Page 62 of Under a Wicked Moon
Focused on everything he’d lost, he wanted to scream and destroy. He’d imagined they had something special, a bond.
“Keep it together,” Roman warned. “Bangkok.”
“Dammit.” After centuries of fighting together, the Lanzo brothers had developed their own shorthand. Years ago, whenchasing a psychopathic vampire through Thailand, Ky had feigned his own death to fake out the vampire, allowing Roman to ambush and dispatch it.
Roman wanted him to fake his own death. He had to admit, it’d help later when Vivi would have to decide if she would take the amnesia injection to erase her past and her brainwashing.
But then this would be it. The last time he’d see her look at him with recognition in her eyes. He glanced down to where Roman still had her pinned. She sneered at him.
Then again, she seemed set on murdering him. Maybe it wasn’t the most terrible plan.
“Hurts.” Ky dramatically slid to the floor clutching his side. He cracked his eyelids to see her. Got to sell this idea of him dying. Not too hard to do with numbness seeping into his body from her betrayal. She’d been given no choice. Her choosing to be with him had been an order she couldn’t refuse. Did she resent him as much as he resented every single errand the Crown forced on them?
Her eyes flickered, perhaps with a hint of concern? Or he imagined it.
He shouldn’t care that she’d been ordered to seduce him. His chest felt so tight he could barely move air. It had nothing to do with the bullet wounds in him, and everything to do with never seeing her again. Of letting her go.
Roman uttered a soft spell as he wrapped a woman’s bracelet around his fingers. It was too small to pass beyond his knuckles. He touched it to the back of Vivi’s head. She sank to the floor.
“She out?” Ky asked as he stood. He rubbed his chest where his ribs felt too tight.
Roman nodded. He slung her over his shoulder.
Ky fisted his hands against a need to grab her from him, to hold her more gently than Roman, and protect her. “She’s fine? Not dead?”
Roman tucked the bracelet back into its cloth pouch. “The muse’s bracelet kills only humans. It simply knocks out paranormals. You know this. She’s fine. Heart’s beating. She’s breathing. She’ll be out until I say the counterspell.”
Ky punched the elevator button, which opened immediately, and depressed the lobby button.
“You okay?” Roman asked.
He pulled up his shirt. The blood barely showed through his black shirt and jacket.
“A few bullets. Nothing major.”
“Not talking about bullets. I know you’re messed up over her.” Roman squinted at him as if trying to discern his sanity.
“I’ll get over it. None of whatever we shared was real.”
Roman compressed his lips and fixated on the mirrored wall ahead of him. “I’m calling bullshit on that. Something as strong as what you have with her doesn’t happen because a human told her to do it. There was something there.”
“Aren’t you supposed to feed my disappointment? Make it easier for me to let her go?”
“I feel you right now a lot more than you think. The partnership of the bond brings a balance I didn’t know I needed. It’s a level of strength that makes the shit of our lives easier.” He shifted to stare at Ky. “That said, the smart move is to let her go.”
“Dammit,” Ky muttered.
They made their way down to the lobby, and Ky asked out loud, “Flynn, ETA?”
“Thirty seconds at the corner,” Flynn replied in their ear communicators.
He and Roman stared at each other.
“It’s the only way,” Roman said. This was his cue to say a forever goodbye to Vivi as he knew her. Roman explained that he planned to give her a half hour with her sister and then she had a choice of death or injection with the experimental amnesia drug.She couldn’t be allowed to be a walking time bomb that someone could say a few words and turn on at random.
When she took the drug, she’d never remember him.
He felt hollowed out. “I understand.”
