“I can sate your appetite,” he murmurs, “better than Lucian ever could. He pretends restraint is virtue, but I know hunger and untapped potential when I see it.”
His words hit me wrong from every angle. He thinks he’s already claimed something that isn’t his.
Then he releases me abruptly, already turning away.
“Get some rest,” he adds over his shoulder. “You’re going to need it.”
Santiago leaves me alone after that.
I linger where he left me for a while, until I decide it’s time to learn more about Sanguine and the vampire who wants to own me. I move cautiously through the floor, weaving between sparsely placed desks and a few workers. My eyes drift to them, wondering how many once served under Lucian, how many had betrayed him by willingly handing themselves over to his enemy.
Like me, I guess.
Well, maybe not like me.
When a man rises from his desk, water bottle in hand, likely heading for a refill, I slip to his station on light feet. The monitor is asleep but unlocked.
I move the mouse to wake the screen and begin to skim through the windows already up on the screen. Digging a little deeper, I find interesting things. Financial ledgers disguised as shell accounts. Media subsidiaries that don’t exist. Payments funneled through charities that never file reports.
Then I find an even more interesting folder.
My fingers go cold as I open it.
Human trafficking routed through “exclusive donor events.” Blackmail archives on everyone from politicians to judges. Blood banks siphoned illegally, records altered to hide the dead.
Sanguine isn’t a legitimate media corporation like VMR. It’s a cover.
And I just found its rot. All of it damning.
I work fast then, determination sharpening me into something precise. I copy everything—every ledger, every email, every name—and route it through an encrypted dump, splitting it into pieces the best I can with the lame skills I have.
But who to send it to?
The cursor hovers over the send button.
This will be my last gift to Lucian. My finalsend-off.
I type in one of the emails I remember from when I sent in my resume what feels like centuries ago and click send. Someone in VMR will find it and know what to do with the information.
The progress bar crawls forward.
Then it’s done.
I wipe the access logs and return the computer to exactly the way I found it. As I see the employee rounding the corner, coming back to his desk, I hurry away.
Santiago once tried to burn Lucian and me alive. But I don’t need fire to bring Sanguine down. Now he’ll have no choice but to watch everything he has turn to ash.
The elevator is too slow, so I take the stairs, counting breaths, listening for footsteps, for raised voices, for the first crack of realization to what I’ve done. Nothing yet.
Good.
By the time I step out into the early morning, my pulse is like a war drum in my ears.
I don’t have much of a plan from here, but I don’t look back at the building. I don’t need to. Whatever Sanguine was, it’ll be dead soon enough.
I slip into the flow of the city. And as much as a small dark part of me knows a war may still be coming, I’m hoping for the quieter ending.
For Sanguine to be stripped down to nothing.
