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“And what are you doing here with her?” Adrian added.
“I wanted access to my future daughter-in-law and you wouldn’t grant it. So I took it. And that horse was delicious. Very memorable.”
Adrian scowled a scowl so big and menacing that it was hard not to quake in her boots.
“Where are the security guards? Have you bitten her?” Adrian was pointing at Kyla’s throat.
Taryn giggled again and shrugged. Then she zoomed out of Kyla’s sight.
Adrian ran a hand through his hair and sighed and then looked at Kyla.
“Are you alright?”
Kyla raised her brows, “Like you care.”
“What did she want? What did she say?”
“Like I’ll tell you…” Kyla walked back into the house and slammed the door.
Adrian was inside a split second later, “Stay here. I need to figure out what she’s done with your guards and nurses.”
He walked toward the back of the house and then she heard a sigh and then heard beeping and then he was on the phone, “I need a clean-up crew down at Cottage 2. Six casualties. I need replacements. Code red.” He beeped off and then sat on the sofa, “I’ll stay until security replacements arrive. She did, didn’t she? She fed.”
Kyla massaged her throat and Adrian’s expression dropped, “Damn her.”
“Just a taste. I shoved her off. She thinks she convinced me to forget about it. Well, you’ll forgive me if I can’t be bothered to keep you company.” She headed for the upstairs thinking about how Tristan warned about female vamps being cold and calculating.
Killing six people in order to get alone with Kyla? Killing a horse, clearly to piss him off or punish him? Yeah, obviously Tristan wasn’t just blowing smoke about his mother.
“Don’t trust Taryn,” Adrian advised.
“But trust you?” she asked, stopping mid ascent.
“Don’t trust anyone, Kyla,” he said, “except Tristan. You can trust that he will do anything in his considerable power to keep you safe.”
What an odd thing to say. And it seemed sincere. It was unexpected. His face was unguarded and for a split second he looked different, not cold, not callous. But then it was like shutters came down and the arrogance was back.
She turned on her heel and ascended the rest of the way up the stairs.
She went into the bathroom and took a long shower. The bleeding was still happening so she took care of business in the bathroom, got dressed, and then went to the bedroom and found that there was a meal there for her. She ate a little bit of roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, and mixed vegetables and then got into bed and closed her eyes for a while, trying to mull things over, get her head straight.
Okay, so first she’d dreamt of being in a stone tunnel with blood and after Liam had found her and violated her she found herself against a wall made of stone with blood on her hands.
She had also dreamt about being on a swing in a meadow with rapid blooming flowers and then found herself in that meadow watching moon flowers bloom. In the dream he’d bitten her and that day his mother had bitten her.
There was also the fact that she’d dreamt of her dead parents after a lifetime of not dreaming of them and then getting the news that they weren’t dead at all.
She drifted off to sleep after a lot of tossing and turning.
She had a dream about a sweet chubby-cheeked blue-eyed baby boy, smiling and cooing at her. She woke up drenched in sweat and tears and her arms were itchy.
Withdrawals.
Already?
And grief. She let herself cry it out for a while, a long while. She cried into the pillow in the dark, fully feeling the immense loss, fully feeling her frustrations. And she let the fear engulf her. She acknowledged everything she was afraid of, including the fear that she’d never have Tristan’s baby because she’d die first.
The itchiness got worse as the night wore on. It kept waking her. By pre-dawn, her teeth started to chatter and she was getting alternating hot and cold sweats.
“Are you bleeding? Let’s get you to the bathroom to check.” It was a nurse in her room, waking her up like ten seconds after she’d finally fallen back to sleep. Adrian was in the doorway.
“You’re in withdrawal.” Adrian said as the nurse helped Kyla past him.
“No shit, Sherlock. You get your PhD in a crackerjack box?” she snapped.
He laughed and ruffled her hair as she passed him. “Taryn feeding from you didn’t stop the withdrawals from coming. Good to know.”
She shuddered at the memory of Taryn and stopped the nurse outside the bathroom door, “I can handle this myself.”
The nurse was a big sturdy woman, the one who seemed to be in charge the last few days. Kyla suspected her name was something like Inga, Olga, or Helga or something that. Right or wrong, those names were attached to a stereotype that conjured images up of six-feet-tall Russian female basketball players for her. Sure, there were probably gorgeous and petite women by those names, many of them, but Kyla’s brain named all big scary sturdy women those names until she knew different.
