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“So this happened when you were a child?”
He nodded, but nothing else would come. “Let it go, Shayna. Just know that I’ll never be free of the remorse I feel.”
“It’s impacted your life, hasn’t it? I mean, that’s why you’re not married, why you haven’t found someone to share your life with.”
“I’m sure it’s one of the reasons.”
He glanced at her and the odd thought went through his head that maybe another reason was that he’d been waiting for her all this time. Even Gabriel must have felt it, how special she was. Why else would he have opened up the secret vault of tablets just for her, a human?
But the weight of his guilt had settled in hard and he rolled from bed.
Wish I could help. Her voice, full of sympathy, made him cringe.
He didn’t turn to look at her as he headed to the bathroom, but let his thoughts fly. Wish you could as well.
The next moment, he heard running feet and before he reached the shower, she caught him from behind, wrapping both her arms around his chest, holding him fast.
His throat tightened painfully.
He overlaid her arms with his own, holding her fast just as she was holding him. For a moment he couldn’t breathe. All the air had rushed from his lungs, and his eyes burned. He wished like anything that this woman would stay, this lovely, eccentric question-riddled human, with her long white-blond hair and light-blue eyes, with her tenderness of heart, her love of other cultures, and her beautiful willing body.
God, yes, he wanted her to stay.
* * *
&
nbsp; An hour later Shayna sat on a park bench deep inside the Catskill system in the state of New York. The cavern was one of the more massive ones she’d seen and had been cloaked in an intricate layer of disguises that not even Marius could detect, let alone see through—Gabriel’s handiwork, no doubt.
The Catskill refugee center housed five thousand former female slaves and even a few men, mostly human but with a smattering of vampire slaves as well. She and Marius had learned that Gabriel and Rumy together had built and paid for about a dozen of these centers throughout their world, all hidden, and they’d filled each to capacity. Apparently they’d had several black-ops forces working in secret over a long period of time, stealing slaves out of a number of sex-slave organizations around the globe.
She sat facing a large park, where a number of women wandered about and talked in groups. A massive complex, built into the adjacent cave wall, formed the dormitories and gathering rooms, as well as several classrooms that served the refugees.
A couple dozen of the latest refugees that Gabriel had recovered from the Dark Cave system sat with her. The women had told her all about the rescue mission, that a hundred male vampires had suddenly just shown up and that the extraction had taken less than two minutes.
She kept shaking her head in between all the comments. Something wasn’t adding up, which was why she kept pelting the group with her questions. She just couldn’t seem to get to the center of something very important, something critical to the vampire world.
She asked the group at large. “So if I’ve understood correctly, what you’re saying, especially those of you who had been enslaved for over a year, that neither Daniel nor his two sons Quill and Lev was even in residence for most of that time?” She had always supposed that Daniel would have spent most of his time in the Dark Cave system, engaging in the orgies he sponsored and sold.
A murmured ascent went around the group. An Indian woman spoke up. “You could always tell when they were gone. The vampires left in charge became more relaxed, and there were fewer assaults. Some of the guards even protected us from customers who became too rough. Daniel would have been furious at such leniency and more than once he beheaded vampires for treating us kindly.”
Everything about that statement spoke to Daniel’s character, but something else as well. Was it possible that the Ancestrals, which all three men of these men were, enthralled those vampires around them? Although sheer intimidation could make vampires and humans alike behave in ways they might otherwise not. This was a cross-cultural condition: Faced with the prospect of torture and/or death, most will succumb to the required behavior.
Of course she left her supposition open to further study, observation, and analysis. She resisted drawing absolute conclusions, life being an absurdly dynamic process, always changing. Even her presence here in the vampire world had given new meaning to the concept of change being the only constant.
But the larger question remained. “So where did Daniel and his sons go? What were they doing when they were gone? Were there rumors?”
A fair-haired Russian slave, more emaciated than most of the slaves, responded. “More than once I heard he was building something in one of the largest caverns in this world, but I do not know where it would be or what it was.”
Others confirmed the rumor.
She mentally reviewed all that she knew about the horrors of the Dark Cave system, leading her to pose a question for which she expected no particular answer. “Were any humans ever given special treatment, so they didn’t have to work as sex slaves?”
To her surprise, the response was an overwhelming affirmative accompanied by a shocking bit of information: Most of the women were put through a series of tests, and the brightest were actually administered standard IQ tests. As she continued asking her questions, she became increasingly alarmed since the consensus seemed to be that at least five and maybe as much as ten percent of the arrivals of the past year were sent elsewhere, presumably not to work in the clubs.
“And the rumors about where they went?”
The Russian responded once more. “To the same system, the one with the enormous cavern.”
