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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MAKER’S MARK
Many times I’d wondered if this moment would ever come—if I’d ever look into the eyes of the man who’d tried to kill me, the vampire who’d changed my life forever.
We’d believed he’d been a Rogue, a vampire not affiliated with Cadogan, Grey, or Navarre. He didn’t look vampirically familiar, for what that was worth.
Enough time had passed that I figured he was dead or gone, had left Chicago in order to avoid a run-in with me or Ethan. I hadn’t expected that run-in would come on a northbound train a year after the attack.
But a year was a long time, and I wasn’t the girl he’d found that first night. I was vampire. I was Cadogan Novitiate. I was Sentinel, and I knew how to push down fear. I braced my legs just as he’d done to keep myself upright against the swaying of the train, and I faced him, this man who’d tried to take my life, who seemed to value life so little.
“Hello, Merit,” he said.
Stick to the facts, I told myself. We’d have only a few minutes before we reached the next stop. He might disappear, or humans might jump on, which wouldn’t help matters. “Who are you?”
“You know who I am.”
I swallowed hard against the bile that threatened to rise. “No, I know what you did to me and to Caleb Franklin. I’m pretty sure I know the why and for whom. But I don’t know who you are.”
In answer, he pulled a matte black dagger from a sheath beneath his T-shirt. His smile was slick and confident, and it made my skin crawl, sent a line of cold sweat down my back.
For the first time since I’d seen his face, I stopped thinking about that night, and started thinking about this one—the fact that I’d chased him onto an empty train. That he’d managed to lead me away from my House, my partners, my allies.
Reed couldn’t have planned it better himself. Unless he had planned it himself.
What, exactly, was I going to do? What was my play? I’d survived the vampire’s attacks. Was I going to kill him then and there for what he’d done to me? Did I even have the right?
I swallowed hard, made myself focus. “Once upon a time,” I said, preparing to relive my darkest fairy tale, “you did Celina Desaulniers’s bidding. You attacked me because she paid you. Who’s paying you this time?”
He made a clucking sound. “Let’s say this one is a freebie.”
Something about the cockiness of his tone, the jocularity, spurred my anger.
And God, anger was so much better than fear.
“For Adrien Reed?”
His eyes tightened, just for a moment. Long enough to know I was on the right track—if the most dangerous one.
I might have been conflicted about the fight, but he wasn’t. Blade at the ready, he moved toward me, began with a swipe of the knife that would have sliced my abdomen if I hadn’t jumped back quickly enough.
While he reset, I remembered the dagger I’d stashed—as always—in my boot, and pivoted to keep him in front of me. He slashed out again, nimble and fast.
As the city blurred past the windows, I took the offensive, feinting to the right before dropping, slicing the dagger along his leg. I made contact, scraped metal against skin. Blood seeped through denim and plopped in heavy droplets onto the metal floor, scenting the air with the tang of fresh blood. If not the type I had any interest in.
The vampire roared, eyes silvering and fangs descending, and swiped at me again, and I rolled forward, switching our positions. I jumped onto the seats, turned back. His eyes were wild, angry.
I smiled at him, but there was nothing happy in the look. It was the smile of a predator preparing for battle, and it gratified me more than a little to see his eyes narrow, reassess.
The first time he’d attacked me as a human, after dark, and when my guard was down. The second time he’d had a gun and a Trans Am.
“Yeah, it’s not nearly as much fun when the prey fights back, is it?” I tilted my head at him. “Does Reed still pay you if you lose?”
He growled, ran forward. And this time, in the full blush of blood fury, he was faster.
