Atticus had arrived only a few minutes before and hadn’t even taken his jacket off yet. When he stalked across the room, away from the temporary crisis station of half a dozen monitors and men attempting to comb through the city’s extensive security network for a glimpse of Zia, his long black coat billowed around his legs.
The tattoos on his neck and hands stood out ghoulishly as the muscles there tensed with barely concealed aggression.
He sank onto the couch beside Harlan. They both stared at the screen for the span of a ring. The caller was unidentified, the number scrambled, and the video feature disabled. It couldn’t be anyone else.
Harlan was calm when he raised the phone to his ear and answered, “Julius.”
“Little Harlan. It’s so good to talk to you after… what has it been? Four years?” Julius’s voice was almostbubbly.There had always been a saccharine outer shell to the man that only made his rotten core more stomach-churning.
He used to think that Julius played a character to disguise his terrifying lack of empathy, but as he got older, Harlan came to the chilling realization that he did it simply because it made people uncomfortable. He never tried to fit in, nor pretend to be anything other than what he was.
If he laughed, it was because he knew it raised the hair on the back of a person’s neck. If he cooed, it was because he knew it made sweat break out across their skin. If he soothed, it was only because he was about to cause unimaginable agony.
The sick bastard only loved two things: making people afraid and himself.
Harlan’s stomach did a familiar turn. For many years he was both afraid of and desperate for Julius’s attention. When he was hand-picked out of the group of Amauri-claimed orphans at six years old by the son of Dora Amauri herself, he’d been so briefly full of hope. Finally, he would be special to someone. He would no longer live in the cramped room full of other forgotten children, fed once a night and told to make themselves neither seen nor heard. He would have somewhere to belong, and someone to care for him.
Julius shattered those dreams in less than twenty-four hours. The hope, though…
That took years to die.
Once that was gone, what was left was little more than hatred tinged with disgust. Julius was pathetic and broken in ways that Harlan couldn’t comprehend. Regret for not eliminating him when he had the chance four years ago burned a path through him. Dora had freed him from the Amauri family’s control, but she had also made him swear to never raise a hand to a member of the family again.
He didn’t give a shit about promises made to someone like Dora Amauri, a woman who had her own son murdered and oversaw the misery of countless others for the sake of profit, but the desire to get Adriana out of there as quickly and quietly as possible outweighed his need for justice. He didn’t kill the bastard when he should have.
He wouldn’t make that mistake twice.
“If you don’t want to suffer, return her,” he commanded, voice low. His rage was vast and hot, but it was also still. It held itself tightly coiled, waiting for the right time to strike.
Julius’s laugh — hollow, practiced, and a sound that haunted his childhood nightmares — rang over the line. “Are you talking about the sweet little bite I found walking all by herself? Really, Harlan, you should know better than to let your leftovers out of your sight. Someone else might just gobble them up. This all could have been avoided if you just finished your food like I always told you to.”
Old memories assailed him with that one simple phrase.Finish your food.
Vampires weren’t designed to kill the beings they drank from, but that didn’t stop people like Julius from doing it anyway. Some purists believed that was therightway. To truly take in the power of the blood they consumed, a life had to go with it.
And Julius, for all that everything else about him was artifice, truly, wholly believed in the purest ideal of vampirism.
For many of his boyhood years, Harlan’s job had simply been totake out the trashhis master left after a meal.
That coil of rage drew tighter, hotter in his gut. The threat to Zia’s life was clear, but Harlan didn’t act on the instinct that demanded violence in response. Not yet. Instead, he clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and drawled, “So desperate for my attention, Julius? You could have just written an email.”
“And miss sampling such a sweet little creature?” There was the faint sound of fabric rustling, then a soft, urgent noise of distress.
The hair on the back of Harlan’s neck stood up. Every muscle tensed as he fought the urge to spring up from the couch and rip the room apart.
A ripple of tension went around the room. Every man leaned toward him unconsciously. The aggression had been high before, but now it radiated out from every one of his soldiers like blistering heat.
That wasZia.He knew it. He knew that breathy sound of panic — the very same one she made when he found her in the greenhouse that fateful night in October.
His mind spun as he imagined what Julius was doing to her. Was he using his claws on her? Was he drawing a knife over her throat just for fun? Was he pressing on a bruise, or pulling her curls?
Surely he wouldn’t kill her. Not yet. Not if he guessed that she was his anchor and so much more valuable to him alive.Surely.
“So pretty,” Julius cooed. “Such soft skin. I can see why you like her. Even if she didn’t belong to you, I might have plucked her off the street anyway. You know how I have a sweet tooth.”
It was an effective taunt, though Harlan didn’t think Julius would be stupid enough to try it. An anchor’s blood was poison for another vampire unless their venom was identical to that which already flowed through the host. That was a one in a million bet. No vampire in his right mind would risk taking even a sip from a host with clearly visible bite marks.
And Julius, for all his arrogance, wasn’t stupid. That was the only way he managed to stay in Dora’s good graces for so long, after all.
