Others would have suffered. Like they did tonight.
He had a fraction of solace before his mind countered,Others did suffer. You simply chose to ignore their pain because it wasn’t yours.
“I’m sorry,” Roger murmured to the boy before him. “I am so sorry that I did nothing for so long.”
Vincent frowned. He finished taping a bandage over the stitches. “Huh?”
“I know what he’s like better than anyone other than perhaps you,” Roger continued. He wasn’t speaking to just the boy but to all of them. The long-ago ones whose faces he couldn’t recall. “I am so fucking sorry.”
“You got me out, master,” Vincent said quietly. Carefully.
Because they didn’t know each other and Vincent was scared he was treading into dangerous waters. Roger could feel that pulse of fear in him, feel as Vincent attempted to morph it into some sort of desire. Because he had lived for years with a monster who would be able to sense those inner workings and make demands of him.
Roger’s only respite had been his months away in Taliville. He’d had freedom only to come back to this wretched coven and realize just how awful this corner of the globe was. Instead of taking his loved ones and running as far as he could, he had stayed and waited and played his fucking part and attempted to scheme for coven leadership, and now … now his plans were nothing.
Kit’s pulse was becoming stronger, steadier. Their breathing was deeper. They were still too pale—a full recovery from the wound might take days—but they weren’t in more danger than Roger and Vincent were.
Which left Roger to face the other horrors waiting for him in the suite.
“Vincent, what happened to them?” Roger asked.
“I told you. Seamus drove Zack’s blade into them.”
“Not Kit,” Roger rasped. “Zack. Takashi. I need to know where I’ll find their bodies.”
Vincent stilled like a mouse hoping a cat hadn’t spotted him. The fear emanating from him became an electric, salty mixturethat was alluring to the thirst burning in Roger.I will never hurt another innocent.
“Please,” Roger whispered.
“They took them,” Vincent replied.
The answer was harsher than a slap. Roger was stunned into silence, left with the beating of Kit’s and Vincent’s hearts. A glimpse of waking in bed with his lovers—Zack between him and Takashi—came to mind, and he held on to it. They were his stars. His wind.
And they had been abducted.
The meaning slithered into Roger and coiled around his chest. It compressed his spirit and bound it in iron and threw it to the bottom of the sea. Zack and Takashi weren’t dead, but that would have been a mercy because Seamus and Anton had perfected the cruelties of torture in their eight hundred years together. Roger had seen them at it over and over. Had been forced to participate. Had pretended he’d liked what was happening so that his mind might believe he was all right. But even he had suffered under those hands.
Now, they had his lovers.
A resounding note of anger cleared the storm from Roger’s mind. Grief was too new a thing. Anger, oh, that had been buried in him, but he knew it from his mortal years. He had smothered it in his early decades as a vampire, but it had never truly died. It had waited for him to open the chest and pull out the sharp sword of rage.
A bottle rattled off the shelf beside Roger’s shoulder, and he let it hit the floor with a thud. He picked it up. It was a bottle of Dolorous Rum, an Unseelie liquor made in the fey realm and brought to the mortal plane. One of his least favorites because it always brought out a drinker’s sorrows.
He wondered if he could find some way to set Seamus alight with it.I could burn that fucking mansion. Perhaps it was a flashof madness, perhaps it was the rage pouring through him, but new wants were forming.
Roger would find his lovers.
Then he would repay Seamus for the painful centuries by burning everything he cared for into ashes.
And then maybe,maybe, he would grant the bastard his well-deserved death.
CHAPTER 2
They couldn’t remain in the hotel suite. Besides the damage done, it was an exposed location. Seamus had come for them once. He might return.
Roger drank two blood bags. The cold food barely dented his hunger, but he gained enough strength to push forward. Though his anger was a steady presence, he had to approach his situation with clarity and precision. Lives were counting on him.
In theory, he could attempt anything. He could stride up to the gates of Seamus’s mansion and plead for Zack’s and Takashi’s lives. He could abandon the mortals counting on him and run to the farthest corner of the Earth. He could carry on with his attempt to take the Great Lakes Coven from Seamus.
