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"Director Starkn?" Regina murmured. "He's been to this house more than a dozen times over the years. He's been here before and after Corinne went missing. Good lord, Victor, it has to be fifty years ago now, but I remember you spoke at his reception when he was elected to the Enforcement Agency's high council. Are you saying that he had something to do with this?"
Corinne frowned, confused now. The unfamiliar name bred a wild, desperate hope.
Maybe there was some kind of mistake here, after all. If he didn't know that it was Dragos who'd taken her, maybe Victor Bishop's hands weren't as bloodied as she feared. But Hunter's grim glance stripped her of even that fragile hope. He gave a vague shake of his head, as if he knew the direction of her thoughts. "Dragos has used many aliases. Including this one. Gerard Starkn and Dragos are one and the same."
Corinne looked to Victor Bishop, searching for some shred of honesty in the face she no longer knew. "Did you know that? Were you aware that the man you called Gerard Starkn was actually a monster by the name of Dragos?"
His scowl deepened, eyes blank of recognition. "I've told you everything I know."
"No," she murmured. "You haven't told me everything. You knew what had happened to me, but you didn't come after me. I waited. I prayed, every day. I told myself that you wouldn't rest until I was found. Until I was saved, and back home again. But no one ever came for me."
"I couldn't," he said. "Starkn told me that if I went against him, there would be more pain. He said that if I wavered in my support of him politically, or if I tried to expose him for what he'd done to reach his position within the Agency, the price for my defiance would be far greater than what I'd already paid. You have to understand - all of you have to understand - that I did what I did in order to protect my family, what was left of it."
Regina drew in a sharp, shaky breath. "And so you simply let him keep our daughter?
Corinne was family - she is family, damn you. How could you have been so heartless?"
"He left me no other way," Bishop answered, those stranger's eyes sliding back to Corinne. "Starkn promised that if I attempted to find you, or if I allowed anyone to suspect that he had you, I would be mourning Sebastian next. So I kept my silence. I made sure his demands were obeyed." His voice caught for a moment. "I am sorry, Corinne. You have to believe that - "
"I can never believe anything you say again," she replied, wounded, yes, but not about to break.
She'd been through worse than this. She was battered and weary from the weight of his betrayal, but there was still a long, dark road ahead of her.
As she stood there, trying to reconcile everything she was hearing, a fresh horror began to settle over her. "The girl," she said, new pieces falling into place in the puzzle of his deception.
"After I had been taken, there was a girl recovered from the river ..."
Victor Bishop held her appalled stare. "You were gone, and Starkn made it clear that you were never coming back. As long as there were questions about your disappearance ... as long as there was hope that you might be alive - "
The truth settled over her like lead, cold and heavy. "You were the one who wanted everyone convinced I was dead. Oh, Jesus ... you had an innocent girl killed. You had her cut in pieces, just to cover your own sins."
"She was nothing," Bishop countered as though to justify the murder. An angry edge crept into his voice as he went on. "She was common gutter trash, selling herself down by the waterfront."
"And what about me?" Corinne asked, her own outrage rising. It spilled out of her in a furious rush. "I must have been nothing to you too. You let him take me away, keep me all this time like an animal in a cage. Worse than that. Did you never wonder what was happening to me at his hands? Did you ever stop to think that he could have been torturing me, degrading me ... destroying everything I was, bit by bit? Did you never imagine the kind of torture a sadistic lunatic like him might be capable of in the bowels of the prison where he held me and all the other captives he'd collected?"
Regina Bishop dissolved into a wracking fit of tears. Bishop said nothing, merely stared at Corinne and his mate in unaffected silence. "Let me up," he growled to Hunter, whose fingers had gone tight once more around his throat. "I said unhand me. You must be satisfied now. You have the confession you came here to wring out of me."
Hunter leaned over him. "Now you're going to tell me everything you know about Gerard Starkn. I need to know where he is and when you last saw him. I need to know who his associates are, both inside the Agency and outside of it. You'll tell me every detail, and you will tell me now."
"I don't know anything else," Bishop sputtered sharply. "It's been more than a decade since I've even thought of the man, let alone seen him. There is nothing more for me to tell, I swear to you."
But Hunter didn't look convinced. Nor did he seem inclined to release Bishop from his killing grasp, not even if he was given the answers he sought. Corinne could see the truth of Hunter's lethal intent in the steady calm of his eyes.
Bishop realized it too. He started to squirm and struggle. He bucked on the surface of his desk, kicking his legs and sending a stack of leather-bound books toppling to the floor. Corinne's talent, humming more intensely in her veins now, latched out to grab hold of the percussion those falling books had caused. She couldn't hold it back. The noise swelled swiftly, exploding into a prolonged roll of thunder that quaked the room and rattled everything in it.
"Corinne, stop!" her mother cried, covering her ears as the racket shook and rumbled, louder and louder now.
Under the rising din, Bishop's lips peeled back from his teeth, baring the tips of his emerging fangs. Anger and fear transformed his eyes from their normal brown to the fiery amber of the Breed. His pupils thinned and stretched, becoming catlike slits. Hunter, however, remained cool, utterly in control. He spared Corinne's burst of kinetic power only the briefest acknowledgment before seeming to tune out the distraction completely. His eyes held their golden hue, his sharply angled face taut and lean, focused but not furious. He drew his fingers tighter around Bishop's larynx.
Corinne parted her lips, panting and spent. She willed her talent to subside and was on the verge of screaming for all this madness to cease.
But it was Regina who spoke first.
"Henry Vachon," she blurted. Victor snarled, and it was difficult to tell if his anger now was directed more at his punisher or his rattled Breedmate. Regina looked away from him, lifting her chin and speaking directly to Hunter. "I remember another Breed male, also from the Enforcement Agency. He was at Starkn's side almost constantly whenever I saw him in public. His name was Henry Vachon. He was from the South somewhere ... New Orleans, as I recall. If you want to find Gerard Starkn - or whatever he calls himself now - start with Henry Vachon."
Hunter inclined his head in a vague nod of acknowledgment, but he still had his hand on Bishop's throat.
"Release him," Corinne murmured quietly. She was sickened by all she'd heard, but she had no vengeance in her heart. Not even for the father who had betrayed her so callously.
