Certainly they weren’t paid enough to faceHarlan.No one was.
Harlan turned his head one way and then the other, deliberately resting his gaze on the side of each man’s pale, sweaty face.
Quietly, he asked, “Do you know what he did?”
They didn’t answer, but their throats bobbed. More sweat beaded, then slid down to soak into the collars of their dress shirts.
“That man kidnapped and threatened my anchor,” he explained, calm and low. “He has probably hurt her in some way. At the very least, he’s scaring her as we speak.” He paused, watching as horror tightened the skin around their eyes. Their shock and repulsion was written in every line of their faces, no matter how hard they tried to hide it.
Of course they didn’t know. Why would they be told the truth about the job they were given? To Julius, they were expendable thugs. They were nobodies, like he was once a nobody, and they would probably end up face down in a gutter sooner rather than later even without Harlan’s help.
Julius would use them up and toss them out like trash without a thought. All for control of a family he couldn’t win without his pet assassin there to pick up the slack.
Both guards were ashen when he continued, as bland as if he was explaining what errands he planned to run after this was all over, “I’m going to kill him in the worst way I can conceive of, and then I’m going to kill every single person who helped him. I’m going to make ithurt.”
He let that hang in the air for several terrible seconds before he tilted his head toward the exit. “Go.”
He didn’t wait to see what they would do. As soon as he stepped past the swinging door, he knew that they would bolt.
No amount of money was worth crossing a vampire whose anchor had been stolen.
When the door swung shut behind him, Harlan stared down the dark hallway and tapped the corner of his jaw, reactivating the implant.
Too quiet for anyone but the mic to hear, he said, “Just cleared the VIP door. No guards yet. There are two men headed your way. Make sure you stop them and offer them a job.”
Atticus’s voice buzzed deep in his inner ear. “Picking up strays again, boss?”
“No,” he answered, walking toward the single black glass door at the end of the shadowed corridor. He wasn’t shocked to discover it was empty. Not a single vampire stood between him and Julius’s long overdue justice.
The darkness of the hallway was a familiar shroud. Only his feet were illuminated by tiny lights in the floor, scattered to look like stars. Instinct took over as his shoulders rolled forward and his heartbeat slowed.
Bloodlust was a high, keening note in the back of his mind when he finished, “I’m here to take out the fucking trash.”
ChapterTwenty-Two
When Zia wokeup with a dry mouth and the tang of chemicals in her nose, she felt like she was swimming up to the surface of a deep, deep pool.
Her senses were dull; her thoughts were sluggish. Something in the back of her mindscreamed,but she couldn’t hold onto any thoughts long enough to understand what her instincts were trying to tell her. All she knew was that she was late for something, or…
Had she been in a hurry? Yes, that sounded right. She had been rushing to get back to Harlan so she could cuddle up beside him in bed.
Zia’s muscles twitched. Gradually, she became aware of stiffness in her limbs, and the ache of being in a strange position for too long in her neck and shoulders. Had she fallen asleep in a weird position? Maybe Harlan had rolled on top of her again. Being an extremely clingy sleeper, he tended to do that sometimes.
Except, when she shifted to get out from under him, Zia was baffled to feel the familiar slide of leather under her thighs and against her back. She was in a chair.
The screaming in the back of her mind got louder, more focused, as she tried to force her eyes open and rise at the same time.
She wasn’t successful in either endeavor. Her eyelids felt like they weighed a thousand pounds each. Her arms wouldn’t move from the armrests, and when she flexed her knees, she was chilled to realize that she couldn’t move her legs.
I’m… Am I cuffed to this chair?
Fear, sickly and cold, seeped through the haze of confusion. How in the world did she end up locked to a leather chair in a dimly lit room?
She couldn’t puzzle it out for several long, fuzzy seconds, and then—
Memories came back in a flood of broken pieces.
The bond. An awareness that her magic no longer simply belonged to her, and the soft comfort of feeling not quite alone in her own mind anymore.
