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"Then we heard he was bringing in a guest," said the new girl, "and that she's on her way from the airport."
"Oh, and this is Michelle," Lindsey absently whispered, gesturing toward the new girl. I offered Michelle a smile and a wave.
"If it matters at all," Katherine said, "if it makes any difference, he's being a huge ass**le, and we were totally rooting for you." There was pity in her expression.
My stomach tightened with nerves.
"Alrighty, ladies," Lindsey said, holding up her hands. "Dawn is on its final approach, so someone start at the beginning. What in the sam hell is going on?" The three girls glanced at one another again before Michelle, misery in her expression, looked back at Lindsey.
"It's the Ice Queen."
"Oh, shit," Lindsey murmured.
Margot nodded. "Lacey Sheridan's on her way to the House." My heart nearly stopped.
That sickening feeling returned again, twisting my stomach and threatening to push back the pizza I'd eaten earlier. Not only had Ethan decided I wasn't worth the trouble - he'd already made arrangements to pick up the pieces of our stunted relationship with someone else. I didn't know how not to take that personally.
"Good Lord," Lindsey muttered. "Hot or not, the boy has issues."
"I can't believe he'd ask her to come back here," Margot said. "Especially now." Especially now that he'd slept with me, or broken up with me?
The pity in Margot's voice brought hot tears to the edges of my lashes, but I blinked them back and looked up at the plastered ceiling to keep them from tracing down my cheeks. In that moment of weakness, when I was focused only on not crying in front of these virtual strangers, some of the walls that kept back the noise and sound began to tumble. The whispers I could no longer filter out began to circle around me. I belatedly realized we weren't the only vampires clustered together in the foyer, waiting for something to happen.
Black-clad vampires stood in groups of three or four, some with heads together as they whispered, some with eyes on me, some with gazes out the front windows that flanked the front door.
"She's on her way to the House," someone said.
"What about Merit?" asked someone else.
I clenched my eyes shut. My name was being whispered around the room. There were ninety witnesses to the act and now to the request that Lacey get to Chicago as soon as goddamned possible.
I opened my eyes again. I could feel my skin beginning to heat as humiliation and defeat gave way to that much more satisfying emotion - anger. Grief twisted into fury, and I could understand exactly how Celina's dismissal by some English beau could pull an emotional trigger, turning sadness outward into a spray of bitter shrapnel. I'm sure she wasn't the only woman - or man - in history for whom rejection had become fuel, that fire in the belly that moved her to action - to violence, to war, to destruction.
The vampire ego was no less fragile than the human one.
It was comforting, that anger; the ability to direct the emotion toward Ethan, instead of seeing my rejection as my own failure. I closed my eyes as goose bumps lifted on my arms, my body sinking into the feeling as though into hot bathwater.
When the room went silent, I opened them again.
The girls had silenced their pity party, all heads turning as Ethan walked through the main hallway and past us toward the front door.
"She must be here," Margot muttered, and we turned to watch him move.
She, I realized, must have been the reason for the phone call he'd received when he left the Ops Room - the reason he'd dismissed us. Ethan opened the door, then leaned forward to embrace a woman. "Lacey," he said, "thank you for coming on such short notice." His voice was warm, the implication of his words clear - he'd asked her here.
She must have been the cool sherbet to my garlic sauce, the palate cleanser he needed after a night with me. I swallowed down a sudden bout of nausea. When he released her and stepped clear, then began shaking hands with the remainder of her entourage, I got my first look. She was tall and slender, her blond hair cut into a sharp bob that ended just below her chin. Her face was model perfect - straight, long nose, wide mouth, blue eyes that held an icy sheen. She was dressed in a pale blue pantsuit that hugged her lean body; on her right hand was a single ring that carried an oversized pearl. She was beautiful, put together, elegant.
She was everything he'd want.
And she was here, in Chicago, from San Diego, because he'd asked her.
"The House looks lovely, Ethan. I like what you've done." He turned back to her and smiled. But as he turned his head to look over the room, as he caught sight of the knots of vampires in the hallway, his smile faded. He surveyed us, body tensing, and finally met my eyes.
As we stared at each other, I wondered why he'd called her here, what succor he thought she could provide. I wondered why dating me would have been a sacrifice, but inviting back a former lover was not.
I saw nothing in his eyes that would explain it, only a dose of shock that I'd caught him in the act. I don't know what I wanted to say to him, but I took a step forward, intent on telling him something.
"Whoa, whoa," Lindsey said, moving to stand in front of me. "Don't go storming over there. You don't want to be that girl."
I snorted, half the room's attention on me now. "What girl? The girl who got replaced within a matter of hours?" I fiercely whispered, then looked around the room. "They may not have known about the breakup, but the evidence is pretty clear. Is there anyone who doesn't think it now?" Margot, Katherine, and Michelle all looked away.
"Mer," Lindsey said, putting her hands on my arms, "we're your friends, your fellow Novitiates. But Ethan's a Master, and so is Lacey. Embarrassing yourself in front of them would be a whole different level of humiliating."
She had a point.
Okay, I decided. I wouldn't confront him, but I also wouldn't hurt myself further by watching their interactions. I turned around and, without another word, took the stairs to the second floor. I went to my room and locked the door behind me. I didn't cry - wouldn't cry. Not again.
I also wouldn't sleep.
It being minutes before dawn, I changed into pajamas and climbed into bed. It had been a long night, but I lay awake, one arm behind my pillow, staring at the ceiling. Dawn was coming, the pull of it enticing my eyes to close, my brain to shut off. But the human part of me kept replaying the moments we'd shared, few though they were, and wondering if there was something I could have done, should have said, to give us a chance. I'd made myself vulnerable, and I was paying the price. But the real insult was that the entire House now knew - or would soon enough - about my being summarily dumped and replaced.
