Besides the fact that Liam’s people suspected her as our leak? No, not at all.
I dropped my hands. “Why are you here in this room?”
“Liam said you needed to feed and asked me to come.”
Did he now?
It was a little surprising she hadn’t already been placed under Anton or Liam’s care for questioning. I wanted to say neither would hurt her without proof of her guilt. Then again, both preferred to be safe than sorry.
Her presence here must be Liam’s way of telling me he would let me handle it myself.
I sighed, looking up at the ceiling. “Remember how I told you I didn’t need to know why you decided to leave your old master?”
Despite the loss in status and the chance she would never become a vampire.
“I do.”
I looked away from the ceiling to glance at her. “I rescind that statement. I need to know everything.”
“Did Chadwick do something?” Deborah asked.
I held up a hand. “Just answer the question. Why did you stay behind when he relocated?”
A mask slammed down. “I have family here. I didn’t want to leave them.”
“Lying right now will get you killed.”
“I’m not lying,” she protested.
“Do you know what I do?” I paused as she blinked at me in confusion. “I investigate things.”
I didn’t mention the fact I couldn’t investigate her personally because of the lack of time. She needed to be scared of me right now, and telling her some of Thomas’s people had looked into her wouldn’t have the effect I wanted.
“I thought you were more of an errand person.”
“I do that too.” My smile was faint. “I know you don’t have family. Your parents died in a car crash when you were twenty-one and you have no siblings. You became a companion a year after that, when you were diagnosed with Huntington’s.”
The disease wasn’t immediately fatal but would impact the quality of her life, progressively getting worse if her symptoms weren’t managed. It made it all the more strange that she would elect to abandon her companion when suffering from something like that. Most humans would cling to the possibility of salvation. No matter how bad things got.
Occasionally, a vampire would lose interest in their companion, or the companion would do something to be cast out, but it almost never happened in reverse.
Deborah folded her arms in front of her stomach, everything about her screaming vulnerability. “You’re right that I don’t have biological family still in town but there are other kinds.”
That there were.
Two types of family existed in this world. The kind you were born to and the kind you made. Neither was better than the other. I considered myself lucky to have both in my life.
“I have someone I consider a younger sister,” Deborah confessed. “My parents fostered her when she was ten.”
“That’s not in your history.”
Deborah’s smile was bitter. “It wouldn’t be. Lexi’s parents weren’t good people. They cared more about getting high than they did about their daughter. My parents let her stay with us whenever her mom and dad went on a bender. It wasn’t exactly approved through official channels.”
“How old is she?”
“Seventeen.”
Deborah was twenty-five. Lexi would have been fourteen when Deborah’s parents died. Three years was a long time not to have a safe place to live.
