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Corinne closed her eyes. "Oh, God. Not our sweet Sebastian."
"I know, darling." Her mother's voice was small, still rife with grief over her son all these decades later. "Sebastian had changed in the years after you went missing. We knew he was struggling, that his thirst was consuming him, but he withdrew from us. He tried to hide his problems from us, wouldn't accept help. He'd been on a terrible killing spree in the city that night. When he came home, he was covered in blood. None of us could reach him. He was Rogue by then, too far gone to be saved. And he knew it. Sebastian was always so perceptive, so smart and sensitive. He locked himself in your father's study. We heard the gunshot not even a moment later."
"I'm so sorry." Corinne hugged her, feeling the anguish as the other woman stifled a tight sob. "It must have been awful."
"It was." Sorrowful eyes met her gaze as she withdrew from her mother's embrace. "Until you've lost a child - and until tonight, I'd thought I'd lost two - no one can imagine what it's like to feel such hollowness inside."
Corinne said nothing, unsure how to respond. She bore her own emptiness, endured her own loss, even now. It was that loss that had brought her home, even more so than her own selfish needs for comfort and the sheltering arms of her family.
"You must recognize this room, don't you?" her mother asked abruptly, wiping at the corners of her eyes.
Halfheartedly but glad for the momentary distraction, Corinne took in her surroundings. Her glance traveled over the elegant dark cherry sleigh bed and the antique chest and dresser that still looked so familiar to her, despite all these years. The linens and window treatments were different. So were the walls, no longer swathed in yards of shimmering peach silk but painted a soothing matte shade of dove gray. "This used to be my bedroom."
"It still is," Regina replied, a forced brightness in her voice. "We'll put it back exactly as it was before, if that's what you'd like. We can start tomorrow, darling. I'll take you shopping for a new wardrobe in the morning, and we can make an appointment with my decorator to refurnish the whole room, top to bottom. We'll set everything back to rights and it will seem as though you've never been gone a day. Everything can be made exactly the same as it was before, Corinne. You'll see."
Corinne was hardly aware she was shaking her head until she noticed her mother's crestfallen expression. "Nothing can ever be the same. It's all changed now."
"We'll fix it, darling." Her mother nodded as if her certainty alone would make it so.
"You're home now, and that's the most important thing. None of the rest matters."
"Yes," Corinne murmured. "It does matter. Things happened to me while I was gone. Terrible things that I need to tell you about. You and Daddy both ..."
She hadn't meant to blurt it out like this. Her intent had been to sit both her parents down together and gently walk them through the circumstances of her captivity as best she could. Now she knew there would be no graceful way to convey the truth, as she watched dread creep into Regina Bishop's pretty face.
The two of them could have passed as sisters in public, both of them youthful looking, the process of aging halted near thirty years old. It was the same for all Breedmates, due to their genetic anomalies and the life-giving power found in a Breed male's blood. Corinne was gone seventy-plus years, but she'd hardly aged. She'd been kept alive, deliberately kept young and viable because that's where her value had been to her captor.
Regina Bishop saw this truth now; Corinne watched the realization dawn, as though her mother hadn't really looked at her closely until that very moment. "Tell me," she whispered.
"Tell me what happened to you, Corinne. Why would anyone want to hurt you?"
Corinne gave a slow shake of her head. "Why would anyone want to hurt any of the young Breedmates who were captured along with me? Insanity, maybe. Evil, certainly. That's the only way to explain the things he did. The torture and experimentation ..."
"Oh, darling," Regina cried, the words lost within a choked intake of breath. "All this time? All these years, you've been made to suffer such things? To what end?"
"We were used for a very specific purpose," Corinne replied, her voice sounding wooden even to her own ears. "The one who took us - the one who locked us in a lightless prison and treated us no better than cattle - needed our bodies to help him grow his own army. We weren't his only captives. He also had another, a creature I'd only heard about in stories Sebastian used to tell Lottie and me to frighten us."
Her mother's face drained of all its color. "What are you saying?"
"There was an Ancient imprisoned in the labs too," she said, speaking past Regina Bishop's recoiled gasp. "Our captor used him for experimentations as well. And he used him for breeding, to father Gen One vampires who'd be raised in service - enslavement, more like it - to the madman who'd controlled all of us."
For a long moment, her mother simply stared, mute and pale. A tear rolled down her cheek as the understanding settled on her fully. "Oh, my dear child ..."
Corinne cleared her throat. She'd gone this far now; she needed to speak the rest. "I fought every chance I got, but in the end they were stronger. It took a long time, but eventually -
thirteen years ago, as best I've been able to guess - they got what they wanted from me." She had to draw a deep breath in order to continue. "While I was in those awful laboratory cells, I gave birth to a son. I have a child out there somewhere. He was stolen from me just hours after he was born. Now that I'm free, I intend to get him back."
Something wasn't right.
As Hunter parked the car in the Order's private hangar at the airport, he kept thinking back to Corinne's reunion with her Darkhaven family. He kept wondering why his predator's instincts were circling back around to Victor Bishop like a hound on a trail that had nearly gone cold.
Nearly, but not quite.
Something about Bishop's reaction toward Corinne's reappearance didn't ring true. The Breed male had seemed shocked, certainly, and obviously moved to see the young woman who'd been dead to all of her kin for such a long time.
As any Darkhaven leader would be, Bishop had been notably concerned about the immediate security of his home and its inhabitants. He'd been cautious and protective, all things to be expected. Yet Hunter had detected something more in Bishop, something that seemed to run deeper than his outward expression of astonishment and relief at Corinne's unexpected homecoming.
There had been a remoteness to Victor Bishop's gaze as he looked at his daughter. There had been a hesitancy to the man, a hint of distraction in his demeanor, even as he'd embraced her and told her what a relief it was to see her again. Victor Bishop was hiding something. He was holding back somehow with Corinne; Hunter was sure of it.
