He didn’t believe her, but he wasn’t going to push her on it either. “Would you like me to order you some food? I can get it delivered.”
Elena’s stomach rumbled in response to the question. She had a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner before her mom called with the awful news about her father. She didn’t know if that was last night, the night before, or six hours ago. Time was a foreign concept right now.
The idea of eating while her father’s body was growing colder was about as appealing as snot, but she was so hungry she was nauseous. Besides, if she was going to get through all of this, she had to keep her strength up. At the moment, she wasn’t sure she wanted to get through this.
She pushed the morose musing aside. Of course she wanted to get through this; she’d lost her dad, but she was glad to be alive. She was just so…exhausted.
She was exhausted and heartbroken; she had no idea if her mom was safe or what would happen to them. She had to talk to her mom; she was probably worried sick about her and scared she lost her husband and daughter in one day.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“New Mexico,” Logan replied.
“Where in New Mexico?”
“Outside of Roswell.”
“Great, aliens and vampires. What a perfect combination.”
Logan couldn’t stop the corners of his mouth from twitching upward. “I aim to please.”
She shot him another dagger-to-the-heart look before settling on the bed. “Do you know what they have for delivery around here?”
“I grabbed some brochures from the motel office.”
He lifted them off the bureau and walked them over to her. When Asher started to stir, he tossed them on her lap and hurried over to check on his friend.
Elena picked up the brochures, but she only pretended to look through them as she watched the hunter and vampire from the corner of her eye. The vamp knelt by the hunter’s side and rested his hand against Asher’s forehead.
The tender care in the gesture and the concern on his face made her forget the brochures as she studied them. Monsters didn’t fake sympathy like that, and they didn’t save lives either.
She was a hunter; killer vamps craved her blood, but this vamp hadn’t taken any of hers. Or at least, he hadn’t bit her. She’d looked for punctures while in the shower and found nothing. He could have licked the blood away from her wound.
The possibility of such a thing made her shudder, but though she wouldn’t put it past some vamps, she didn’t think he’d done that. He looked as exhausted as she felt. If he’d consumed some of her blood and Asher’s, he would look a lot better.
And what did they have to gain from killing her father?
He supported the Alliance. A couple of months ago, he confided in her that he welcomed the new changes it brought to the compound. He wasn’t willing to open his doors to the vamps like Asher and Logan’s compound had done, but he believed it would strengthen all of them. He also thought it was better for the women.
He didn’t look at her as he said this or elaborate further, but she suspected part of his decision to work with Ronan and Nathan was because of her. She’d left to avoid the life they chose for her; the young women coming of age now didn’t have the same concerns.
Those young girls would eventually marry, as that’s what most everyone did at some point, but it wouldn’t be forced on them, and they would now have a choice for their husband. That was so much more than she had.
But what if her father threatened to pull his support of Nathan’s alliance with the vampires from them?
She didn’t know why he would, and he certainly hadn’t been considering it the last time they talked, but he could have changed his mind. And he could have told Logan and Asher he had; would they have killed him over it?
But even if her father vowed to leave the Alliance, these two had to realize anyone who replaced him might feel the same way. Or had they simply lashed out in the heat of the moment?
She hated the doubts and confusion swirling through her mind. Deep down, she knew Mateo was the one with the most to gain, and he was the one she trusted the least, but the depth of the betrayal it would take for her father’s second-in-command to kill him was nearly unfathomable.
She focused on Logan as he dipped the washcloth into the bowl of water. He was paler than when she first saw him, and lines etched the corners of his mouth and eyes, but she couldn’t help being a little fascinated by him. Not only was he handsome, but he also acted like he genuinely cared too.
Looks can be deceiving,she reminded herself. She’d learned that lesson the hard way more than a couple of times on the streets before it finally sank in and she stopped trusting everyone she met.
Growing up, sheltered in her small compound and dedicated to the hunter way of life, her hunter heritage was her daily guide to living. She was a naïve mess when she first left the compound.
At the compound, she had scheduled daily meals, training sessions, classes, and teachings on everything from foreign languages—she spoke four fluently and was raised with English as her second language—to physics and calculus. And she couldn’t forget all her classes on how to be thebestestlittle wife ever.
