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Adilla stared at him, expressionless. Stared at the golden light blazing in Dominique’s eyes. “Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. I am giving you a rare opportunity to join more than a colony of blood-drinkers. We are a family.” He held out his hand in what appeared to be a random direction. “Yourfamily.”
Something slammed down on his shoulders and pressed with the weight of a world. Esteban. Down he went. Add a cracked kneecap to his list of miseries. He couldn’t even feel his arms anymore.
A new aura bobbed amidst the blaze of white. It wasn’t Jackson. His aura was red, this one a vibrant blue. A stranger…
Realization punched his gut like a steam-powered fist. The blue bubble was a woman who should have been impossible in this place. She was a little more full-bodied than he remembered, but her scent shimmered with sage and herbs and the tropical sun. And her face, with their father’s soft curves and mother’s distinctive widow’s peak, was unmistakable.
Four years of time vanished in an instant.
A garbled snarl emerged from his throat. “Geneviève.”
His last surviving sibling didn’t look at him, her attention for Adilla alone. Compelled. She might not even know there were others in the hall. Adilla held her under his spell as she took his hand and dropped to her knees. Her navy blue skirt flared out around her.
Dominique moaned. His entire body shook with pain.
With rage.
With helplessness.
“Geneviève,ma petite chérie. Look who has joined us,” Adilla said in flawless French.
She looked as ordered, and when she spotted Dominique, her face brightened. “Frère préféré!” She saw only him, her “favorite brother,” not his circumstances, bleeding and on his knees, nothing of the horrific reality. “Have you come to visit? Or to stay?”
“He will stay,” Adilla assured. His smile didn’t touch his eyes. “Now that he sees you so happy here, how can he not?”
Geneviève beamed at Adilla.
“No. No, you cannot,” Dominique spluttered. This time, when he bolted to his feet, he leveled a solid kick at Esteban’s ribs. At least one cracked audibly. The Spaniard, who had been trying to snatch at him, stepped back with a grunt. Dominique’s not-yet-healed knee screamed and threatened to buckle.
Adilla pressed a kiss to Geneviève’s knuckles before turning over her hand to expose the wrist. “We have gotten to know each other these past two nights, have we not, my dear?”
She continued to smile.
“No!”
Ink wells bloomed in Adilla’s eyes as his fangs emerged.
“Do not touch her, you fucking piece of shit!” Dominique roared, but Adilla already had his teeth into her wrist—for perhaps the third time in as many nights. She was more than halfway turned.
Dominique’s flesh rippled and compacted as his beast exploded to the surface. With a mighty jerk, his shackles snapped and his hands came free, darting out to either side of him. Silver-coated bracelets slipped over his bony, bloodied wrists and clattered to the floor. Adilla, under the influence of blood fresh from the vein, paid him no heed.
But others did.
Before Dominique could take more than a step in Adilla’s direction, Esteban and two more closed in. He leapt into the air and kicked out with both feet. Esteban ducked out of the way, but the others fell back, howling, their noses smashed. His injured knee failed him on landing, pitching him sideways. Four more took advantage, grabbed him, and pinned him to the floor by his shoulders and legs.
Dominique screamed to the limits of his lungs, which was a hoarse croak compared to what it should have been. Frustration and anger burned through him. This is where his dream of seeing the sun again had brought him, here, to the brink of losing everything.
Everything.
Suddenly, that was precisely what he wanted. Lose everything, including his life. He would take them all with him, the world over. Geneviève would be free. Jackson would get her to the surface and take care of Cassidy and her child. They would all survive. As mortals.
All he had to do was die.
“I will never submit to you. I am your lord, not a test from an ancient one who could not tolerate your company,” he screamed on an impulse he scarcely understood. Kambyses had never mentioned Adilla to him, but somewhere deep in Dominique’s psyche rested the immense accumulation of Kambyses’s memories that had come along with all his sire’s blood. They were nothing Dominique could call up at will, but every now and then, like now, knowledge came to him out of nowhere. In this case, knowledge about an ambitious young prince in a long-vanished realm with no hope of ever gaining true power. He had manipulated Kambyses into bestowing the gift of immortality, and Kambyses, in turn, had abandoned him—after decades, not centuries.
“You disappointed him,” Dominique continued in a guttural snarl. “He regretted making you as he regretted nothing else in all his eternal life. If you had not been the last who survived his blood, he would have put you down.Like I will!”
Appalled cries rose all around, and the vampires holding him hissed. Esteban appeared, and, in a flash, delivered a backhanded blow so violent Dominique’s jaw fractured. Blood exploded in his mouth. Just as quickly, he spat it and a shattered tooth back into Esteban’s sneering face. A claw hand shot toward him.
