Callie lifted her chin from her knees. She blinked in the direction of his voice, but of course she still couldn’t see him. Had he really confessed to murder with such ease?
Yes, he had. A chill slid up her spine, and she gulped. He’d kept her alive and gotten them this far, but she could never forget she was sitting with a predator, and she was most certainly the prey.
“What are… what are Savages?” she croaked.
“That’s what we call the vampires who took you and imprisoned me. They’re vampires who kill for fun; they enjoy destroying innocent lives, like yours. They’re monsters, they’re Savages, and they don’t deserve to live.”
She pondered this for a minute before replying. “I agree with you on that. Do you hunt them on your own?”
Lucien didn’t know how much to reveal, but he could give her a little more without divulging too much. “No, I have friends—no, they’re my brothers of my choosing, and we hunt them together.”
Because the brother he shared blood with, he never would have chosen. His thoughts returned to Yannis standing there and smiling at him from the tunnel entrance. And then back to a night almost three hundred years ago when he walked in on the bloodbath of his brother’s doing. It was the first and only time in his life that his heart broke.
“I see,” Callie murmured.
She was amazed to discover she enjoyed listening to the rough timbre of his voice. Unlike the man, his voice was pleasing, deep, and melodic.
She yearned to see his face, but it was probably better she couldn’t. She was scared she might start to feel pity or understanding for him, and she’d be playing an incredibly perilous game by sympathizing with a creature who survived by feeding on her kind.
“And how did you end up as the Savages’ prisoner?” she asked.
Lucien focused on her again as he recalled the events that led to him chained to a wall. “A group of us was sent to check on some cameras at an underground site where Savages once lived. While there, Savages ambushed us.”
Now that he could think clearly again, he wondered how his fellow Alliance members had made out after the attack. At the beginning of his imprisonment, he worried about them often, but then his mind became more and more consumed by his obsession with blood while he wasted away.
Had he unknowingly left some of them behind when he fled that underground hellhole? Were some of them now Savages? He hoped some of them survived, but they were probably slaughtered or in the hands of their enemies. He’d tried to hold back the Savages spilling from that hole, but there were so many of them. He didn’t see how anyone could have escaped the tide of evil pouring forth.
“Do you remember how to get back to where we were?” he asked.
“Back to that tunnel?” she asked incredulously.
“Yes.”
“I have no idea how to get back there.”
“Shit,” he muttered.
“Why?”
“Because some of my fellow Alliance members could still be there.”
“What’s the Alliance?”
“It’s what we, those who hunt and kill Savages, call ourselves.”
“Oh.” Callie fiddled with the bottom of her jeans. “You’d really go back there?”
“To save any others who might be trapped there? Yes.”
She didn’t know how to take the revelation that he would return to save others. He’d saved her life, but she still saw him as more of a monster than a man.
Chapter Fourteen
“You’re takingthis all really well,” he said.
“What am I supposed to do? Break down and turn into a sobbing mess or run screaming into the night? Neither of those options will keep me alive.”
“Still, many do not take the knowledge of vampires in their world so easily. Many try to deny it.”
