Page 55 of Sweethearts and Savages
I cut the thought off. I didn’t think they could mind read, but I wasn’t going to give them more than they could take.
But the reasonable twin was just looking at me pensively, like I was a puzzle and he knew he was missing a piece. No matter how I might try to hold onto my secrets, I was fairly sure they’d wring me dry before they killed me.
He tilted his head to the side and continued to study me, then he looked out the window, at the light brightening the sky. “Thank god it's almost dinner time. I’m starving.” He turned back to me, and his eyes said I might be dinner. “Did The Hounds approach you?”
I shook my head.
“Did you approach them?”
I clenched my jaw, because maybe, just maybe, if they believed there was an army coming for me, they’d cut their losses. But that was a foolish dream.
“No. I was going to bring them a plan for retribution.”
“So they don’t know about Eden? Does anyone know?”
I gritted my teeth again, trying not to betray my only friend. But it was useless. I hung my head. “Only my friend, Frost.”
As the light started to pour in, I could see more details of my captors, including the tribalistic tattoos that dotted their faces. They were old. Like bone-achingly ancient.
So. Fucked.
Nico shook his head. “Ah, yes. Cedric Frostmore.” He let out another sigh, and walked to the window. Weren’t vampires allergic to the sun? Maybe I just had to hold out a few more hours and the sun would solve my problems for me. Nico turned back toward me, taking a seat in the only chair in the room. “You know, the person you abducted was really your blessing and your doom. Enit is… well, she’s the best of us all, really. She’s the sweetness and light that you tend to lose when you are an immortal. She genuinely cares. She argued for the life of your friend Cedric. And she is hard to say no to, so he’s hers now.”
Shock froze the air in my lungs as I processed what this vampire was trying to say. Frost was alive. Enit had saved him. Had she saved him because she was everything Nico said she was, or did she save him for me?
My eyes bounced back to Nico’s ancient ones. “She argued for your life too, but we are less forgiving. There is only so much leniency I am willing to grant, and your friend Cedric used it all up.”
I huffed out a relieved breath. Frost was alive. I hadn’t been the cause of his death. I could die today with an easier conscience.
Yet Nico wasn’t done. Though he wasn’t touching me anymore, so perhaps I could resist his questions. “What I really want to know, Mr. Arborson, is why you care so much about Eden? Micah, Alistair and Locke have racked their brains about what they could have done to a small child, but they have nothing. Which leads me to believe it isn’t about you at all, is it?”
“No.”
“Tell me what it is about then. Make me understand.”
I’d been fooling myself that this ancient vampire needed physical contact. I was an open book to him, a nut that he wanted to peel open and get a good taste of the inside.
“My father was a soldier for The Hounds. He was a good man, he used to dance around the kitchen with my mother, and would take me to the park.” Nico’s lip quirked but he motioned for me to continue. “He was there at the battle—when The Hounds fell. He saw friends torn apart by monsters, he watched those he’d sworn to protect be stolen.”
Nico snarled. “Those people were already stolen, Mr. Arborson. From their families. Off the street. They were stolen so The Hounds could sell them for a profit.” He took a deep breath and calmed himself. “Please continue. I know he didn’t die there, that your vendetta isn’t a blood oath. He died seven years later from cancer.”
I didn’t want to continue, to hash up all this bullshit from the past. But right now, I was unable to help myself. “You’re right, he didn’t die. He was injured though, and those injuries plagued him for the rest of his life. But it was the mental scars that affected him most. He started hitting my mother in the kitchen instead of dancing with her. He stuffed me in closets for days on end rather than take me to the park.”
Lucius rolled his eyes. “Did he feed you to an angry god that demanded blood, turning you into an immortal killing machine? No? Stop whining.”
Nico threw him a worried look, then turned his gaze back to me. The sunrise bathed him in its rays, and there went my idea that they’d just burn to a crisp.
I looked back at the good twin. “When I was ten, I came home to my mother dead in her bed from an overdose of sleeping pills. After that, my father realized what had caused our life to spiral out of control. Eden. He began to train me to become a soldier. When he died, he made me promise to live out his vendetta on the people who ruined my life.”
Nico was silent and I was sweating, memories pouring out of the recesses of my brain, torturing me all over again. He stood, walking toward me, staring down at me in pity. “The monster who ruined your life is already six feet underground, Kell Arborson. Killing the Lycans, bringing down Eden, none of that will make the betrayal go away.” He turned toward Lucius. “Let us go home, brother. Raine waits for us and I am done with this chase. Besides, if we spare him, we will be Enit’s favored parents again.”
Lucius looked like he wanted to fight—his brother, me, this entire city. He visibly shuddered, trying to get himself under control. Then he sneered at me and strode out the door.
Nico paused on the threshold. “You probably have Enit to thank for saving your life. There are few things that Lucius loves more than bloodshed; she happens to be one of them.” His face fell into a scary mask that made all the tiny hairs on my body stand on end. “Attack us again, and I will personally cut you from groin to gullet and feast on your entrails.”
With that, the door slammed shut and I leaned over the bed and vomited into a waste paper basket.
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