Page 18 of Missing Piece
Vincent held his breath, violence coiled in his chest like a living thing ready to wrench free and go on another year-long rampage.It’s them. They’re back.“Do you think—?” he let his words trail off, not wanting to complete the thought.
“No,” Marcus said quickly. “Not them. They haven’t moved from Chicago in years. We’ve all been on our best behavior. They have no reason to do this now.”
“Then what’s the plan here? If Jae can’t help us, we need to contact others, maybe in Peoria or out of state,” Vincent said. The edges of his device screen cut into his hand and he forced his fingers to relax. He was moments away from breaking it just like he broke the twins’ glass the other night. Getting a new device was a much bigger pain in the ass than ordering new antique drinkware.
“Do it. I’ll call around and see if someone has something for us down south,” Marcus said.
“Blood shortage aside, what do we tell the others? I don’tkeep track of what kind of back stock everyone has, and things could get messy in town when the younger ones go hungry.”
“We need to call a family meeting to go over some free feeding rules if everyone is about to run low at the same time,” he said, concern threading through his tone. “Petrov, can you coordinate something like that? We can have everyone meet at Euphoria near the end of the month and get things planned out.”
“Yes, Graves. On it,” Petrov said as he began scrolling through his device.
Vincent fixated on the clothes hanging by the fireplace again.Should I give them back? Adam might be cold. What the fuck am I thinking?He glanced down at his device, breathing out heavily as he realized he cracked the glass. “God dammit,” Vincent muttered. “Marcus, we need to talk about something else that might become a problem.”
“Is this about your pet project?” Marcus asked.
“No, well, maybe that too. You ever heard of L’Ordre du Nouveau Soleil? The Order of the New Sun?”
Marcus was silent for a moment. “I’ve heard of The Order of the Sun. They were down in New Orleans in the ‘60s, but I’ve never heard of a branch popping up outside of the South. Why do you ask?”
“I found out one of them was posing as a dancer at my club,” Vincent said. “Is this something I need to worry about?”
“Fuck. Yeah, you need to worry about that. What did you do to her? Please tell me she is dead.”
Petrov looked up from his device, his eyes wide. Marcus rarely advocated killing other vampires. He believed everything could be solved with diplomacy and despised whenthings got messy. “She might not be dead,” Vincent said. “Why is that a problem? It was one scrawny girl, around six months into turning. She probably just went back to her little group with her tail between her legs if she made it out of the cornfield.”
“You don’t understand, Vincent. This isn’t some collective or den. If she made it back…” Marcus let loose a string of curses under his breath. “If she’s not dead, you just painted a target on your back and invited a vampire supremacy cult to town.”
Chapter Six - Adam
When Vincent didn’t come back into the room after his abrupt exit, Adam tried to pretend he wasn’t somewhat disappointed. He instead focused on different ways he could try to seduce Vincent now that he had seen a bit of vulnerability in him, listening to the muffled sounds outside his room, the opening and closing of what sounded like a very old and creaky storm door. He tried to formulate a plan, but that quickly fell to the wayside when he realized he had no way to tell what time it was, or what day it was.
By the third meal—his only way of marking time—Adam had begun to wonder if Vincent intended to starve him of human contact entirely. When he woke from what felt like his dozenth boredom-induced nap, a tablet and charger waited on the nightstand like a peace offering. He knew it was dumb to hope that the device was connected to the internet, but the disappointment hit him hard when he saw that he was locked out of accessing anything online. He managed to hobble to the bathroom to splash his face with water and convince himself that crying wouldn’t help anything.
He needed to be strong.Men don’t let their emotions get the best of them, his father always said to him.
Adam could admit those first few days with the tablet had helped occupy his mind. It had a lot of very stupid games and what appeared to be an illegally downloaded collection of classic novels. He was never a fan of literature in school, but when it was just him, his thoughts, and the empty room, he supposed he could finally give Dickens or Tolstoy a chance.
Which was a mistake, because those books were boring as fuck.
Three days after getting the tablet, he was getting ready to climb the walls. Whichever one of the kidnappers was dropping off food for him, they always seemed to wait until he was asleep to do it. Other than the squeaky door, he couldn’t really hear anyone either, though he could have sworn there was a woman with a very high-pitched voice in the house the day before. He had even gotten pretty good at hopping to the bathroom, grabbing the furniture he could reach along the way while he prayed his bladder would withstand all the jostling. But between eating, bathroom trips, and straining his eyes after hours of staring at the tablet, the room was suffocating him.
Even trying to sleep had become restless. When his mind wasn’t forcing him to relive his biggest regrets, it was conjuring up dreams that involved Vincent. Sometimes they were terribly violent, waking him in a cold sweat while he grabbed at his neck to make sure his throat hadn’t really been ripped out. The rest of the time, they involved the vampire in various states of undress. In bed. With Adam. He tried to not think about those dreams as much as he could, but there were weirdly intimate dreams where he could swear he could still feel Vincent’s fingers stroking his face when he woke up.
He wished they would at least hit him with the ketamine again. That would have killed some of the time for him, or at least made it so he wouldn’t dream about doing the Devil’s Tango with a vampire. Or they could throw some OxyContin his way. He could spend days doing nothing if he could get high. Just nodding in and out, not a care in the world for things like the passage of time, food, family, whether or not he was being held captive by a weirdly attractive strip club owner.
You have over thirty days clean, why would you ruin that willingly?If he had still been using, he wouldn’t have been in this situation at all. He’d be in jail drinking toilet wine with the other county degenerates. That almost sounded nice, except for the fact he was trading one type of imprisonment for another.
At least the food was nicer here.
But he was getting desperate enough for human contact that he considered yelling for one of them to come into the room and just talk to him. Hell, he’d even let Vincent touch him again if it meant not being alone with his thoughts. Convincing himself not to wander down a rabbit hole of bad memories and the part of himself he spent years trying to bury under enough pills to kill a circus elephant got more difficult. Even passing notes back and forth with Matteo would help him stay out of that place in his mind.
What sort of game were they playing at? Was this some sort of mind-breaking technique? Because it was working.
More than once he had opened his mouth to yell for one of them to come in, only to snap it shut when he realized they likely wouldn’t respond, either because Vincent was ignoring him on purpose or because the seemingly nice one was deaf.
The only thing keeping him sane was keeping track of the times that he heard the storm door opening and closing. He realized if it took more than two seconds to hear the door shut, that meant more than one of them was leaving at the same time. At least two of them always left the house at six o’clock, and someone always left or entered right around ten at night. The door wouldn’t creak again until four in the morning, and that one always took more than 2 seconds to shut, so that meant whichever two left around six were coming back.
