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Plus, there were always hiccups and negatives as well.
Like we couldn’t save Synda. Every time she woke, she raged for the coven leader and was more beast than person. She wasn’t eating food or feeding, and her mind was just—she didn’t understand life the way someone had to so she could survive.
Or fuck, even start to heal.
And honestly, it wasn’t even us separating her, it was his betrayal at learning he had still been buying humans that would turn into demons. Something broke in her conditioning with that and there was no putting her back together.
Not safely. The VPs all agreed if we thought there was even a chance, we would have taken it, but we couldn’t risk the lives of our people when we didn’t see hope. Ally made the call as the oldest and put Synda out of her misery.
And then she stabbed the coven leader until not an inch of him didn’t have something sticking out of him and all of his blood was on the floor. We’d gotten everything we could out of him, and we were going to kill him but… I understood her needing to make him feel pain.
I’d wanted to do the same.
So we had a lot of progress and things were getting better, but we couldn’t ever, not ever, forget the losses and sacrifices it had taken to get to where we were. And at least it seemed to make everyone a bit kinder to each other.
22
“The demons we saved in LA are doing much better and ready to become house moms of the twenty safe houses,” Natalia told me in a meeting the Wednesday after Valentine’s Day. I was a bit bummed that nothing had happened with Mason on the holiday and having trouble focusing, but I snapped out of it when I heard that.
“Really? They’ve agreed and are good with it?” I checked.
She nodded. “They all love the idea. They want to make sure to personally meet the manager of each club who could come to them and agree that adopting an adult dog or two would be great. Even for them. They all said a dog might have been the only thing that could have helped them more after they’d been rescued.”
“That’s amazing. Yeah, let’s do it.”
“We’re at over fifteen hundred at the compound now,” she continued, nodding when I couldn’t hide my shock. “The snakes had a lot. Almost every group, but there aren’t as many of them, and after we made it clear we’d crush them…” She shrugged.
Yeah, self-preservation was a powerful thing.
There were also updates on other matters that I hadn’t had a chance to circle back to much. The club in Canada was designed and ready to be built the moment spring hit, same in Denver. Both of the temp clubs were doing well and everyone was being trained, the right people hired and things going well.
And good progress was made in Rome. All the groups were on board, and we finally had all the proper permits from the government. It took way too much back and forth, but once they realized that we were going to clean up the area, they stopped blocking us.
What else was there really todowith a shitty area like that? Build a sign we were moving in criminals? Like… Yeah, governments were their own worst enemies a lot of times.
New leadership was put in place at the LA coven where so much had happened. There were a bunch of vampires who weren’t involved in anything bad that wanted to transfer, and from what Natalia heard, a lot of bad wanted to transfer to LA thinking things were ripe for the pickings.
Plus, some payback for us.
Good luck with that. We could kill some more bad vampires easily.
And we had everything handled with the Jackson club. We had people covering the ones we were pressing charges against or simply firing. Lisa was going to be very dead, so we had a manager covering. It wasn’t even about the stealing with her, but she’d used magic to get away with shit and broke the rules against her council.
None of the other councils would put up with that shit either, and we’d found a list of other crimes. We couldn’t show leniency for someone who wouldn’t even be sorry when there was so much else on the line, so manyliveson the line.
I left there and went to check in on Kiera since she was moving. I had offered to make any repairs and adjustments to the house before she did, but she was so in love with the place that she wanted to start sleeping there and things could come later. Her bathroom was already renovated with a fancy tub she wanted, and the fireplace could be done in the spring when it wasn’t such a hassle.
She did have two others she could use, simply not in her bedroom.
We sat outside and smoked a couple of cigars when the movers we had through corporate were done.
“Dylan came to find me at the club several times,” she informed me.
“I heard. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be mad at me, but I talked with him,” she told me, ignoring when I gave her a shit look. “It’s not getting better for him. He just didn’t get it.”
“And you think talking to him would? He’s not listening to anyone.”
