Page 29 of Unbound

I growl, anger and fatigue battling to take charge inside me. I feel like draining her right here, right now. Fuck the foil blanket.

I leap to the ground, run so fast to the doorway that I know I’m just a blur to human eyes. I have one moment of satisfaction when I slam into her, crush my forearm on her windpipe, and pin her against the door. A look of fear flashes across her face, and it is delicious. I could end her in one twist of her head, one squeeze of her throat, and she knows it.

She manages a gulp, her eyes blazing as she stares me down. I’m lost in the battle of wills and don’t even notice I’m sizzling until Rosa lays the sheet around my shoulders. “Let’s take this inside,” she says. Someone opens the door, and I reluctantly go through it, dragging Yvonne behind me and throwing her to the floor. I loom over her, and again I’m impressed with her spirit. She doesn’t cower; she doesn’t crawl away. She just looks up at me, slightly fucking smug.

Rosa lays a restraining hand on my arm. “Come on. Let’s all go up. Get a coffee.”

I don’t want a fucking coffee, and Rosa knows that. Her eyes meet mine, and she smiles. Gentle, soft, sweet, despite the blood in her hair and the bruises I can now see developing on her cheekbone. I reach out, run my thumb along her jaw, turning her face up to mine to inspect. Beautiful, as ever. I drop a light kiss on her bruises, and she leans into me. Exhausted, sad. Needing me to be a man not a monster. She will care about what happens to Yvonne, and so should I. “Okay. Coffee. But first, I need to put her somewhere safe. She’s going downstairs.”

Rosa nods. I thought she might argue, but she’s not stupid. She knows a security breach when she sees one. Her heart might be tender, but her brain is fully functioning.

“Downstairs?” mutters Yvonne. “What does that mean?”

Fear is finally building, and I enjoy it for a second. I grab her, pulling her to her feet. She fights me, pummels at me, hisses and kicks. It’s entertaining, and I let her have her moment. “I don’t want to go downstairs!” she screeches. I guess eight years in a dungeon will give a girl a few phobias.

“Yeah? Well, you should have thought about that before you turned up here, shouldn’t you? Now you’re all out of choices.”

“Please!” she says, casting a desperate look at Rosa, her eyes wild and rolling. “Don’t let him lock me up.”

Rosa shakes her head sadly. “He’s got no choice, Yvonne. We have no choice. You fucked yourself over, turning up here like this. Look, he won’t hurt you, and you won’t be in there for long. We have stuff we need to take care of, and then I promise someone will come get you out. Few hours, a day max. Okay? Can you trust me on this?”

Yvonne’s glare tells me no, she does not think it’s okay, but it’s enough—enough to calm herself, take some deep breaths, regain control.

I keep hold of her as we go down to the dungeon in the basement. It’s not a nice place, and if I’m going to bring Rosa down here for sex like I threatened, I’ll need to do some work. Give it a fucking makeover or whatever. Now, though, it looks exactly like what it is, a place where people get locked away, tortured, killed. I use it when I need to, and Matteo brings some of his special guests down here to play with. It smells of blood and urine, it’s dark, and the chains for hoisting glint in the light of the single dangling bulb.

“Please don’t chain me up,” she says, her voice one step away from a beg. “If you need to leave me in here, I get it. Put please, don’t put chains on me.”

It’s the first time I’ve heard this level of terror from her, and I add it to the list of damage that Carlos and Vincenzo did to this woman. The mental torture on top of the physical. I shove her down onto the shabby old couch. “One chance,” I tell her. “You mess me around, and I’ll know. You’ll go into those chains and maybe never come out. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” she murmurs, nodding rapidly. “I understand.”

“How did you get out, and how did you know about this place?” I ask, pushing her while she’s weak. I think I probably know the answer, but I won’t rest until I’m sure. Normally, I think she’d refuse to tell me, protect her source or whatever the fuck, but she’s staring at the manacles, rubbing her own scarred wrists, so freaked out by the dungeon that she’s more persuadable than usual. If I was ever going to charm this woman into forgetting everything, it would be now, and yet I don’t. I am intrigued by her, and I know Rosa will want to be involved in what happens next. Have I gone soft? Maybe. In some places. She’s still quiet, so I rattle the chains, loud enough to make her jump. Not that soft.

“Okay. So, I picked up on the fact that you had somewhere else. The way Rosa was talking about coming home. So later, I told Freya you’d asked me to come here. That you’d given me directions and wanted me to meet you. That I’d lost them and needed her help.”

I nod. Lying to Freya isn’t as easy as you’d think. She’s childlike in some ways, but she’s learned a lot about people and monsters in her years at court. Yvonne, though? Yvonne could pull it off, I’m guessing. She’s a professional bullshitter after all.

“She believed me, and she drew me a map,” Yvonne tells me. “And getting out of that place … it wasn’t as hard as it probably should be. There was some kind of fight, and the guards were distracted, and nobody was really taking any notice of me anyway. I’m just the weak little human.”

Some of her spirit is back. I take careful note of what she’s said and what it tells me about her. It tells me she’s clever, that she’s ruthless. She didn’t care about landing Freya in trouble if it meant getting what she wanted. She watched and learned, figured out the time when security was vulnerable; she was patient and waited for her moment. Then she somehow made her way here in her physical condition. She made the most of the fact that nobody really saw her, just like Freya, the girl who thought she was invisible. That did not end well for Vincenzo, and I will not make the mistake of underestimating this particular human.

I nod, taking it in. Knowing that yet again we’re going to need to have “the talk” with Freya. Might even need to charm her into forgetting this place exists and not have her back here. I’d hate that, but she’s a threat without knowing it.

“Why?” I ask, once she’s finished. “Why come here? Once you got out, you could have gone anywhere. Escaped.”

“I wanted to show you what I was made of. What I was capable of. How useful I could be. I still want you to make me one of you.”

She sounds determined but now is not the time for this conversation. I shake my head. “You don’t know what you’re asking for.”

“I do! You think I don’t know anything about you? I know you’re not all monsters. I know those two sick fucks who abused me were the worst of you. There were others, guards who were kind. I know not every vampire is evil. I’ve seen you and your friends, you and Rosa. She’s not a vampire; she’s nice. But she still loves you. It’s possible to be one of you and not be vile. But it’s not possible to be one of you and be weak. I can’t carry on living in fear.”

She means it, I can tell. No matter how good a show she puts on, she’s always going to be haunted by this. Even if she found a way to integrate back into the human world, she’d never truly be part of it again. She’s seen too much. Transforming her has some merit, she’d be on our side of the fence for a start.

“We’ll discuss it later. Believe it or not, Yvonne, I have more important things to deal with right now.”

“Like what?” she asks immediately. “I can see you’ve all been in a fight. Is it the other Coscas? What’s going on? Can I help?”

“Yeah. You can help by shutting the fuck up.”