“You are a complication,” Harrington said, gesturing forward.
He didn’t get up out of his seat. She tilted her head to the side in contemplation of what that could mean. Then she assessed him. His color had worsened. His eyes were sunken in. His shinyhair was no more, replaced by an oily, thinning mess. His hands were gnarled and sickly. He looked the way he had the first time she had met him all those months ago at Visage. He looked like he was dying.
Her eyes snapped up to his. And it was there that she saw the masterful mind who had always outwitted her. He held his supreme intelligence deep in the windows of his eyes. Yet his body was failing him.
“I don’t believe that I am the only complication,” Reyna said.
“Ah. Yes. Things have changed, you see.”
“Your blood match died?” she guessed.
“She did. She was quite old. A frail woman. She couldn’t keep up with the demand.”
Reyna clenched her hands into fists at her sides and then released them. Such careless and thoughtless murder.
“And the antidote doesn’t quite work like you hoped,” she added.
“It nourishes the body, but not the illness,” he admitted freely. “Rh null negative blood is so rare, and the components counteract the vampiric disease I have been carrying with me all these years. It turns out that I can re-create a universal donor and still not get it right.”
“Too bad you killed Washington, then,” she said callously. “He could have fixed it.”
Shock registered on Harrington’s face. “Roger is dead?”
“You dropped a bomb on him.”
“He got out.”
Reyna narrowed her eyes. “He stayed behind.”
“What a horrible loss.”
“Oh yeah, a ‘loss.’ Not another one of your murders.”
Harrington waved the comment away. “You and I both know that to get to the top there must be casualties. You’ve certainly sacrificed enough people to get to where you are.”
Reyna wanted to stab him for what he was insinuating. She was nothing like him. She was not casually sacrificing good people to get ahead. She felt every single loss like a shot to the heart.
And he felt nothing.
“All I’m hearing is that you need me again. Big surprise.”
“I’ve always needed you, Reyna. It was you who did not realize that you needed me.”
She laughed. “I don’t need you.”
Harrington pressed a button on the glass desk and suddenly the windows changed to televisions. Every single one of them showed the battles being fought below them. Beckham and Bronwyn fighting in the observation deck. Meghan and Gabe back-to-back, taking on a pack of vampires. Drew leading a team of anti-vamps into a nest. Tye fighting, fighting, fighting, and finally failing. Succumbing to the vampire before him. Fangs piercing his skin and drinking his precious blood. Spilling it on the already red floor of the main room.
Reyna gasped as the vampire heartlessly dropped Tye’s body and moved on. Her hand went to her heart. Death. So much death. She had known there would be casualties in this war, but she hated seeing it happen. Hated being forced to watch.
“See. You do need me, my little queen,” Harrington said. “I can make it all stop.”
“As if you would.”
“I simply wanted you to play the part of a queen on the board instead of a pawn.”
Reyna ran her hand across her braid in frustration. “The game isn’t over yet.”
“Almost,” he agreed. “But I did know that you would show eventually anyway. Incredibly predictable. Haven’t we already danced this once?”
