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“I resent your tone,” Jerry sneered. “But now that you’re back under my control, things can work out the way they should. I kind of like you tied up better than when you’re running around the office acting like you know more than I do.”
“Shedoesknow more than you do,” Lazlo said.
Jerry bared his teeth at Lazlo in an animalistic snarl, but he didn’t act. There was no doubt who was in charge here.
“How did you know it was me?” I asked.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lazlo asked.
“When I started working for Wonderprise… did you know about me?”
“No,” Jerry admitted. “It was a surprise that you were what you are, but at least it counts in our favor now. Not only do we know how to lure Colter here so we can take him out, we can use you to get what we want, too.”
Lazlo shoved Jerry. “Stop monologuing, asshole. She doesn’t have to know the plan.”
“Come on, someone should,” Jerry complained. “It’s so good.”
Lazlo rolled his eyes and walked to the back of the room, where I noticed he had a machine. The machine looked a lot like the one we’d been working on.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Do you like it?” Jerry asked with a grin. “New and improved. Once we got the blueprint, it wasn’t hard to replicate, and with a few extra tweaks and changes, it’s good for what we need. It will bleed little angels like you dry and give us the ability to create an army.”
My blood ran cold. They wanted to bleed me dry? The dialysis function must have been altered to take and not give back the way it had been designed initially. My researcher brain kicked into overdrive, going over the possibilities. The more I thought about it, the more scared I became.
The blood bags that lay on the table next to the stack of wrapped needles were enough of a confirmation, and my throat closed.
Colter had told me vampires wanted my blood because it made them stronger, more powerful. Lazlo wanted to use my blood to build an army to… what? Overthrow Colter?
“He won’t come for me, you know,” I said, putting two and two together.
“Of course he will,” Lazlo scoffed. “He might have killed a lot of people in his life, but he knows what he wants, and lately, he wants you.”
Dread curled in the pit of my stomach when Lazlo talked about killing.
“He what?” I asked.
Lazlo laughed. “Of course, he wouldn’t have told you that. An alpha shifter doesn’t become an alpha just like that. He needs to go through the motions, climb the ladder of success, and that ladder is built on the dead bodies of those who stand in his way. His parents were victims, too.”
That couldn’t be right—I didn’t want to believe it. Colter wouldn’t do something like that.
Except, hewould. He would do whatever it took. I’d known he was a diamond in the rough. I knew inherently that he’d done things to be where he was, but to kill his own parents?
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
Lazlo shrugged. “I don’t care if you do or if you don’t. We’re just waiting for him to get here, so that we can get rid of that bastard once and for all.”
“How can you do this to him when he’s trusted you for so long?” I asked.
Lazlo smirked. “I know you’re not human now, but you still think like one, and that’s pathetic. Trust and honor and pride and all that shit is just a fantasy. In this world, it’s every man for himself. Jerry and I are going to get that dick off the proverbial throne, and once I’m up there, order can be restored, and vampires can take over. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”
My headache was getting worse the more I learned.
“He won’t come for me,” I said again. “He believes in every man for himself, too.” I’d walked away from Colter after our fight. In hindsight, it seemed so petty, and he hadn’t followed me. He hadn’t asked me to stay, told me he wanted to keep me in his life. He might have told me he loved me, and he wanted to make things official between us, but in the light of everything I’d just learned, I guess being with me hadn’t been high enough on his list of priorities to follow through.
And why should it be? I was just someone he’d met in the middle of all of this, an accident. The same as I’d been for Jerry and Lazlo—someone who might have been a stumbling block.
Lazlo did something with the machine, and it hummed to life. He turned to me with a menacing grin and held up a thick needle attached to a pipe that led to the machine.
