Page 52 of Legacy
“Not any more so than the people in thisfacility.”
Those words struck Melanie straight throughthe heart. Yes, vampires were monsters, but so were the people whokept them imprisoned here and tortured them in the name ofscience.
“We’re never getting out of here, arewe?”she asked.
Lucy’s shoulders went back, and her chin roseas her nostrils flared.“Yes, we are. Neither of us is dying inthis place.”
“Have you seen Kyle?”
“Not up close and personal, but yes, I’veseen him. He’s doing as well as can be expected.”
Melanie was about to respond when the dooropened. She turned away from Lucy and leaned toward the mirror asshe ran her hands over her hair and fluffed it as if she werefixing it. Delilah strolled around the corner. In all her years ofliving at the facility, Melanie had never seen the woman in theirbathroom.
Someone must have seen them come in here, andsince they couldn’t have the two of them plotting such evil thingsas regaining their freedom, they would have reported them. Therewere plenty of people in this place who were far too enthusiasticto please her father and Delilah.
Lucy’s fierceness vanished under thedisapproving gaze of her mother. The hair on Melanie’s nape rose.This was an entirely different game than the last time they werehere. Now, Delilah was making it clear they were closelymonitored.
Melanie couldn’t take her eyes off thebeautiful woman who stared back at her with a smug smile curvingher mouth.
Her father was a manipulative control freak,but this woman was a monster.
CHAPTER 24
After another week,Melanie talked her father into letting her see Kyle. At first, hewas adamantly against it, but Delilah overheard her one day andintervened. She wanted to see what would happen.
After that, her father relented. Melanieshould have been excited about this, but she wasn’t. They wereturning this into a lab experiment, and she was one of therats.
Her father escorted her onto the elevator.Lucy came with them, and at the last second, Delilah strolled ontothe elevator with that hideous smirk firmly in place. She pressedthe button for the fifth floor.
No one spoke as the numbers lit up and theelevator descended. When they arrived at the bottom floor, a smallding announced their arrival. The doors slid open to reveal thecavernous room beyond.
Almost three dozen glass cages ran from thefloor to the ceiling. More cells remained retracted inside theground, waiting for new vampires to arrive. Melanie had never beento the fifth floor before.
She’d been to the control room on the fourthfloor and looked down on this room, but she’d never stepped foot inhere before. Until they’d kept her locked on the fourth floor, themost she’d done there was walk past the rooms where they conductedtheir experiments. She’d glanced into one of the rooms, but theequipment, tables, trays, and knives within had caused her to rushaway.
The one time she’d been in the control roomand looked down on the glass cages below, she experienced anunnerving second where she understood the power her father and theothers felt as they gazed at the lives they held.
With self-loathing churning in her stomach,she retreated from the glass. That one instance of power scaredher. It had made her feel as if she almost understood her father,and she couldn’t have that.
Nausea had churned in her stomach when sherushed from the room, and she’d vowed never to return. But now, shewas not on the fourth floor. She was on the fifth. The prisonerssurrounded her, and they all stared at her like she was a lobsterfresh from the pot.
She wished she wasn’t here, but there was noturning back, and she wouldn’t let her father and Delilah see hertrepidation and revulsion. As far as she knew, none of the vampiresbrought here were killed. That meant some of them had been here foryears, trapped behind the glass and experimented on.
Though, she wondered how much theyexperimented on those older prisoners. How much more could herfather possibly learn from them?
But they could have started killing vampiresfor all she knew and those older prisoners were gone. These mightbe all new inmates.
When her gaze swung to the right, she spotteda vampire she recognized from the last time she saw this room. Theman was a lot thinner, but she recognized the hopelessness and ragesimmering in his red eyes.
The anger he emanated had terrified her thelast time she saw him, but now, a strange pity formed in her heart.She shoved it away. She couldn’t feel sorry for these things; theywere animals who would tear her throat out the first chance theygot.
She searched the glass cages as she strodethrough them. At first, she didn’t see Kyle, but then she spottedhim in the center of the room. He sat with his back against thewall, his legs drawn up and his forehead on his knees.
She hadn’t known what to expect when she sawhim, but it certainly wasn’t the way her heart leapt and a cry ofanguish lodged in her throat. The entire time she tried to convinceher dad to let her see him, she hadn’t considered what it would beliketo see him trapped behind the glass with nothing morethan a bucket and no privacy.
Maybe it was because she hadn’t allowedherself to contemplate the man who told her he loved her and alwaysheld her so gently was now a prisoner in what she considered acircle of Hell. Maybe the creatures in here were all monsters, butnothing, no matter how repugnant or destructive, deserved thisfate.
For the rest of their existence, they wouldbe poked and prodded. They would be experimented on, cut open,examined, and stitched back together. They would never get anyprivacy, freedom, or joy of any kind again.
