24
“As far as last-ditch efforts go, I suppose it’s not the worst plan I’ve ever heard,” Rowens conceded.
Even without my newfound, heightened senses, I would have felt the uncertainty and tension filling the room. With my new senses, I actually smelled it like the acrid warning of smoke. If we inhaled too much, we’d succumb before the real battle even began.
“This is not a last-ditch effort,” I defended. “This is our best shot at taking down Jillian and reducing the risk of casualties to both us and the night bloods she’s transformed.”
“You mean the mindless, monstrous, heart-eating army of Damned guarding her front door,” Greta clarified.
“They can be saved,” Nathan insisted. He raised his hand. “I was once a mindless, heart-eating monster, and look at me now.”
Greta snorted. “Now, you’re a lucid heart-eating monster. Such an improvement.”
“It is,” Rowens said, calmly, as usual.
I sighed. This meeting of the minds was going as well as could be expected, I supposed, except for my creeping suspicion that perhaps “as well as could be expected” wasn’t going to be enough to win this war. Not nearly enough. Jillian had an army of almost one hundred Damned vampires and the entire New York City coven at her back. I looked around at the players who had my back: Greta and Rowens were sitting as far as possible from Bex and her murderous eye, which was currently trained on Ronnie, who determinedly ignored her regard. Rafe, Neil, Keagan, and Jeremy sat around Ronnie, but Theresa and Logan sat slightly apart from their group, next to Keagan. They were cold and rarely participated. Nathan and Dominic sandwiched me. Next to Nathan sat Meredith and Dr. Chunn, and in the far corner away from everyone was an empty seat where Walker should have been.
“As well as could be expected” was going to fail.
“But it doesn’t matter how good—or ‘not the worst’—the plan is. It won’t work unless everyone is on board,” I said.
Rowens raised his eyebrows and glanced at the empty chair in the corner. “Everyone?”
“He’ll be here,” Ronnie insisted, but even she looked a little sheepish as she added, “I hope.”
“He won’t,” Dominic growled. “He knows better than to show his face with me here.”
Greta cocked her head at Dominic and then settled her eyes on me. “I thought we were all on the same team.”
“We are.” I squeezed Dominic’s knee under the table. No one wanted to know if Greta and Dr. Chunn had supplied Walker with his Day Reaper ammunition more than me, but now was not the time or the place. If Bex knew what Walker was capable of, she would kill him—or at least try to—and we needed everyone to put aside their personal battles in favor of fighting the war against Jillian. Granted, leaving her unaware and vulnerable to Walker’s potential attack didn’t sit well with me, either, so the faster everyone was on board, playing nice, and focused on the common enemy instead of each other, the better.
“Except for Walker,” Meredith said.
“What
else is new?” Bex scoffed.
I groaned to myself. I could do many things now as a vampire, and Day Reaper to boot, but reaching under the table like Stretch Armstrong to unobtrusively squeeze Meredith’s knee on the other side of the table was not one of my many talents.
I kicked her shin under the table instead.
Nathan grunted and glared at me. Wrong shin.
“Whether or not Walker is on board is his choice,” I said, soldiering forward. “We all have choices to make, the most important of which, in my opinion, is uniting as one force against Jillian. Everyone here at this table needs to commit to that, or we’re just planning a mass funeral.”
Rowens pursed his lips. “Run through it again.”
Jeremy made an imperceptible noise in the back of his throat. I could hear it because I could very nearly feel the rubber-band snap of his brain synapses firing, but even Jeremy knew better than to groan loud enough for Rowens to hear.
I leaned forward, more than willing to comply. “The coven has a hidden underground entrance, but thanks to our little mishap while smuggling out Bex, Jillian is likely now aware of that entrance. We’ll need leverage to have a hope of actually infiltrating the coven and making it to the honeycombs.”
Neil frowned in confusion, and Rafe opened his mouth.
“The great hall,” Dominic clarified.
Rafe grunted. Neil still looked confused.
“Kaden is our leverage,” I said, refocusing the conversation. “He visits his mother to feed from her every night. We plan a stakeout, ambush him, and before Jillian gets wind of it, we infiltrate the coven. When she makes her move against us, we’ll use Kaden to force her down. At the very least, she’ll hesitate long enough for us to make our move.”
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