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“Bay, you're exaggerating,” I laughed, but quickly became serious again. “I'm going either way. Decide for yourself if you want to come with me.”

Julie looked back and forth between us, obviously overwhelmed.

Bayla blinked worriedly.

I knew she wouldn't let me go alone.

After all, deep down inside her lay that little rebellious girl who, back then on the elementary school playground, had completely changed the life of an insecure orphan for the better.

Chapter 41

Julie

Office Talk

Christopher Tyng

As always, I stood in front of my lab locker and grew more nervous with every second that David DeLoughrey packed his things. As always, I swallowed one of the prenatal vitamin supplements and tried not to react to David's scrutinizing gaze before he said goodbye.

A minute passed, then two. Eventually, I closed the locker and turned around, daring to let my gaze wander across the lab as if I hadn't just spent three hours experimenting on countless Ruisangor blood samples with him.

He stood there, wearing those damn glasses with the rounded corners, focused on his documents with a razor-sharp gaze, as if I didn't even exist.

That wasn't Professor Tiberius, who always made references to mythology in his seminars. It wasn't Erik, with whom I had spent hours philosophizing... with whom I had slept. This was Quentin. A man with ice-cold principles who used me for his own plans, of which I still knew nothing.

I forced myself not to look at his Adam's apple, but this time I lost myself in the sharp angles of his jaw, the slight curve of his lips...

Something was different. And it had nothing to do with his appearance. It was the fact that he had prevented that damn football from seriously injuring me or my baby.

He could have let the ball hit me. If it had struck me in the head at the speed and force of a Senseque throw, I could have died. All of this... would have finally been over.

Something rebelled inside me. Also something new. The urge to survive. I didn't want to die anymore, didn't want to disappear from here anymore, as long as... As long as what? I didn't know. But something inside me didn't want to just give up.

Besides, there was the baby...

“Julie.”

I flinched and my spiraling thoughts vanished into thin air, because Quentin was more dominant than all the chaos in my head. Something about him possessed such a strong tension that it could repeatedly transport me back to the present and push everything else aside.

“Hurry up. I want to show you something.”

He didn't look up, continuing to leaf through his documents, including sepia-toned sheets of paper covered in runes.

I realized that I meant nothing to this man. I knew why he had done it, why he had caught that miserable football.

He needed me. I was useful to him.

And in my daze over the Erik problem and the Councils, I had completely forgotten that he also had to fulfill his part of the deal.

Determined, I gathered all my self-control, clenched my hands into fists, and approached him.

“The blood pact,” I began in a firm voice. “You promised me a blood pact.” Quentin looked up. And I would be lying if I said that the gleaming peridot green of his eyes left me cold. But I remained strong. “So far, it hasn’t happened.” Two meters in front of him, I stopped. “I won’t continue working with you if…”

“You should be glad I'm still working with you at all after you razed this lab to the ground,” he interrupted me, far too matter-of-factly.

I swallowed, but held his gaze.

I had spent the last three hours analyzing the lab, trying to find traces from last time, but they had been completely removed. Not a scratch on the massive lab tables, completely new glass panes on the lab cabinets...