Page 36 of You Only Love Twice
"Anything," she breathed.
"Fine." He slid his hands into his trouser pockets. "Drop the cloak."
Gemma tugged the strings of his cloak loose, letting it slide from her shoulders. The heavy fur-lined fabric pooled around her bare ankles, the sudden biting chill of the air pebbling her skin. "And now, Obsidian?"
"Ghost was right," he said coldly, looking his fill. "You will do anything, stoop to any level, in order to ensnare me."
A game to see how far she would let him push her.
Damn him.
Gemma hauled the cloak up around her shoulders. "Not all of us have the luxury of power. You have something I want. I have nothing to bargain with. If you're hoping to shame me, then please take your smirking face elsewhere. I am done with being shamed. All I wanted was a simple luxury. Clearly, I miscalculated your level of empathy." Somehow she laughed. "The mistake, I believe, was in thinking you had any."
Hauling the warm fur around her bare arms, she retreated to the marble slab she'd been sleeping on and turned away from him before deliberately raising her voice to earsplitting levels. "Oh, there was a young Nighthawk from Matlock—"
* * *
"Ghost."She let the word fall into the still air as Obsidian appeared at evening with a fresh flask of blood.
She hadn't been thinking earlier, but trapped in this barred room, all she had was time to think and resurrect every word spoken between them.
The Company of Rogues knew they faced an unknown alliance ofdhampir. Created by Dr. Erasmus Cremorne at Falkirk Asylum, according to the information Malloryn had handed her, most of thedhampirpatients had died when the asylum burned to the ground.
It wasn't a project the common people of London would have felt easy with; trying to force the evolution of blue bloods that were fated to turn into vampires. Vampires were monstrous entities, capable of tearing entire streets of people to pieces. Back in Georgian times, there'd been a spate of vampire attacks, resulting in the Year of Blood, before the Echelon had brought in strict rules.
Any blue blood who reached craving virus levels of 70 percent or higher was to be reported to the authorities as standing on the edge of the Fade, that moment in time when the color began to bleach from their bodies in preparation for the transformation into a vampire.
Yet, it was only in recent years they'd discovered there was one more way for a blue blood to evolve.
The Falkirk project had been kept quiet. Meddling with blue bloods almost on the verge of becoming vampires? The human classes would have rioted.
So Falkirk burned, all the records within it were lost, and it was only in the past year, withdhampirsurfacing out of the dregs of myth, that Malloryn began to find traces of information about the project.
There was no way of telling how manydhampirwere arrayed against them.
Gemma needed that information.
Suddenly, escape was not the first thought in her mind. Could she do some good here? Could she gain Obsidian's trust? Learn more about who COR faced?
"Ghost is your fellowdhampir, is he not?" she continued, as Obsidian shot her a sharp look. "And he knows about me." She paused. "He knows about Russia, and what lay between us."
And he had warned Obsidian away from her.
"He's the one who sent thatdhampirto kill me, isn't he?"
The muscle in Obsidian's jaw flexed. "You're not going to gain anything else from me, Miss Townsend."
Oh, I already have.
"I never realized why your hair was so pale in Russia. I thought it your natural coloring, or perhaps you were close to the Fade. We had no inkling then, ofdhampir. You were at Falkirk, weren't you?"
A flinch.
"Or was it the Russian court who experimented upon you?" No flinch. "No. You were born Russian, I suspect, but you were experimented upon here. When did you arrive in England? Were you a blue blood before you were sent to Falkirk? You had to be. According to the Duke of Caine's records on the facility, only blue bloods were interred there—"
"Do you want this, or not?" His hand clutched tight around the flask, knuckles splayed white.
Struck a nerve, by the look of it."I'm only curious," Gemma protested, uncrossing her legs from where she sat on the marble slab and pushing to her feet. "There's not a great deal to do to pass the time, apart from think. You can only blame yourself for not providing adequate entertainment."
