by Linde, K. A.
Jodie trotted out of the back room with her mouth full of a gigantic bite of her sandwich. “The iiii ta da fer.”
Reyna’s eyebrows rose. “What?”
Jodie chewed and swallowed. Then she repeated, “This is to die for.”
“PB&J, baby,” Meghan said.
“Peanut butter,” she groaned. “I missed peanut butter.” She took another huge bite.
“Let’s get out of here. I think a tour can wait for tomorrow when you’re both fed, rested, and have begun to acclimate,” Meghan said. She was already storming out of the cafeteria.
Reyna and Jodie shared a look. It said everything that neither of them could speak of. They weren’t going to be acclimated. Not now…maybe not ever.
Still they followed Meghan. They took an elevator up two levels before exiting onto a floor that read RESIDENCE.
Meghan cocked her head to the side. “We only have so much space for housing right now. That’s the main room where the girls bunk, but the outer walls are all private or shared private rooms. Hard to come by.” Meghan grinned devilishly. “But this one is yours.”
Reyna stopped and stared at the closed door. There was even a plaque with a sliding tray that had her name on it.
“You planned for me being here?” she whispered, hope filling her.
“Something like that.”
Reyna twisted the knob and pushed the door open. She gaped at her surroundings when she entered. “Oh my God.”
“Cushy,” Jodie said. “Enough room in here for two. Don’t you think?”
“Up to Reyna,” Meghan said. “I’ve got extra space if you want to crash with me until we find something else.”
She could hear Meghan and Jodie making arrangements but her mind was lost on this room. It was nearly identical to the one that she had stayed in at Beckham’s penthouse. The bed was enormous and high off of the ground with the same comforter. Photographs lined the walls. Before it had always been Beckham’s pictures. But now she was amazed to find her own images staring back at her in frames and on canvas. Black-and-white photographs straight from the website Perspective that she had used to showcase her art. Visage had worried that it was an Elle sympathizer website. Turned out they were right.
She walked in a hazy dream to the closet and laughed. None of the silky doll outfits awaited her. Just practical jeans, fit T-shirts, and a whole rack of Converse to choose from. There was also an olive-green military-issue jacket, two ball caps, and her backpack. She pulled open the first drawer and grinned from ear to ear. Well…it seemed he hadn’t taken away all the sexy garments. Lace bras and silk thongs and satin matching sets and corsets and lingerie galore. Drawer after drawer after drawer.
“He did this,” she said, shutting the door with reddening cheeks.
“Yeah. He started to set this room up for you when he thought you were going to join us.”
“Thanks, Meghan,” Reyna said softly. “For everything.”
“Of course. I’ll just…” She gestured to the door that Jodie had already walked out of. “If you need anything, take the elevator down two floors and someone will find me.”
Reyna nodded and listened for the click of the door closing behind her. The rest of the day caught up with her in a rush and she sank into the pillow-top mattress. Adrenaline wore off and exhaustion hit her anew. Without warning, tears sprang to her eyes. She was free. She was finally free. She couldn’t believe it.
And yet, Beckham wasn’t here. After everything she’d gone through, she’d thought that he would be here waiting for her. Her eyes moved around the room that had been created for her. She saw it for what it was—a slice of a once-wonderful life. Beckham had done this for her. He’d wanted her to feel like home when he brought her here. Which meant that he’d always intended for her to show up.
But if that was the case, then where was he?
Chapter 11
The next three days passed in a blur.
Reyna slept off and on the entire time, only waking up long enough to eat. And even then sometimes she couldn’t be bothered. She could hear her brothers flit in and out of her room with Meghan and occasionally Tye on their heels. She knew they were worried about her sleeping so much. She knew that she should get up and act like a human again. But she had never been more exhausted.
It wasn’t until the fourth day when Meghan finally said enough was enough. She went about checking Reyna’s vitals. “We’re going to have to dose you with vampire saliva.”
“What?” Reyna asked groggily.
“Or we could have someone bite you if you prefer.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“No, but I’m tired of you moping around like this.”
“So, you’d rather have me high?” Reyna sat up in bed and pushed her messy hair out of her face.
“We took a lot of blood from you that last time. He was taking more than the recommended amount each time, Reyna. Harrington was taking more. Then he was giving you extra-large doses of his saliva to make up for the blood he was taking. You didn’t get any of that this time. The first time in weeks,” Meghan said with a weighted frown. “I thought you were tired. I let you get your rest. I should have known better. Your body is trying to make up for the loss of blood and I suspect it’s going through withdrawals.”
“I’m not an addict,” Reyna countered.
“I didn’t accuse you of anything. You just went through a traumatic experience. Sleeping is perfectly normal, but I’d prefer to check you out before I let you live the rest of your life in that bed.”
“Fine,” Reyna relented. “How’s Jodie?”
“Incredibly resilient. She won’t let me check her out, but at least she’s not still sleeping.”
“And Beckham?” she whispered.
Meghan shook her head once solemnly.
“Okay.” She shucked the covers off of her. “Where to?”
“Medical center,” Meghan said.
“A hospital?” Reyna shuddered at the thought.
“It’s a safe place. I’ll be there with you the entire time.”
Reyna didn’t reply. She shoved out of the bed and headed for the shower. Hospital rooms. More hospital rooms. It was bad enough that she had to get dosed one more time or that Meghan thought she was a blood whore fiending for her next hit. She hated that her body was reacting this way. She just wanted it to be over.
* * *
—
Meghan forced Reyna to eat something before they entered Elle’s medical wing. She wasn’t hungry but she ate anyway. Jodie showed up in the mess hall as they were finishing and agreed to join them, with the caveat that she was in no way being checked out.
Reyna would have liked to have told Meghan the same thing, but she was practical. She didn’t want the venom, but if it helped, then she’d do it. Giving blood was a whole other scenario though.
They followed Meghan out of the mess hall and into the main corridor.
“No time for the official tour, but this is the workout room.” She pointed into a room. “Here we have a weight room.” Another room was passed. She kept yammering on as they went past three more rooms before stopping in front of a giant one. “Oh, and this is everyone’s favorite. The rec room.” She gestured to the open door.
Reyna peeked her head inside to find a giant room with everything from Ping-Pong to air hockey to cards to Monopoly. A projector took up one side of the wall, displaying six different shows at once. Someone was arguing which one should have sound for the room, though it looked like a couple people wore headphones for the show they wanted to watch. Everyone looked so happy and carefree.
“Wow,” Jodie breathed behind Reyna.
“Yeah. It’s…something.”
“Overwhelming?” she offered.
“Loud?”
“Awesome,” Meghan ad
ded.
They looked at her and shrugged.
“It’s a lot just yet,” Jodie offered.
Someone must have finally wrestled the remote to change it to the news, which was playing in the center left of the screen.
“The news,” Reyna whispered.
“Ugh, don’t watch it,” Meghan grumbled. “All they do is lie.”
“Well, at least nothing has really changed,” Jodie said.
“I’d like to know what I’ve missed though.”
“You won’t get it from there. Harrington bought out most of the news stations. If you want to hear the reality, you have to tune in to the underground networks and listen on the radio frequencies. This bullshit runs 24/7 and it’s all nonsense. They focus on celebrity gossip in the midst of the world falling apart. Anything to deflect from reality.”
“I bet,” Reyna said.
Reyna was about to turn away from the rec room when her eyes narrowed in on the figures in the news frame.
She gasped.
“What?” Meghan asked, then went pale when she looked up at the screen.
“What am I missing?” Jodie asked.
Reyna took a few steps into the room, ignoring the now blatant stares from the other people inside. The screen was filled with Beckham and Penelope’s smiling faces. Underneath it read, “The Engagement We’ve All Been Waiting For.”
Reyna’s hand flew to her mouth.
Engagement.
Engaged.
Beckham and Penelope were engaged.
Her stomach heaved and she thought at any minute her peanut butter and jelly sandwich was going to come up. Her eyes were blurry and she couldn’t hear a word that the news reporter was saying. All she could see was the fuzzy picture of Beckham and Penny. What the fuck?
“Reyna, come on. Don’t look at that,” Meghan said.
“He’s engaged,” she whispered.
“Let’s get out of here, okay?” Meghan said, using her nurse voice.
“He’s…he’s engaged.”
“Come on, buttercup. Let’s move it.”
Reyna wasn’t seeing or hearing a thing. Her world was spinning. She was upside down.
Meghan reached for Reyna’s arm and tugged her toward the entrance. Reyna took one last look at the glowing faces of the people on the screen and then forced herself to turn away. She didn’t know what she was feeling right now. Sick and twisted up in disbelief. But also…angry. Beckham and Penelope were engaged? It wasn’t even possible. She had trusted him and believed in him. She had seen them together at the ball and believed the act. Had it been a reality? Was she an idiot? Or was this part of the act too? Could she even tell the difference between fiction and reality anymore?
She ground her teeth together and followed Meghan to the medical center.
“Look, it’s a trash news network,” Meghan said. “I told you from the start that everything they post is a lie.”
“You think they’re not together?” Reyna asked her pointedly.
“I don’t know. I can’t answer that, but it looks like a con.”
Jodie snorted next to her as they finally came to a stop.
“What’s your problem?” Meghan asked.
“I’m just saying that I got a good look at that girl. No one is forcing a man to be with her.”
“You’re right. No one is forcing Beckham to be with Penelope,” Reyna said. No one could force Beckham to do anything. If they were engaged, it was of his own volition. “Can we just get this over with? I don’t want to talk about him anymore.”
“Great. Thanks for that.” Meghan shook her head at Jodie, who shrugged.
Reyna needed to pull herself together. After everything she had been through and everything she’d endured, she wouldn’t fall apart over a guy. Not even Beckham Anderson. She was finally free. Well, as free as she could be at this point. She would have to find out the truth about the engagement some other time. Whenever the hell Beckham decided to show his face. Right now she needed to concentrate on getting better and maybe actually trying that acclimating thing Meghan had mentioned when she first got here.
“You know,” Meghan said as they started walking away, “we have a therapist who works here too.” Reyna clenched her jaw. Jodie fidgeted. “It might help if you two talk about what happened with someone.”
“We don’t want to talk about it,” Jodie cut in.
“I understand,” Meghan said at once. “I was just offering so that you knew you had the option.”
Reyna wasn’t about to talk to a therapist about anything that happened. Not about Beckham or Harrington or Rowland or the needles or the venom or the prison cell. Or…or B. Reyna shuddered at the thought. None of it. Revealing what had happened at Visage meant reliving it, and she definitely wasn’t prepared for that.
She’d do better trying to move on and find a new place for herself in Elle. Her brothers had already done it. She might not like their path, but at least they had one. She hadn’t been content in Beckham’s penthouse as a cooped-up doll and she wouldn’t be useless here either. After everything she’d gone through, it would be nice to have something to do again.
* * *
—
Reyna sat in an all too familiar chair inside the sterile white medical facility. Jodie paced relentlessly around the room like a caged animal. Reyna’s own fear should have spiked at the settings, but the only thing she really felt was numb.
She had been here before. Not this building, of course. But it was set up much the same as the Visage rooms. The chair was less comfortable, straight-backed and forbidding. Harrington wasn’t going to walk through the door, but the equipment was the same. The gentle beeping of the machinery was the same. The sounds and sights and smells…it was all the same.
Meghan trotted around the room as if her two patients weren’t ranging between feral and catatonic. “Let me get the saliva and we’ll be good to go.”
“Venom,” Reyna corrected.
“What?”
“I call it vamp venom.”
“Fitting,” Jodie chimed in. She was picking up various knives and syringes and then putting them back down. Over and over.
Meghan laughed, smacking Jodie’s hand away from a needle she’d picked up. “Vamp venom it is, then,” she said before she disappeared into a giant walk-in refrigerator.
“This place is the same, huh?” Jodie asked.
Reyna nodded. “Same company probably built and outfitted it.”
“Probably so.” Jodie poked the heart-rate monitor. “You okay about your boy?”
Boy. Reyna almost laughed at that. She didn’t think anyone had referred to Beckham as a boy in a very, very long time. He was a man. A hulking brooding vicious vampire. He’d earned his reputation with fear and intimidation…and murder. The innocence of childhood was long gone.
“I don’t even know what I expected,” she confessed.
“Obviously that he wouldn’t propose to some bitch behind your back.”
Reyna couldn’t help her laugh then. “Yeah. That. I mean…I was only gone eight weeks.”
Jodie’s eyes rounded. “Eight weeks is a lifetime in there.”
It was.
“How long were you there?”
Jodie shut down and turned her back on Reyna. “He was pretty and all, but maybe you could hook up with a human this time. Find one who doesn’t want to eat you for breakfast.”
Reyna didn’t correct her. She was probably right. Things would be easier if she wanted someone other than Beckham. The problem was that she had never wanted anyone like she wanted Beckham. She hated cutting through the red tape between them.
Meghan returned then. She fit the venom to the IV and prepped Reyna’s arm. Reyna tensed as she waited for the inevitable needle. Jodie blanched at the sight and disappeared from t
he room.
“I am so glad that I was working that day you came in for testing,” Meghan said, drawing Reyna’s attention back to her face. “I was the nurse who ran the test on your blood and found out how special you are. I changed out your file from Rh null to O negative. We’d been looking for you for so long. It was perfect timing too since Beckham had to take a permanent escort and he’d been putting it off. It was the first day I learned he worked for Elle.”
Reyna’s mind was whirring to life with the new information. A sharp prick jolted her back to reality.
“Ugh, needles,” she groaned.
“Don’t worry. The worst is over.” She glanced at Reyna. “So, I don’t know all the details about what’s up with you and Beckham. Only that Elle placed you in his custody for protection to begin with.”
Reyna eyes swept to Meghan’s green ones. “So, the whole thing was a setup? Beckham knew about my blood type?”
“Well, yeah. Otherwise you would have ended up with Harrington right away. We would have brought you straight to headquarters, but we hadn’t vetted you yet. We wanted Beckham to vet you and then bring you in. Perfect really.”
Reyna sank back in the chair as Meghan turned on the machine to filter the venom into her system. All this time, she had wondered why Beckham wouldn’t drink from her. She’d assumed for so long it had been because Penny was his blood type match too. He didn’t approve of the new permanent position and she’d thought that it was his rebellion to drink from Penny instead. When he’d finally given in, things had gone crazy. And that was because they weren’t a blood match.
Beckham had known all along that they didn’t match. He had kept her to protect her and to eventually bring her into Elle. She knew he was a good actor. She knew that what she’d seen of him with Penelope could be an act. But how could she trust that he hadn’t fooled her too. If she was so valuable that Elle had gone out of its way for her twice, then maybe Beckham had only pretended to want her to keep her close.
Her mind started to muddle as the venom took ahold of her. She didn’t want to believe this. She didn’t want to think he was capable of deceiving her so completely. That he’d only wanted her to stay because she was valuable.
