“This monster chose to work with Harrington. Ichoseto work with him. For nearly fifteen years.”
Reyna swallowed. “So? You changed your mind.”
“He kidnapped and tortured you. Do you think that’s the worst I’ve done?”
“I don’t care what you’ve done.”
Though she was curious. How could she not be? Especially after the hints Penelope had thrown out.
“I can see it in your eyes.” He rolled off her and stood by the edge of the bed as if he needed space to think.
“What you see in my eyes is the unknown,” she told him, following him off the bed. She refused to give him that space. “It’s you telling me you’re this horrible monster, other people saying you’re a scary motherfucker, and even Penelope saying I’m just like all the other girls and will be dead soon. It’s hearing over and over again that I should fear you, but I don’t.”
They met each other, stubborn stare for an even more stubborn stare. Beckham would not win this. She wanted answers, and she’d wait however long it took. He must have seen it in her face. He released a breath and looked away.
“I was what we called a lord when I met Harrington,” Beckham said.
“Washington used that term. Sounds antiquated.”
“Yes. Well, the name has been passed down for many generations. Vampires are kind of stuck in our ways,” he said wryly. “The termlordis reserved for the most powerful vampire rulers. They traditionally have a court, though by the time I was a lord, it had evolved into an army.” He gauged her reaction to see if he should continue. “There are only two ways to become a lord: rise up in the ranks and eventually unseat the ruler, or raise an army big enough and lethal enough to take down the current lord and all their minions.”
“Which did you do?” she breathed.
“Rising up from within is easier. Unseating a ruler can be done if you can assess their weaknesses and then gain the support of the other vampires already within the organization. Building a force big enough to contend with the lord’s army and then slaughtering hundreds of well-trained vampires is nearly impossible.” He paused and met her eyes. “I did the latter.”
She shivered. “Wow.”
“And I did it in five years. Here. In this city. In territory that had been ruled by a lord for three centuries longer than I’d been alive. I was the youngest lord to ever rule a territory of this magnitude. I was thirty when I was turned, and it had only been another twelve years when I became a lord. I ruled on high like that for a decade before it all fell apart fifteen years ago.”
She did some quick math in her head. Thirty when he was turned. A dozen years as a vampire before becoming a lord. Ten years as a lord. Fifteen years since being a lord.
“You’re sixty-seven?” she gasped out.
He nodded resolutely. “Thirty-seven years since I was turned. Relatively young for a successful vampire. I was extremely young for a lord.”
“How did you do it, then?”
“I was a ruthless murderer, and I gained the loyalty and respect of every single person who worked under me from my second all the way down to the lowest dreg. No one was ever going to turn on me. Not in my organization. Not the way I worked.”
Reyna saw suddenly how he had gotten where he was. How he was such an incredible businessman. He had been running a different sort of business for much longer.
“How did you end up going from being a lord to working with Harrington?”
His face was carved out of marble. His onyx eyes were dark gems cut into the hard surface. A deep sorrow suffused him all at once. It enveloped the room, sweeping everything into its orbit.
“My second was killed.”
The way he said it made it perfectly clear that his second-in-command had been incredibly important to him and that loss still shaped him.
“When my second was gone, I wanted to walk away from everything I’d earned and burn the city to the ground. William showed up a couple of months later as I tracked down and killed every person who had been related to the death. He offered an alternative. He offered me the blood type cure.”
“And you accepted it, just like that?”
Beckham laughed harshly. “No. I told him to go fuck himself. He said he knew who had killed my second and that he was able to think more clearly because of this cure. More clearly than I ever had before. If we brought the vampires out of the darkness together, he would help me hunt down the person who had done it and kill them.”
“Did you find out who did it?” she whispered.
“Yes. And he paid dearly for what he had done.” His eyes were unfocused, returning to what had happened that day.
