Roger put an arm around her shoulders and tugged her close. “If you keep looking out for me, perhaps I will survive this.”
Lightly, Josefina pushed him away rather than letting him drag her in. “You still have to do something. I won’t let you sit idle either. Do you have a plan?”
“No, but I think I have a brilliant idea.” Roger grinned at her. “Why don’t we see what we can do about emptying the coven’s coffers?”
CHAPTER 13
The body remained in the graveyard. Zack had been too numb when they first walked away from the corpse, but when he tried to go back, Seamus caught his arm. He murmured something about ghouls and whisked Zack away from the cemetery.
Seamus didn’t force a conversation during their ride to the mansion. In fact, he spent his time on his phone, periodically typing. Since words had fled Zack, he tried to study Seamus’s minute reactions to whatever he was doing, but Seamus had a schooled, calm expression. He was unreadable.
But not entirely unknowable. Even when Zack wasn’t looking at him, he couldfeelSeamus. It was like knowing where his dagger was, but more like having a rope tied around his waist and the other end being tied to Seamus with no slack in the middle. They were connected. Bonded.
I will never throw you away. Zack hated that there was an ounce of comfort in those words. Hated more how some emotion was tickling at the edges of his mind. It wasn’t his. It was like a pop-up ad that just kept showing up in front of his thoughts. This calm nugget of peace was an emotion from Seamus. Zack wasn’t sure what that desire was supposed to mean, only that it wasn’t sexual. He’d thought vampires could only feel andmanipulate fear and lust, but desires could run to other stuff. Academically, he’d known that but figured vampires trained themselves to feel and manipulate the other stuff.
Instead, he was just sitting there, on the other side of the limo’s back bench seat from Seamus, and that weird desire for calm kept springing to mind.
Zack’s gaze drifted toward the window. Old memories joined the confusing mix of his concentration. In vivid clarity, he remembered Cousin Denny’s tenth birthday party. He’d been allowed to play with the big kids for the first time, only to wind up as the “damsel” and tied up in the tree house for an hour. Then he relived prom his sophomore year of high school; atypical for teens that grade, but an older girl had asked him. Turned out she was hoping to meet and hook up with his older brother—which Cal had been into—and the night had been a disaster for Zack. Then there was the time during his first and only semester of college where he’d handed in a persuasive paper for an English course. The professor had praised his creativity but given him a D. All those preventable pains if only he’d been that bit smarter, that bit cleverer—just that bitmore.
The external desire for calm pushed into him as if someone was attempting to steal his phone from his hand and shove a book into it instead. With a quick glance, he saw that Seamus wasn’t typing on his phone, only looking at it.
“Do you want a son or a puppet?” Zack asked, his voice rasping from a renewed thirst and dryness.Now I want more blood. Awesome. “If the answer is ‘son,’ stay the fuck out of my emotions.”
Seamus lifted an eyebrow and slid his phone into his coat pocket. “I was attempting to steady you.”
“Then fucking talk to me.”
“Please stop swearing, Zack. It’s unbecoming.”
“So is raping your way through the centuries, you fucking shithead asshole.”
Aflickerpassed over Seamus’s features, and a sudden violent desire popped into Zack’s mental screen with an almost audible chime. But that window closed on its own, and Seamus managed to retain his calm demeanor.
But Zack had seen the thin gap in Seamus’s mental wall, and the tiny victory buoyed his spirits.
“Did that feel good?” Seamus said smoothly.
A littletoosmoothly. Zack narrowed his eyes and waited for the other shoe to drop.
“I asked if intentionally upsetting me made you feel good, Zack,” Seamus said.
“You’re not going to try to make some parallel between pissing you off and raping someone, are you?” Zack replied. “Because they are nowhere near the same ballpark.”
“You pushed to find power, and you reveled in it.” Seamus continued to hold Zack’s gaze. “And what confirmation have you had that I raped anyone?”
“Roger—”
“Who talked you into sparing his life because he wanted to kill me,” Seamus said. He motioned at Zack’s neck. “He nearly tore out your throat. You managed to turn the tables on him, and he needed some way to convince you to stay your hand. He spun a story about his evil sire.”
“I’ve seen with my own eyes what kind of asshole you are,” Zack growled.
“Nice vampires do not live a decade, Zackery. I am what I need to be in order to survive,” Seamus said with a sigh in his voice. “I do hope that you’ll realize this petty mentality is standing in the way of your greatness sooner rather than later.”
There was no point in trying to hold a conversation with him because Seamus kept spinning everything. Zack didn’t believea word of it, but clearly, Seamus wasn’t going to be swayed either. With a huff, Zack folded his arms and slumped against the corner.Bound by blood to another fuckhead with an explanation for everything. Fan-fucking-tastic.
Every angry thought slipped to the back of his mind as Seamus’s mansion came into view. Zack researched what he could on the building, but he hadn’t found much.
And holy fuck, was it a flex. The building was massive, stretching out hundreds of feet on either side of a central entrance. The damn thing would barely fit onto a football field. Built in the 1920s, it had the sharp, elegant beauty of an art deco palace. Sporadic lights were on and providing some illumination out into the darkness, but that didn’t take away from the impressive, foreboding feeling the mansion exuded. Statues decorated the long circular drive; each one was a figure seductively offering themselves up for a dramatic bite—their wrist, their neck, their inner thigh, anywhere that could bring intense pleasure.
