“You’ve got a house in Fisher Hill?”
She glanced at him in irritation. “Are you going to echo everything I say?”
“Sorry,” he muttered, with a shake of his head. “You caught me by surprise.”
The steady pulse of the windshield wipers accentuated the silence.
“I wish I were stronger,” Antoine said, staring down at his hands in his lap. “I don’t think I can take him, not with the power gap you said.”
Belle didn’t reply. No hollow ‘you’ll get there’ encouragement, no reminder that his strength would only growwith Cally’s blood. Her lack of response said it all: the gapwastoo big.
“Maybe I should go away for a while,” he mused. “Come back in a few years when I have more power.”
“A long time to live obsessed with revenge,mon amour.”
She was right. It wasn’t the passing of years; that meant nothing to vampires. It was that he knew it would fill his every waking moment, and that was hardly fair on Cally.
“Why don’t you kill him?” he asked.
“Would you have me do so?”
“Would you, if I said yes?”
Belle was quiet for four beats of the windshield wipers. “For you, I would. But I don’t think you want me to. It would not sate your vengeance; the Curia would not look kindly upon it; and no vampire in Boston would ever forget. We would end up being outcasts together, romantic though that idea is.”
He hadn’t intended to ask her to; he simply wanted to know how she’d answer, and it had surprised him.
Had she changed so much since coming here? No… vampires were creatures stuck in their ways. She’d turned up at his house and called him ‘her pet’, and there had been nothing to suggest this side of her. Only when she’d spoken to Cally… met Eve… heard Noah question him.
Maybe she was capable of adapting, as she’d always advocated.
But then, she’d spent three centuries obsessing over him enough to set Cally into his path. That was the true Belle; the rest of it was merely a performance. How to know which was the real Belle: the one who offered her help and a house, or the one who wanted to manipulate him into returning to France?
Both of them, probably. She was complicated enough.
And he still hadn’t told Cally about her mother. Even when she had apologized for lying about the Order, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to. His own hypocrisy mixed with the bitterness of Roberto’s triumph, and Tobias’s smugness at hearing that Dedham would grow. Milton too, which was ironic, with Nico trapped in an Order prison cell.
But of course Roberto would choose to reward the two vampires that had helped entomb him. It was an added insult.
Belle pulled up outside his house, and pushed the gearstick into park. “You have a week,mon amour. It is not long.”
“Any suggestions?”
She gave her brief Gallic shrug. “Other than offering you my house, not really, no.”
“There must be land around here that no vampire has claimed. Something on the outskirts of a territory, away from it all, in the peace and quiet.”
“Is that what you want?”
Maybe, before he’d met Cally, the idea would’ve appealed. Hell, it still did—more, if anything, as he wouldn’t need to hunt to feed. But that was before he’d been entombed. Before they’d threatened her, and tried to claim her as theirs. Just like Darian. And he was dead.
“No,” he said coldly. “What I want is to kill Roberto and Tobias, and reclaim my territory.”
Belle nodded, as if she’d expected nothing less. “You have my number. Call me when you are ready.”
“Oui.” He paused with one hand on the door handle. “Thank you. Again.”
“D’accord.”
