Page 80 of Auctioned for Her Blood
“No.” I step toward her. “I am not wrong. He is a pirate. A thief. If you will allow me to show you the evidence—”
She shoots me a look so fierce I can feel it, and her lovers gather closer around her, with their menacing presence. “You know that is not what I’m talking about.”
My jaw hardens. Has she toldDiederikabout my research into the Illuminant? Octavia swore me to secrecy, assuring me that she would do the same, and her obvious greed in wanting the Illuminant for herself, made me believe that she’d never tell anyone. Certainly not someone like Diederik.
But if Diederik knows, I have put Ember in far more danger than I realized, and getting her released along with me has become even more delicate and complicated.
What have I done?
My intentions when I arranged to have Ryker arrested were to get him away from Ember, to keep him from discovering the truth about her, but now…
“I ordered six different vampires to feed from Ryker.” Octavia flicks her wrist toward him. “None of them…reacted as you claimed they would.” She steps closer to me.
“Have you told—”
“I’m not an idiot,” she interrupts me. “I only just summoned Diederik. He insisted he could soften Ryker up to tell me what he knows. But so far, nothing.”
Clearly Diederik’s interrogation techniques include torture. I am not certain that Ryker knows what I suspect Ember’s blood can do, but if he does know, he has not revealed it. If he had, Octavia would have her goons searching the dungeons for her.
“Now you’re here,” Octavia says. “You can ask the right questions.”
My heart rate accelerates, but I reach inside myself to calm down. I am better than this, no longer driven by anger, cruelty and other base instincts. I will not let my emotions show. Revealing them will put Ember in more danger.
“Remove his gag,” Octavia says, and the guard in protective clothing does as she asks.
“Fuck you, Octavia!” Ryker shouts as soon as his mouth is free and he starts to heal from the silver gag’s burns. “Fuck you all.”
Octavia flicks her wrist and Ryker is immediately flooded by sunlight that pours down through a hole in the ceiling, high above. He screams in agony, writhing in the chair, and the silver burns are now insignificant compared to his crisping skin.
She flicks her wrist again, and the aperture closes.
Ryker slumps forward, as much as he can slump within his constraints, and the acrid smell of burnt hair and flesh fills the room. If Ember’s blood gave Ryker the ability to walk in the sunlight, even for a time, that time has passed.
Or am I wrong about Ember?
Octavia sashays toward Ryker. “You know I don’t enjoy this, lover. Answer Zuben’s questions so that we can put an end to all this…unpleasantness.” She leans toward his burnt body, slowly starting to heal. “End this, so we can get on to mattersmuchmore pleasant.”
She turns toward me. “Ask him your questions!”
I turn to Octavia. “I was wrong.” I bow my head slightly. “Your experiments have proven that this vampire does not hold the key to my research. He is not the one.” I already knew he wasn’t the Illuminant, and I certainly do not want to ask him questions about Ember in front of Octavia and Diederik.
Her eyes narrow. “Are you certain?”
“One hundred percent.” Nothing is ever one hundred percent certain, but I don’t want to confuse Octavia with the finer points of statistics.
“Release Ryker’s bindings,” she says, her voice tight. “Then someone feed him. Quickly. He has suffered enough.”
One of the guards removes his leather hood and leans over Ryker, exposing his throat, and the pirate’s fangs spring out. He plunges them into the other vampire’s vein.
Octavia moves to the side of the room as Ryker’s feeding progresses, and her mates surround her. As they caress her, she kisses them, one by one, and I turn away from the intimate family moment. Octavia and her five mates have something I will never have, something I don’t even want, but a strange longing opens inside me.
“What the fuck were you doing with Ryker when we picked him up?” Diederik asks me.
Ryker releases the vampire’s vein, and he moans as his skin heals more rapidly.
“I was following him,” I tell Diederik.
“Why the fuck would you do that?” he asks me. “You knew we had orders to pick him up.”
