No. I can’t…not yet…
“Good evening, pet,” Luigi said as the cell door opened with a mournful whine.
“Fuck…off.”
“Is that any way to talk to your Master?” Luigi wrapped his bony fingers around her throat, nearly cutting off her air, and hauled her off her feet. Slamming her into the wall, he grinned, his fangs glistening. “Clearly, you have not accepted your place yet. Marie! Bring the equipment.”
Equipment? Evangeline wheezed as she tried to kick the elderly vampire, but he merely gave a tiny shake of his head as if he were bored with her feeble struggles.
“Were you surprised to see your dear, departed mother?” Dipping his hand into his pocket, he pulled out a syringe, used his teeth to remove the cap, and jabbed her in the arm.
Liquid fire shot down to her fingers, up to her shoulder, and into her heart, and despite her weakness, she screamed as her body convulsed in his grip.
“Stop!” Philipe begged. “You are killing her.”
“I am training her.” Luigi glanced back, and through her tears, Evangeline saw her mother enter her cell with an odd-looking wheelchair. Marie’s lower lip wobbled, and she kept her head down as she set the chair against the wall close to the hasp for the ankle chain.
“No, no, no,” Evangeline whispered. The room spun, and her stomach tightened into a knot, the nausea slamming into her so hard and fast, she couldn’t catch her breath.
“Your dear mother came to me, you know,” Luigi said. “Begged me to send someone to free Nicola and rescue you.”
Her mother…knew? About Nic? About Henry’s experiments? Evangeline swallowed her questions as she tried to wriggle free from his grasp, clawing at his fingers around her throat. Even if Luigi answered her, she couldn’t trust him to tell her the truth. Fight him. Ignore him. Nic. Focus on Nic.
“Nothing to say?” Luigi tsked softly. “Soon, you will rush to answer me. To fall at my feet and beg me to feed from you.”
“Never,” she rasped.
Snarling, Luigi shifted his grip to her upper arms and sank his fangs into Evangeline’s neck. Her vision went white. Her heart imploded, the swirling vortex of pain sucking her down to a place where she couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t feel anything but her bond with Nic shattering into needle-sharp fragments that tore her up from the inside out.
Consumed by the raw agony, she didn’t notice when Luigi pulled away, nor when he tipped a vial of his blood to her lips. It burned, acid on her tongue, and she choked and sputtered, but he laughed as he pinched her nose shut until she swallowed.
Only then did he let her slump to the floor.
“Take as much as you can without killing her. If you can harvest three pints, you may have one hour with her.”
“Th-thank you, signore.”
Evangeline forced her eyes open to see Marie cowering away from Luigi as he strode from the cell. Once Luigi disappeared down the dimly lit hall, her mother raced over to her, gathered her in her arms, and dragged Evangeline over to the toilet.
“Get the blood out,” she urged and shoved her finger down Evangeline’s throat. “Don’t let it do any more damage than it already has.”
Relaxing into Marie’s comforting embrace, Evangeline let her body expel the poison eating away at her bond with her life mate. When she couldn’t throw up any more, Marie pressed a bottle of water to her lips, and she sucked down as much as she could. “Why…are you…working for him?”
“To find some way to save you from an eternity of pain. I don’t know if I can, but I had to try. He would have found someone else, and—” she leaned closer, pressing her lips to Evangeline’s ear, “—I’ve been able to slow him down. Not much, but maybe enough for you to have a chance. He’s so strong. Even as old as he is…”
“He’s killing me.” Evangeline blinked the tears from her eyes, desperate to understand why her mother wouldn’t…or couldn’t help her. “You have to do…something.”
“You don’t understand, sweetheart. If I’m not careful…he’ll know.”
“Know…what?” A fresh spasm of pain overtook her, and she let her mother pull her closer, desperate for any shred of comfort.
“I can’t tell you. In case I fail. He’s evil, Eva. He starved me until I couldn’t stand. Over and over again, until I didn’t have the strength to fight him anymore.”
Dabbing a cloth over the twin puncture wounds from Luigi’s bite, Marie made soft shhh-ing noises as Evangeline whimpered. “There’s only one door out of here. Luigi and his men know the combination, but he changes it every day. And it’s never unguarded.”
“The chain…” Evangeline tried to draw her legs up, but the thick silver cuff around her ankle burned her skin from her calf down to her toes. “Can you—”
“Marie! You are supposed to be taking the human’s blood.” A large male, well over six-feet-tall and a wall of muscle, hovered at the cell door. “Either do your job or I will send Yousef to restrain and bleed her.”
“I’m sorry, Roman. She needed water to increase her blood volume.” Marie hauled Evangeline to her feet and roughly shoved her into the odd wheelchair. Before Evangeline could protest, her mother tightened leather straps around Evangeline’s torso, wrists, and ankles.
“Mom…?”
“Try to relax, Eva.” Leaning in, Marie whispered, “If Yousef gets a hold of you, you’ll suffer so much more.”
Evangeline let her head fall back and rest against the cold stone wall as her mother tied a thick rubber cord around her bicep, slapped her elbow, and then slid a fat needle into her vein. When thick, red blood started to flow into a bag attached to the arm of the chair, she started to cry.
A quick pinch followed by the sting of a needle in her hip made her hiss and struggle to lift her head. “Sedative,” Marie mouthed.
“No. Not again.” She didn’t want any more fucking sedative. Or her mother’s care. She wanted Nic. Needed him. “You really won’t help me.” Sadness threatened to drown her, her eyes burning as more tears spilled down her cheeks.
Despair pinched Marie’s gaunt features. “I am helping you. The only way I can. I have to make you strong enough to resist him. You’re going to pass out soon. I gave you a double dose of Dilaudid. But it’ll spare you some of the pain. When you wake up, eat. Promise me.”
Her mother’s face wavered in and out of focus, and her words echoed, as if Evangeline were hearing her from underwater. “Promise me.”
“I…” Her world shrank down to a pinprick of light before fading away completely.
Three bags of blood later, Marie removed the needle, eased Evangeline down to the ground, and checked her pulse. Weak, but she was alive.
A few drops of Evangeline’s blood welled in the crook of her elbow, and Marie’s fangs ached as she forced herself to breathe through her mouth. Despite her hunger, she wouldn’t feed from her own daughter. Not even a taste.
She had a few minutes before Roman would expect her back in the lab, and she raced to her tiny room—barely the size of a closet—leaving the bagged blood and the wheelchair next to her unconscious daughter.
After a year chained in the same cell Evangeline now occupied, when Luigi had finally given her a bed, she’d been so grateful, she’d stopped fighting him. Had even done what he’d asked—tried to replicate the serum. But all of her experiments had failed. She’d only managed to produce a very weak approximation of Henry’s work. Evangeline was the key. Marie had repeatedly told Luigi that Evangeline was unique in all the world, but he insisted he’d find a way to replicate the genetic mutations that made her blood stronger than any other human’s.
The day the elderly vampire had brought her news of Evangeline’s escape, she’d cried and started plotting a way out. Delusions of stealing one of the guards’ guns—loaded with silver bullets—gave her hope for a few days until she’d learned the depths of Luigi’s depravity.
“Your daughter does not age,” Luigi said as he paced the lab where she spent all of h
er waking hours. “She and the vampire she has apparently mated with share these mutations. With a copy of your husband’s research and Evangeline under my control, I will live forever.”
Marie attacked him, screaming obscenities and trying to claw at his throat. If she ripped through his carotid artery with her fangs, he might bleed out. But his strength and age were no match for her mere twenty-six years. He shoved her, sending her slamming into the far wall. Blood trickled down her neck, and as starved as she was, her body struggled to heal the wound.
“You will help me decipher her genetic code and isolate what makes her immortal. Once the world knows I will never die, there will be no need for the Conclave. For us to maintain the illusion we care about humanity as anything other than a food source. My secret weapons will be ready soon, and then, each one of my most trusted will be able to live forever. Prepare the empty cell and increase Philipe’s appetite stimulant. We must have a working food additive within the month.”
“No.” She wouldn’t help torture her own daughter. Nor help Luigi build an army of feral, vicious vampires intended only to kill. She couldn’t. Not after what she’d done to cause all of this. She pushed to her feet, swaying from the lingering effects of the impact. “You’ll have to kill me.”
Luigi smiled, his thin lips curling over his fangs. “There are worse fates than death, Marie. I can make your daughter’s life a living hell. An endless nightmare of pain and terror.” He rubbed his chin. “Her healing abilities are wondrous. I could peel an inch of skin from her body every day for months. Pierce her ear drum over and over again. Break a bone every time I feed from her.”
Tears tumbled down Marie’s cheeks. “You wouldn’t.”
In a blur, Luigi grabbed her arm and twisted until the bones snapped. Marie’s scream echoed off the walls, and she fell to her knees, cradling the injury.
“There is nothing I would not do.”
After his solemn warning, he’d locked her in her room, no food, no blood, until she’d been ready to beg. She couldn’t abandon her daughter. Not after Henry had kept her from Evangeline for so long.
If she could ease Evangeline’s suffering, even a little, she’d let Luigi do anything he wanted to her. And maybe…the research she did late at night when Yousef was too distracted by the porn he watched on his tablet to notice, would save them both.
Snatching the thin blanket from her bed, Marie slipped her hand under the mattress and withdrew a small vial of clear liquid. Back in Evangeline’s cell, she draped the scratchy wool over her daughter’s pale form and gently parted her lips.
Evangeline moaned weakly and tried to pull away as the drug coated her tongue, but Marie cupped her cheeks and made sure she swallowed the entire dose. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. This isn’t what I wanted for you. But it’s the only way you’ll survive him.”
31
A shower and fresh clothes left him somewhat revived, and Nic dropped into a chair next to Sylvie in the small dining area and took the protein bar she offered him. “You are certain we are safe here?”
She arched a brow. “After everything? You ask me that now?”
Nic inclined his head. “I suppose if you’d wanted to kill me, you could have let me drown.”
“I know you don’t have a lot of reasons to trust me, mate. And a lot of people you thought were your friends betrayed you in the past…oh…three days. But I take my job very seriously, and if that weren’t enough, I fucking hate megalomaniacs.”
Choking on his coffee, Nic tried not to let the hot liquid shoot out his nose. “And to whom are you referring?”
“The whole bloody Conclave, it seems.” Turning her computer slightly, she tapped a few keys and brought up a window with half a dozen video screens arranged in a grid. “Footage of all of them arriving for the vote to sentence you to death.”
One by one, the men and women he’d considered colleagues, if not friends, rushed into the majestic old building, and as Sylvie advanced the camera footage, all but Antonio and Luigi emerged twenty minutes later.
“No debate,” Nic said quietly. “Death sentences require a unanimous vote. Not a single dissenter.”
Sylvie reached over and gave his arm a quick squeeze. The contact should have offended him, pained him. But every hour he spent without Evangeline, the bond weakened.
“No sign of Evangeline?” He did not need to ask. If Sylvie had found anything, they’d already be on the move.
“Not yet. I’m sorry. Hacking into the traffic cameras around the square is proving harder than I thought. I called Thom. If there’s footage we can use, he’ll find it.”
Lowering his voice, Nic spared a single glance at the couch where Vittoria slept. Carlo and Bayard were in the bedroom, calling every hospital and morgue in the city. “Do you trust them?”
Sylvie ran a hand through her hair, then cracked her neck. “I think they were in an impossible situation. And without Vittoria drugging E and taking her blood, I’d be dead.”
“Is that a yes, then?” Draining his mug, Nic snagged the coffee pot and filled his and Sylvie’s cups. He needed all of the caffeine he could stomach to keep himself going until they found Evangeline—or until he gave up fighting.
“I don’t trust anyone.” Her frown softened as she met Nic’s gaze. “But I think they both care about you. And I don’t think they knew their actions would be as…destructive as they were.”
With a nod, Nic sat back in his chair. His muscles practically vibrated with the adrenaline and caffeine, and he wished he could run or hit something. But until he found Evangeline, he had to conserve his strength.
With a sharp inhale, Sylvie narrowed her eyes at the screen. “Gotcha.”
“Evangeline?” Nic gripped the table tightly, and the wood creaked until he forced his fingers to unclench. “Show me.”
“Getting there. Thom’s a bloody genius.” Images flickered across the screen, a dark sedan in each one. “These are the wankers who took her.”
“How can you tell?” He couldn’t see a damn thing that led him to believe Evangeline was inside. “The windows are tinted.”
Fingers flying over the keys, Sylvie put two images side-by-side. “Here’s the car turning down a side street on the south side of the piazza at 10:55 a.m. And here’s that same car fifteen minutes later.”
“So? They could be tourists. Local business owners—”
“With a hundred pounds of extra weight in their boot?” She pointed to the wheel well in both images. “That car’s carrying a load. And look.” Enhancing the image of the rear of the car, she zoomed in on the license plate. “That red smear.”
“Blood? Vaffanculo. Where did they go?” Nic pushed to his feet, ready to tear the city apart to find his life mate.
Sylvie jumped up and fisted Nic’s shirt. “We get one shot at this, Nic. One. K&R…twenty-nine years of experience taught me not to even contemplate a rescue unless I was willing to stake my life on the target’s location. If you want her back alive, put on another pot of coffee and let me work my magic.”
An hour later, Sylvie slammed her fist down on the table. “I’m bloody brilliant. Remember that when this is all over.” She grabbed a remote control from the table and aimed at the flat screen on the wall. “Bayard, get the fuck in here!”
“Take a moment. Eat something,” Vittoria said as she withdrew a bottle of blood from the small refrigerator and pressed it into Sylvie’s hand.
“E’s out there.” Despite her protest, Sylvie’s fingers shook as she tried to open the bottle. “The longer we wait—”
“Wait for what?” Bayard said as Carlo followed him into the room. “None of the hospitals or morgues report anyone matching Evangeline’s description arriving in the past twenty-four hours.”
Sylvie pointed to the love seats. “Sit down. I tracked the car that took E.”
Nic twisted his wedding ring around on his finger, praying somehow, somewhere, his love still lived. “Where is she?”
“I don’t kno
w. What I found doesn’t make much sense.” On screen, the black sedan she’d tracked from the square took turn after turn, disappearing into the Conclave’s underground parking garage for twenty minutes. “When the car leaves again, E’s still inside. Or…at least, there’s still the same amount of weight in the trunk.”
Sylvie advanced the video five minutes more until the car stopped at a traffic signal in a neighborhood Nic recognized. “Dio mio,” he whispered as she zoomed in on the driver’s open window. “Antonio.”
“Bingo. We lose the car after the next turn. And I haven’t been able to find it again.”
“We do not have to. That is Antonio’s home when he visits Rome.” Rising, Nic clenched his fists at his sides. His strength would not last much longer. “We should pay il mio capo a visit.”
“And maybe introduce him to MI-6’s interrogation methods,” Sylvie said as she unzipped one of her large, black duffel bags sitting by the door. “Carlo, you and Vittoria stay here. Keep monitoring the traffic cameras. Thom’s doing most of the heavy lifting from his flat and sending everything he finds to my laptop. If any of our search parameters hit—the car, E’s face, Antonio…an alarm will sound on the laptop.”
“I will keep trying to reach Carolina. I believe she was pressured to sentence you, Nicola. She may be willing to turn on Antonio…given time,” Carlo said. “Return alive. All of you.”
With a nod, Sylvie crouched down next to the duffel. A smaller bag, two pistols, four clips, and a curved blade that looked like it belonged in the Middle Ages all found their way to her person, and across the room, Bayard assembled his own arsenal.
Vittoria approached Nic warily and thrust a small case into his hands. “More adrenaline.” Taking his hands, she squeezed tightly. “Only use this if there is no other way. Too much, and your heart will give out.”
“If we do not find Evangeline,” Nic said as he tucked the hard, plastic case into his pocket, “my heart will cease to beat of its own accord.”
Revelations in Blood Page 17
