by Lara Adrian
“No!” Dylan blurted. The ice in her stomach suddenly turned into a glacial sort of fear. “Oh, my God—no, you can’t … Rio, tell him—”
“End of discussion,” the dark one said, directing his attention at Rio, not her. “You’ll leave at dusk.”
Rio nodded solemnly, accepting the orders like it didn’t faze him at all. Like he’d done this sort of thing a hundred times before.
“As of tonight, Rio, no more loose ends.” The flinty eyes slid pointedly to Dylan, then back to Rio. “Not one.”
As his terrifying friend departed, Dylan turned shakily to Rio. “What did he mean, remove the risk? No more loose ends?”
Rio glowered over at her darkly. There was accusation in that piercing topaz gaze, a scathing coldness and very little of the wounded, tender man she’d been kissing in this very room just a short time ago. She felt cold under the blast of that hard glare, like she was looking into the face of a stranger.
“I’m not going to let you or your friends hurt anyone,” she told him, wishing her voice didn’t falter as she said it. “I’m not going to let you kill them!”
“No one’s going to die, Dylan.” His tone was flat, so detached it was hardly reassuring. “We’re going to take their memory of what they saw in your photographs, and of anything you might have told them about the Breed or the cave. We’re not going to hurt anyone, but we need to scrub their minds of any recollection of those things.”
“But how? I don’t understand—”
“You don’t have to understand,” he said softly.
“Because I’m not going to remember either. Is that what you mean?”
He looked at her for a long moment in silence. She searched his face for some hint of emotion beyond the stony resolve he projected. All she saw was a man fully prepared for the task he’d been given, a warrior committed to his mission. And none of the tenderness she’d seen in him before, or the need she thought he’d felt for her, was going to stand in his way. She was a captive at his mercy. An inconvenient problem he intended to eliminate.
Rio’s brows came together slightly as he gave a vague shake of his head. “Tonight you go home, Dylan.”
She should be happy to hear it—relieved, at least—but Dylan felt oddly bereft as she watched him leave the room and close the door behind him.
CHAPTER
Twenty-One
He came back for her after a couple of hours and told her it was time to go. Dylan wasn’t surprised that her next conscious memory was waking up in the backseat of a dark SUV as Rio brought it to a stop at the curb outside her Brooklyn apartment building. As she sat up drowsily, Rio met her gaze in the rearview mirror.
Dylan scowled at him. “You knocked me out again.”
“For the last time,” he said, his voice low, apologetic.
He killed the engine and opened the driver side door. He was alone up front, no sign of the two others who were supposed to be riding along. The ones who’d been ordered to take care of the other “loose ends” while Rio personally took care of her.
God, the thought of her mom coming in contact with the kind of dangerous individuals that Rio was apparently associated with made her shake with anxiety. Her mother was dealing with enough as it was; Dylan didn’t want her anywhere near this dark new reality.
Dylan wondered how fast Rio would catch her if she tried to bolt out of the SUV. If she could get a large enough lead, she might be able to make a run for the subway station into Midtown where the hospital was. But who was she kidding? Rio had tracked her from Jiáín to Prague. Finding her in Manhattan might prove a challenge for him … for all of about thirty seconds.
But damn it, she needed to see her mom. She needed to be with her, at her bedside, and see her face so she could know for certain that she was okay.
Please Lord, let her be okay.
“I thought you were going to have company for this trip,” Dylan said, hoping by some miracle there had been a change of plans and Rio’s friends had stayed behind. “What happened to the other guys who were supposed to come with you?”
“I dropped them off in the city. They didn’t need to be here with us. They’ll report back to me when they’re finished.”
“When they’re finished terrorizing a bunch of innocent people, you mean? How do you know your vampire buddies won’t decide to take a little blood donation along with the memories they’re going to steal?”
“They have a specific mission, and they’ll adhere to it.”
She looked into the smoky topaz eyes staring back at her in the mirror. “Just like you, right?”
“Just like me.” He got out of the vehicle and came to the back to grab her backpack and messenger bag from the seat beside her. “Come on, Dylan. We don’t have a lot of time to wrap this up.”
When she didn’t move, he reached in and startled her with a gentle stroke of her cheek. “Come on. Let’s get inside now. Everything’s going to be all right.”
She climbed out of the leather seat and walked up the concrete steps with him to her building’s front door. Rio handed her the keys from out of her bag. Dylan turned the entryway lock and stepped inside the stale-smelling, robin’s egg blue vestibule, feeling like she hadn’t been home in ten years.
“My apartment’s on the second floor,” she murmured, but then Rio probably already knew that. He followed close behind her as the two of them climbed the stairs up to her hole-in-the-wall place at the back of the common hallway.
She unlocked the door and Rio walked in ahead of her, keeping her in back of him as though he were accustomed to entering dangerous places and doing it at the front of the line. He was a warrior, all right. If his cautious demeanor and immense size didn’t confirm it, the big gun he was concealing in the back waistband of his black cargo pants would have done so in spades. She watched as he checked out the place, pausing next to a computer workstation that sat on a small writing desk in the corner.
“Am I going to find anything on this machine that shouldn’t be there?” he asked as he turned it on and the monitor lit him up in a pale blue light.
“That computer is old. I hardly ever use it.”
“You won’t mind if I check,” he said, not really a question when he was already bringing up files and having a look at what they contained. He wouldn’t find anything but some of her earliest articles and old correspondence.
“Do you have a lot of enemies?” Dylan asked, trailing over to him.
“We have enough.”
“I’m not one of them, you know.” She flipped on a light, more for her benefit than his, since he obviously didn’t mind the dark. “I’m not going to tell anyone about what you’ve told me, or what I’ve seen these past several days. None of it, I swear to you. And not because you’re going to take those memories away from me either. I would keep your secrets safe, Rio. I just want you to know that.”
“It’s not that simple,” he said, facing her now. “It wouldn’t be safe. Not for you, or for us. Our world protects its own, but there are dangers and we can’t be everywhere. Letting someone outside the vampire nation carry information about us could be catastrophic. Occasionally it is done, even though it’s ill-advised. A human here or there has been trusted with the truth, but it’s rare in the extreme. Personally I’ve never seen it work out well in the end. Someone always gets hurt.”
“I can take care of myself.”
He chuckled, but there was little humor in it. “I have no doubt. But this is different, Dylan. You’re not just a human. You’re a Breedmate, and that will always mean you’re different. You can bond with a male of my kind through blood and you can live forever. Well, something close to forever.”
“You mean like Tess and her mate?”
Rio nodded. “Like them, yes. But to be a part of the Breed’s world, you would have to cut your ties to the human one. You’d have to leave them behind.”
“I can’t do that,” she said, her brain automatically shutting down the idea of leaving her mom.
“My family is here.”
“The Breed is your family too. They would care for you as family, Dylan. You could make a very nice life for yourself in the Darkhavens.”
She couldn’t help but notice that he was talking about all of this from a comfortable distance, keeping himself totally out of the equation. Part of her wondered if it would be so easy to turn him down if he were asking her personally to join his world.
But he wasn’t doing that at all. And Dylan’s choice, easy or not, would have been the same regardless of what he was offering her.
She shook her head. “My life is here, with my mom. She’s always been there for me, and I can’t leave her. I wouldn’t. Not now. Not ever.”
And she needed to find a way to get to her soon, she thought, weathering Rio’s steady, measuring gaze. She didn’t want to wait until he decided to start scrubbing her memory now that she’d opted out of the vampire lottery.
“I … um … I’ve got to use the bathroom,” she murmured. “I hope you don’t think you’re going to stand guard over me while I go?”
Rio’s eyes narrowed slightly, but he gave a slow shake of his head. “Go on. But don’t take long.”
Dylan couldn’t believe he was actually letting her walk into the adjacent bathroom and shut herself inside. For all his cautious recon of her apartment, he must have missed the fact that there was a small window next to the toilet.
A window that opened onto a fire escape, which led down to the street below.
Dylan turned on the faucet and ran a hard stream of cold water into the sink while she considered the insanity of what she was about to attempt. She had two-hundred-plus pounds of combat-trained, seriously armed vampire waiting for her on the other side of the door. She’d already witnessed his lightning-fast reflexes, so the odds of outrunning him were pretty much zilch. All she could hope for was a sneak escape, and that would mean getting the decrepit window open without making too much noise, then climbing down the rickety fire escape without having it crumble beneath her. If she managed to clear those sizable obstacles, all she’d have to do is start running till she hit the subway station.
Yeah, piece of cake.
She knew it was nuts, even as she hurried to the window and slid the sash lock free. The window needed a good jab to loosen the several coats of old paint that had all but sealed it shut. Dylan coughed a couple of times, loud enough to mask the noise as she knocked the window frame with the heel of her palm.
She waited a second, listening for movement in the other room. When she didn’t hear any, she lifted the window and got a faceful of humid city night air.
Oh, Christ. Was she really going to do this?
She had to.
Nothing else mattered but seeing her mom.
Dylan put herself halfway out the window to make sure the way down was clear. It was. She could do this. She had to try. With a couple of good deep breaths to gird herself, Dylan tapped the flusher and then climbed out the window as the toilet whooshed into action behind her.
Her descent down the fire escape was rushed and clumsy, but in a few seconds her feet touched down on the pavement. As soon as she hit the ground, she gunned it for the subway.
Over the rush of water running in the bathroom sink, Rio had indeed heard the nearly silent slide of the window being pushed open behind that closed door. The flushing toilet didn’t quite mask the metallic clank of the fire escape as Dylan carefully climbed out onto it.
She was attempting escape, just as he expected she would.
He’d seen the wheels turning in her head as he talked with her, a look of rising desperation coming into her eyes every moment she was forced to stay in the apartment with him. He’d known, even before she made the excuse of needing to use the bathroom, that she was going to try to get away from him at her first opportunity.
Rio could have stopped her. He could stop her now, as she clambered down the rickety steel ladder to the street below her apartment. But he was more curious about where she planned to run. And to whom.
He’d believed her when she said she had no intention of exposing the Breed to human news outlets. If it turned out she was lying to him, he didn’t know what he would do. He didn’t want to think he could be so wrong about her—told himself none of that would matter at all if he just wiped her mind clean of the knowledge.
But he’d hesitated to scrub her on the spot after she said she wouldn’t leave her human world for that of the Breed. He hesitated because he realized, selfishly, that he wasn’t quite ready to erase himself from her thoughts.
And now she was running off into the night, away from him.
With a headful of memories and knowledge that he damn well couldn’t allow her to keep.
Rio got up from Dylan’s computer desk and walked into the small bathroom. It was empty, as he knew it would be, the window yawning open onto the dark summer night outside.
He climbed out, boots hitting the fire escape for a split second before he leaped from the structure and landed on the asphalt below. Tipping his head back, he dragged the air into his lungs until he caught Dylan’s scent.
Then he went after her.
CHAPTER
Twenty-Two
Dylan stood outside the windowed door of her mother’s room on the hospital’s tenth floor, trying to rally her courage to go inside. The cancer ward was so quiet up here at night, only the hushed chatter from the nurses on duty at their station and the occasional shuffle of a patient’s slippered feet as they made a brief circuit around the wing, fingers clasped around the wheeled IV pole that rolled along beside them. Her mom had been one of those tenacious, but weary-eyed patients not so long ago.
Dylan hated to think there was more of that pain and struggle ahead of her mother now. The biopsy the doctors had ordered wouldn’t be in for a couple of days, according to the nurse at the desk. They were hopeful that in the likelihood it did come back positive, they might have caught the relapse early enough to begin a new, more aggressive round of chemotherapy. Dylan was praying for a miracle, despite the heaviness in her chest as she steeled herself for bad news.
She hit the hand sanitizer dispenser mounted next to the door, squirted a blob of isopropyl gel into her palms and rubbed it in. As she pulled a pair of latex gloves from the box on the counter and put them on, everything she’d been through in the past several days—even the past few hours—fell away, forgotten. Her own problems just evaporated as she pushed open the door, because nothing mattered right now except the woman curled up on the bed, tethered to monitoring wires and intravenous lines.
God, her mother looked so tiny and frail lying there. She’d always been petite, smaller than Dylan by a good four inches, her hair a richer shade of red, even with the handful of grays that had crept in since the first battle with cancer. Now Sharon’s hair was kept short, a spiky, spunky cut that made her look at least a decade younger than her true age of sixty-four. Dylan felt a pang of irrational, but jabbing anger for the fact that a renewed round of chemo was going to ravage that glorious crown of thick copper hair.
She walked softly toward the bed, trying not to make any noise. But Sharon wasn’t sleeping. She rolled over as Dylan came close, her green eyes bright and warm.
“Oh … Dylan … hi, baby.” Her voice was feathery, the only real physical giveaway in her that she was ill. She reached out and took Dylan’s gloved hand in a tight hold.
“How was the trip, sweetheart? When did you get back?”
Shit. That’s right—she’d supposedly extended her stay in Europe. It seemed like a year had passed in the few days she’d been with Rio.
“Um, I just came home a little while ago,” Dylan answered, a partial lie.
She took a seat on the edge of the thin hospital room mattress, her hand still caught in her mother’s clutching grasp.
“I got a little concerned when you changed your plans so abruptly. Your e-mail that you were staying a bit longer by yourself was so short and cryptic. Why didn’t you call me?”<
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“I’m sorry,” Dylan said. The lie she had to keep hurt even worse knowing that she’d made her mom worry. “I would have called you if I could have. Oh, Mom … I’m sorry you don’t feel well.”
“I feel all right. Better, now that you’re here.” Sharon’s gaze was steady, level with a calm resolve. “But I’m dying, baby. You do understand that, don’t you?”
“Don’t say that.” Dylan squeezed her mom’s hand, then brought the cool fingers up to her lips and kissed them. “You’ll get through this, just like you did before. You’re going to be fine.”
The silence—the tender indulgence—was a palpable force in the room. Her mother wasn’t going to push the subject, but it was there, like a ghost lurking in the corner.
“Well, let’s talk about you instead. I want to hear all about what you’ve been doing, where you’ve been … tell me about everything you’ve seen while you were gone.”
Dylan glanced down, unable to hold her mother’s eyes if she couldn’t tell her the truth. And she couldn’t tell her the truth. Most of it would be unbelievable anyway, especially the part where Dylan confessed that she feared she was developing feelings for a dangerous, secretive man. A vampire for crissake. It sounded crazy just to think the words.
“Tell me more about that demon’s lair story you’re working on, baby. Those pictures you sent me were really something. When is your story going to run?”
“There is no story, Mom.” Dylan shook her head. She was sorry she ever mentioned it to her mother—or to anyone, for that matter. “Turns out that cave was just a cave,” she said, hoping to convince her. “Nothing strange about it.”
Sharon looked skeptical. “Really? But that tomb you found—and the incredible markings on the walls. What was all of that doing in there? It must have meant something.”
“Just a tomb. Probably a very old, tribal burial chamber of some kind.”