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Still, a good chance wasn’t a one-hundred-percent chance. And I had no guarantees that the doctor wouldn’t try for round number two if Declan recovered completely.
“Do you really, honestly believe that Declan set out to kill your wife just for the hell of it?” I asked. “She must have—”
“Must have what? Deserved it?” he snapped, but then his expression softened again. “I...I don’t know anymore. In a war, I admit that sometimes it’s hard to tell which side is right. I, myself, have justified doing things that outsiders might consider evil.”
“Evil, you say.” It was Lawrence who said this. He’d ended his call and was studying the both of us with narrowed eyes.
Dr. Reynolds frowned. “At times, yes. You know as well as I that the line can sometimes blur.” He nodded at the phone. “Is everything all right?”
Lawrence slipped his phone back into his pocket. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“Who were you speaking to?”
“Someone with answers about my wife. Tell me, Victor...” Lawrence didn’t take his attention off his boss. “Where is Stacy right now?”
In an instant, his eyes shifted to black and dark blue veins branched down along the sides of his face to his neck. Both were frightening signs of a vampire who had begun to lose their composure and now leaned toward their darker impulses.
Yet his voice remained controlled. Eerily so.
“What are you talking about?” Dr. Reynolds asked.
“My investigator got a hold of some outer security footage from this building. Stacy was seen entering through the main doors on the night that she disappeared six months ago. She wasn’t seen leaving. Where is she? What have you done to her?”
My gaze shot to the doctor.
Reynolds raised his hands. “We can talk about this, Lawrence. Calmly.”
Laurence raised his black-eyed gaze to the doctor. “You’ve been so supportive these last months, helping me to hold onto hope that I’d find her again. I trusted you, never doubted for a moment. You gave me a chance when everyone else wanted me dead. You and Stacy—you were the only ones who gave me that chance.”
“Lawrence...”
“You’re not denying it, are you?”
Dr. Reynolds pushed his glasses higher on his nose. “I’m not denying it.”
“Where is my wife right now?” In the span of a heartbeat, Lawrence’s calm voice had gone ice cold. Enough that it sent a chill skittering down my spine.
“Sit down, Lawrence. As I said, we can talk about this calmly.”
Lawrence clearly disagreed with that suggestion. He grabbed the doctor by his white coat and shook him violently. “You’ve been using her in your goddamned experiments, you son of a bitch. Haven’t you?”
To say that I wanted nothing to do with this confrontation would be putting it extremely mildly. I crouched next to Declan, holding on to his arm tightly.
“Declan, wake up,” I whispered harshly. “You have to snap the hell out of this right now.”
I sensed that Lawrence the self-proclaimed “nice” vampire was about to go full nuclear and I didn’t want to be here for the blast wave if I could help it.
“I knew what you’d do if I told you the truth.” Dr. Reynolds’s voice held firm.
“Where the hell is she?” the vampire snarled again.
“You must listen to me very carefully and not lose yourself, do you hear me? Stacy had heard about my Nightfall project, I can only imagine that she learned it from you—a file, an email, an overheard conversation, I don’t know. She came to me six months ago, desperate and afraid.”
“The Nightfall project,” Lawrence repeated, shaking his head. “Why would she be interested in such a...?” His eyes went wide with shock. “No. It’s impossible.”
Dr. Reynolds regarded the vampire with more concern than fear. “Yes. She was pregnant. Her first trimester was difficult for her, enough that she knew something was very unusual about the fetus.”
“I didn’t know...she said nothing to me,” Lawrence whispered. “If this is true, why wouldn’t she have come to me?”
