Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 62580 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 313(@200wpm)___ 250(@250wpm)___ 209(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 62580 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 313(@200wpm)___ 250(@250wpm)___ 209(@300wpm)
Nash’s eyes went to the gunshot wound, and breath left his lungs in the next second.
“Our sister’s gonna be a vamp.”
That was Corbin.
I looked up at him.
“And that’s a problem?”
He shook his head.
“No.” He cleared his throat. “I expected it as soon as she started paying attention to you. I didn’t think it’d happen like this, though.”
His eyes were fixated on Acadia’s rapidly healing wound. He didn’t even bother to look up to see my startled surprise at his words.
I felt obligated to share my concerns with them before they got to thinking this was all okay.
“There’s a possibility that she could go mad,” I told the two brothers. “She was young, and though I’m old, that doesn’t mean that this is all in the bag. Vampires have a seventy percent chance of going crazy from the moment they’re turned. She could still go bad and I’d have to kill her.”
The words almost stuck in my throat. The actual act of having to kill her after I’d just found her, brought her into my world, was completely foreign to me.
I could be as ruthless as I needed to be with anyone else in the world… but her.
It was at this point that I looked up to find my inner circle in the room, looking at me but not saying anything.
And it was then that I realized that they knew I wouldn’t be able to do it if the time ever came that she had to be taken. I would protect her, even if the cost was my life. They’d have to fight me to take her from me, and there was a strong possibility that I would take one of them, if not more, down with me if they ever forced the decision on me.
I looked away, trying not to look down at the woman still lying so deathly still on the ground surrounded by her own blood.
Instead, I looked around the room.
“Do we know what happened?” I rasped.
The shakiness in my voice went unnoticed, or if they did notice, they didn’t say anything. Instead, Corbin gave a complete recounting of the events.
“I’ve heard they hit a number of your places in less than five minutes.”
“All?” I asked carefully.
Corbin nodded and stood up, running his bloody fingers through his hair as he did.
“Yes.” He nodded. “All. Plus a few of your inner circle.”
I waited for a response, but it came from a man in the corner of the room, startling me.
“There were supposed to be ten.”
I’d thought he was dead, but now that I had more time to concentrate on my surroundings, I realized that one of the human activists that I thought was dead wasn’t. He was only lying still, likely paralyzed, staring at the rest of the room with a haze of pain and fear clouding his eyes.
I got up, uncaring that I was covered in blood, gore, and who knew what else.
“Tell me what else you know, Mr. Geer.”
His eyes widened.
“You… you…”
I smiled a smile that likely wasn’t very pretty.
“I know your name,” I confirmed. “Yes. I also can find anything I want in your brain, but it’s painful. It requires me killing you after I do it. So, which way do you want to play this?”
He answered quickly. “There were supposed to be ten targets. Your club, your office, your home. Mr. Fox’s office. Mr. Fox’s home.” He cleared his throat. “We go in at the same time. Take out our scheduled targets, go home. Easy.”
The list continued until he’d named off each of my inner circle’s most trusted places, even going as far as to include a home that I thought the world didn’t know about.
Fox’s children lived in that home, and the moment he heard the words out of the activist’s mouth, he was gone.
He appeared back in seconds, this time with two children in tow.
They were adult children, yes, but they were both scared—and bloody.
“What happened?” I asked carefully. Guardedly.
“The home was in cinders,” he said. “They were in the panic room.”
All of our houses, offices, and clubs had panic rooms. Ones that we’d built ourselves so no one would know that we had them. Only the most trusted of us knew where they were.
“Round everyone up and take them to The Cellar,” I said, standing up and gathering Acadia’s dead weight into my arms.
Everyone started to move.
Acadia’s hair fell back in wet, reddened strands like a slick curtain straight toward the floor. Her clothes were bloody and clinging to her curves. Curves I’d just tasted less than an hour ago.
When Abe disappeared, Corbin and Nash finally caught on to how we all had gotten here.
“I think you forgot to tell me that you have other abilities,” Corbin said carefully, eyeing the room as a whole.
I turned my smile on him.
“Oh, we have a lot of things we can do, I’m sure, that you don’t know about,” I drawled. “And I’m going to be blunt here. You can’t have her if you’re a part of the inner sanctum of the police department. You made that decision when you chose her life. So you need to choose. Her or trying to get back your job.”