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“But…you broke the rules,” Adilla chided.
“He doesn’tknowthe rules,” Natalia protested.
“And whose fault is that, hmm?”
Natalia shrank back, horrified. She had shared with Aubrey everything she thought might matter before this meeting, but she had not expected the lengths to which Adilla would go to bend the rules to his whims.
“I apologize if I gave offense,” Aubrey said, finishing on a gasp as the silver collar burned against his bobbing Adam’s apple.
Adilla shook his head. “I’m afraid that won’t suffice. You broke the cardinal rule by acknowledging an allegiance to another. After Kambyses, I am the lord of our kind. Theonlylord.” All around, heads bowed in grim acknowledgement.
“He meant no challenge,” Natalia tried again.
Aubrey said nothing, serving the challenge now by refusing to refute his own words. Or maybe he understood that to one such as Adilla, nothing he could say would have made any difference now.
Adilla’s smile broadened with satisfaction. “Mr. Aubrey Wainwright, according to established procedure, your challenge has been heard and witnessed and will be answered accordingly.”
This time, Esteban nodded to the men holding Aubrey. In a blur, they hustled him away.
Disbelieving horror rooted Natalia to the spot. “No. No, you can’t do this. There is a rule about guests. This is a violation!”
Adilla turned away, reaching for a fresh glass of blood. As the music started again, Esteban appeared by her side. “Careful, pet,” he said under his breath. “Or we might think you’d like to meet the dawn together with this heretic.”
Dominique’s legs buckled beneath him the way Natalia’s had buckled. He had stopped feeding, but he still held her, still swam in her memories.
She had said no more, done no more. She had no choice. Someone else depended on her survival far more than Aubrey did. Though near dawn she had gone downtown, hoping against hope to gain access unobserved to the high rise that was Adilla’s business headquarters. Esteban’s men patrolled the street, and she was too young to outlast them against the coming dawn. They were gone the next evening, when she returned and rushed to the top floor unimpeded. There she found the room she had only heard about, a small space with shackles on one wall opposite a floor-to-ceiling window. A window that faced east, faced the sunrise over the North Shore Mountains.
A sunrise Aubrey had seen.
His fine clothes lay piled beneath the empty shackles, filled with glittering ash.
Natalia had fallen to her knees, weeping. She wept again now, in Dominique’s arms.
His wretched sob broke the silence. Aubrey was dead, and he, Dominique, could have saved him—if he had been there, if he had joined Aubrey, as his friend had asked. If he hadn’t been so selfishly caught up in the promise of seeing the sun again…Aubrey would have lived.
Anguish threatened to rip Dominique apart right down to the bone. But something held him together. Fear. Not his, but Natalia’s. Fear for her mortal lover.
The vampiress had been hiding the secret of their bond for weeks, passing him off as her favored slave to the others. Aubrey had told her about the bond between Dominique and Cassidy, which was her primary reason for volunteering to deliver Aubrey’s ashes to Dominique. More than running an errand, she was fleeing the colony, which would sooner kill her beloved than acknowledge him. She trusted Aubrey’s words with blind desperation, placing her and her lover’s lives into the hands of Dominique, an unknown entity…for love.
Releasing her, Dominique crouched on the floor beside her. His eyes stung when he met Cassidy’s look of sorrow. Slowly, the knowledge of her unfaltering support and the weight of his responsibility forced the grief to settle and his thoughts to focus. He had eternity to chastise himself for this many other mistakes. Now was not the time to dwell. He allowed Natalia to recover her composure before saying, “Aubrey shared with you how to find this peace.”
She wiped at her eyes with one small hand. “Yes. The re-siring. He offered this, but…I was unsure. I thought Adilla might not be pleased. Now I know he would have killed me. And without me, Ryan…” She looked up at him, her words echoing what he could feel in her mind. “I will never return to them. I can’t. It’s peace I want, and for this, I submit to you, my lord, in whatever way you wish.”
Not that she really had a choice. Dominique always asked, and they always accepted, but the truth was that he would not tolerate blood-drinkers who continued to feed on terror.
Natalia felt so raw and alone sitting there before him, her hair undone, her face almost childishly young. Despite her bravado, she was fragile, her resolve thanks to Ryan alone. If not for him, she would be nothing but an obedient shadow in Adilla’s court of horrors.
Dominique pressed a thumbnail into his palm and waited for the blood to pool before offering it to her. “You are safe with me.”
Her touch was gentle as a butterfly’s feet when she took his wrist, though once his blood ignited in her veins, her fingers convulsed like claws. Then she gasped and let go, falling back to the tile floor.
“Natalia!” Ryan rushed forward, dropped to his knees, and scooped her into his arms. There was fire in his eyes when he glared at Dominique. “What did you do to her?”
Dominique licked the rest of the blood off his hand and got up. Already he could sense her more clearly in the web. “She is fine.”
“She better be.”
The outburst made him smile. Ryan was as devoted to Natalia as Cassidy was to Dominique, and clearly just as willing to defend her against forces far beyond his abilities.
