“Who was it?” I blurted without thinking.
“Ryder—”
“It’s all right, James.” Gabriel continued to speak, but he didn’t look at me. Instead, he perched on the couch next to Dani and took something from his coat pocket: A drink pouch that almost looked like a Capri Sun but was slightly larger and solid black. As he talked, he pierced the edge of it with his teeth and brought it to Dani’s lips. “My sisters and I were quite the spectacle when we were born. Triplets are rare in their own right. Triplets in the 1600s were unheard of. Ones that survived infancy and made it to adulthood? That just didn’t happen. Doctors—such as they were in those days—were fascinated by our very existence. Even as children, we were tested, poked, andprodded. We thought that if we just tolerated their experiments, they would eventually grow bored. We were wrong.
“When we were in our thirties, we got sick. All three of us.” He met my eyes and held them. “At the exact same time. What would have been a tragic event for any other family was instead seen as… fascinating. Possibly supernatural. Doctors wanted to study us to understand how it had happened, but the illness was aggressive, and it quickly became clear that we weren’t going to survive it. Before we perished, a miracle occurred. A team of doctors came all the way from Spain claiming they could cure us.” He let out a mirthless chuckle. “It turned out they were vampires. They didn’t cure us, theyturnedus, and it worked: The illness didn’t kill us. They hoped that, with time and more… aggressive experimentation, we would yield secrets about triplets and the connection between those like us. We didn’t know what they were looking for, not specifically, and we never would…”
He trailed off as Dani’s eyes fluttered. Weak, she lapped at the drink Gabriel offered her, red blood tinting her lips. The sight made me queasy
“What happened?” I asked, interested in spite of myself.
“Turning us into vampires eradicated our human DNA, and the answers with it.” He shrugged. “After all of that, they moved on. Decades passed, and they had procured other subjects to test. They didn’t need us anymore. We spent nearly a century with them, but they discarded us like nothing more than failed experiments. So my sisters and I took our knowledge and left. We never looked back.”
Okay… maybe that made the guy less intimidating. Sort of. “I’m sorry,” I said, my own throat tight.
“Don’t apologize. I don’t mind talking about it.”
Dani’s weak and raspy voice spoke up. “Please don’t try to kill me again.” Her words startled me. I’d been so focused onGabriel’s story that I hadn’t realized she was alert. The blood she’d drank had some of the color returning to her face, and her eyes deepened.
“That’s not our intention, Dani,” Gabriel said softly, helping her sit up.
“I was talking to him,” she clarified, burgundy eyes cutting to me.
My skin prickled in goosebumps again. The glare on Dani’s face could have reduced a grown man to tears, but James’s hand on my back relaxed me. Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath before opening them again. “Keep your hands off my fiancé, and I won’t have to.”
“Fiancé? That’s new. Congratulations—and trust me, I’ve learned my lesson about fucking with vampires.” She sank into the couch again, brushing sweaty hair out of her face. “This sucks—no pun intended.”
“How long has it been?” Gabriel asked.
“Right after…” Dani looked at me again, still sipping at the blood. “You know.”
I did the math in my head. “Almost three months. And you’re still like this?”
“They were starving you, weren’t they?” Gabriel said darkly, offering Dani a second drink.
Dani nodded, sucking from the pouch like it was a lifeline before speaking. “This is a vast improvement to what I looked like before. I didn’twantto turn, but I didn’t want to die either. The blood loss from that stab wound nearly killed me.” My stomach roiled, and I choked back the bile rising in my throat. “They agreed to save my life if I agreed to work for them.”
“Who?”
“Not here,” Gabriel interrupted. “Whoever they are, they could still be hanging around. And remember, Dani, they can read your mind now.”
“What?” I screeched, my head whipping around to James. “You said vampires couldn’t read minds.”
“They can’t… technically,” James admitted sheepishly. “But do you remember when I told you that being turned by a vampire will bind you together for life? That’s part of it. You can’t read strangers’ minds, but you can read the thoughts of the person you’re bonded to.”
Gabriel interrupted my latest lesson of Vampires 101. “We should move her. Especially since it looks like we’re about to havetwonewborns on our hands.”
Puzzled, I redirected my gaze. He was staring at my neck, where James’s mark seemed to pulse beneath his attention. My hand snapped up to cover the bruise, and before I could open my mouth, James spoke for me. “It didn’t work.”
Now it was Gabriel’s turn to be confused. “What do you mean?”
Dani’s eyes bounced between the three of us. When they met mine, I looked to the floor. “It’s been two days,” James explained, and Gabriel rose to his feet. “He doesn’t feel any different, and I haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary—other than that he seems to be resistant to the venom.”
Feeling all of their eyes on me, I lifted my gaze from my feet. Gabriel studied me with a mix of uncertainty and… fascination? “I’ve never heard of anything like it,” he muttered, though more to himself. Coming to a stop in front of my seat, he seemed to tower over me, nearly twice as intimidating as he was before. Despite trying to keep my cool, I swallowed hard. He watched me, tilting his head and gesturing to where I covered the spot. “May I?”
My knee-jerk reaction was to look to James for reassurance. Every muscle in my body, every instinct I had wanted his comfort. I held strong, but barely.
“It’s all right, love,” he said, and I blamed that damn vampire bond. I couldn’t hide anything from him. Blanketing my hand with his, he laced our fingers together, tugging my grip free from my neck and dropping our entwined hands to my shoulder.
