Page 104 of Tell Me Why
Tell was willing to pretend like Leonard had escaped, though. Why not? Everything else was a lie.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Tell said, unlocking the lab and opening the door. Leonard scrambled to his feet, following Tell in.
“They took her,” Leonard said.
“I’m aware,” Tell said.
“You aren’t going to do anything about it?” Leonard asked.
“What would I do?” Tell asked.
“I know the stories about you,” Leonard said confidentially. “I know that youcando things.”
Tell looked at him, tired.
“You’re tipping your hand, boy,” he said. “Both that you have actual feelings about herandthat you aren’t the simple player in all of this that you appear to be. Good way to get dead.”
Leonard gave him a sullen look, and for the briefest of moments, Tell considered taking him into his confidence, but then he saw it.
Leonard hadn’t gotten out by gentleman’s agreement. He’d gotten out because sweeping him hadn’t been the intent, in the first place. Maybe he’d never even been taken in at all.
He’d called in the hit himself.
There were only a few vampires who would actively seek the tropical zones. There were the moneyed ones who did it in the far east, because they could live entirely underground, there, and then there were the ones who viewed a white desert as a thousand miles of moat.
Tell knew of one who had once built a compound in the middle of the Sahara, until the sand had overrun it once more.
It was interesting knowledge, but not particularlyusefulknowledge.
Until you had the list of all of the men making the key decisions in the vampire-parts industry.
And then things started slotting into place quite rapidly.
And Tell knew who Leonard worked for.
And if Venus was with him, a dozen other alignments fell into place quite neatly. Matching the type of personality that would appeal to the organizations involved to the ones presently here… the puzzle suddenly got a lot less amorphous and a lot easier to solve.
And either Leonard was begging Tell to go rescue Tina because he couldn’t negotiate to get her out on his own, or he was baiting Tell into a trap to try to finish removing him from involvement with Daryll.
Uncharacteristically, Tell believed that Leonard actually cared what happened to her.
Tell sighed.
“I shouldn’t have brought her here,” he said. “It was a mistake. I’ll have to learn from it for next time. But I don’t take these things lightly. I intend to see this through.”
“You’re just going to leave her,” Leonard said. “Even if she’s still alive?”
Leonard didn’t know that Tell had seen her, knew what was happening to her.
It made sense.
Silix, by whatever name he was going these days, liked to keep his information compartmentalized, and he liked his lackeys clever.
Tell drew a pensive breath, then looked squarely at Leonard.
“Would you risk your life for her?” he asked.
“You wasted her,” Leonard answered. “Threw her away on a game.”
