“Of course.”
She was pretty sure her definition ofnormalwas about as far from William Harrington’s as imaginable. Any life in which she had to “donate” her blood to keep the biggest murderer in history alive was not a life she wanted to live.
“You’ve already seen what the alternative is like,” Harrington said.
“Yes, I remember clearly what my alternative is.”
He made it seem as if those were her only options. A life as a prisoner or a life as a willing prisoner.
“Certainly, you’d rather have what I’m offering.”
Reyna frowned. The fact that he honestly believed he was tempting her was ludicrous. She suddenly saw again exactly what her life had been like: a white bedroom, IVs ripped out, needles, insanity…B. Always B. The woman she could have been. The vampire Harrington had made into an unstable monster.
“I will not be like B,” she spat, unable to keep up the facade. The idea still haunted her dreams. She suppressed them when she was surrounded by people who cared for her, but staring into Harrington’s face, they all returned.
She saw Beckham’s face crease. She was going off script. She couldn’t mask the anger in her voice.
Harrington laughed. “Ah, B. Perhaps my demonstration was too severe.”
His eyes darted to Beckham. There was careful calculation in that look. A person contemplating poking a bear to see if it would bite.
“But surely you know her name is not truly B,” Harrington said, a slow, creepy smile crawling onto his face.
Reyna stared at him in confusion. She had never thought about B’s name. She had assumed B was just a label. A designator.
After a heartbeat, Harrington said, “Her name is Bronwyn.”
Everything slowed to a stop.
Thatname. Bronwyn. B was Bronwyn.
Bronwyn was Beckham’s sister. B was Beckham’s sister.
Reyna couldn’t process that. How could that creature possibly be Beckham’s sister? How could she have been his second?
“What?” Beckham snapped. He lost all sense of decorum and stalked forward. Cassandra and Roland blocked his path, standing between him and Harrington.
“Come now, Beckham. Don’t hate me. I’ve had your sister exactly where she belonged all these years—locked up.”
“You fucking bastard,” Beckham snarled.
Harrington found that amusing. “You are the one who created her. It was only safe for the maintenance of a well-run society to remove the loose ends.”
“My sister is not a loose end.”
“She most certainly was when I encountered her. You tortured her into insanity over the course of several years, Beckham. What did you think would happen to her?” He smiled that wicked, pleased smile he wore when he was needling someone. When he was about to go on one of his soliloquies about how brilliant he was. “She certainly wasn’t going to regain her sanity working as second-in-command of your army. If anything, she was only getting worse. I saw her for the menace to society that she was. So, I took her out of the equation. Killed two birds with one stone with that one. Her disappearance was the only reason you ended up working for me. All worked out in the end, don’t you think?”
“You bastard,” Beckham said. “I know what I did to Bronwyn, and there is no atoning for that. But she is my sister, and you lied to me and killed someone else to stage her murder. Yet you’ve held her all this time?”
“Well, it was an easy way to get someone else out of the way,” Harrington said as if he were so clever.
Reyna’s heart pounded in her chest. Her eyes darted to Beckham, though he had completely forgotten her, standing there in the cold. Beckham had done that to Bronwyn. Beckham was the one who had destroyed her mind.Shewas one of the people he tortured before the blood type cure. It pained her beyond belief to think Beckham had created her nightmare, even as her heart was breaking for him.
And suddenly a conversation with Beckham all those months ago in his penthouse came back to her. His words rang in her mind…
“I’ve sought people out, tortured them, drove them mad just to kill them slowly through their insanity. I’ve done horrible things and enjoyed it, Reyna.”
She realized she had never truly examined that statement. He’d done this to Bronwyn, to his own sister. She’d seen firsthand exactly how thorough he’d been. How ruthless he must have been at the time to ruin her in such a way.
