02 Blood Roses - Blackthorn (27 page)

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She didn’t know how she did it. She couldn’t remember how she did it – only the sudden feeling of loss of balance from both her and Caleb.

They’d plummeted sideways out of the bath, Caleb softening her blow as she fell on top of him. She heard the crack of his head amidst her elbow slamming against the tiled floor.

Rolling onto her back, she lay there stunned for a moment, sickness rising to the back of her throat at the shock of the fall.

She snapped her head across her shoulder to look at him.

He still lay on his back – motionless, his eyes shut, his body lax against the floor. Blood crept along the tiles towards her, seeping, so it seemed, from the back of his head.

Her heart plummeted. Her stomach clenched in inexplicable despair.

She’d killed him.

She rolled onto her side and forced herself up onto her elbow. She pressed her trembling fingers to his neck in frantic hope of a pulse. She could barely feel his flesh through her own numbness, but she searched and searched, desperately waiting for that elusive slow heartbeat.

With the impatience of failure, her shuddering from the cold, the shock, not helping, she eased onto her haunches and gripped his wrist to simultaneously search for a beat there.

She lowered her ear to his mouth, listening, pleading, for an intermittent breath.

She couldn’t lose him. Not Caleb.

‘Please,’ she whispered, tears accumulating in her eyes, the back of her throat tightening until she could barely breathe, her chest aching from an unbearable sense of loss. ‘Don’t do this to me.’

She’d pushed him too far – resulting in them both losing their tempers in the heat of the moment. She’d taunted him into it – coaxing and goading him. If she hadn’t somehow managed to lever herself against the bath and cause the stumble, he could have lost it completely, taken her to the Brink – the prophecies fulfilled.

It could have been her lying dead on the floor, not him.

In that split second, it felt like the better outcome.

It was an unforgiveable thought. She needed to be grateful. If he lay there dead, it was all over – the horrors and nightmares, the fate she had feared all her life. She was free.

She’d won.

But instead of elation, she felt caged by her own grief, the echoes of helplessness flooding back to her as she sat above his unflinching body, panic and pain seizing her chest.

‘Don’t,’ she said more adamantly. ‘Don’t you
dare
leave me!’

She felt it – just when she’d almost forgotten she was trying to find it. A pulse that was faint, but it was there, and so was the shallow breath on her cheek.

Her heart leapt. A tear trickled across the bridge of her nose as she remained bent over him.

She counted for as long as it would take to feel another pulse, another breath – needing to be sure her willing it to be true hadn’t created a phantom heartbeat.

A minute, two minutes, and the pulse came again.

She let him go and dropped back on her haunches. She brushed away her tear and heaved a grateful sigh as she stared up at the ceiling.

She looked back down at him still lying unconscious on the floor. The blood had stopped seeping. Obviously a superficial wound. Hands trembling beyond control, she stroked the firm but soft skin of his cheek, rubbed her fingers across his slightly parted lips.

The realisation hit her hard and fast, causing her gut to clench, and her heart to pound. She retracted her hand as if she’d touched a scalding surface.

If her most basic instincts were telling her the truth, the thought of it was abhorrent, never more so than after what he’d just proven himself capable of.

But it was there, stirring deep inside and screaming alarm bells at her.

And those alarm bells had a right to scream, because if she was right, if there was even an inkling of truth in the way she felt then, this was the worst possible outcome – feelings that were a get-out clause for her as far as her destiny went, but a death sentence for her sisters.

Because if she was right, if the impossible had happened – the actualisation of an unuttered serryn secret as closely guarded as the prophecies – if she
had
fallen for Caleb, she was guilty of committing the ultimate serryn taboo.

And if she had fallen for him before that moment, if she’d already consummated that love, her serrynity would already be gone, bounced down the line to Sophie in punishment – Sophie who was already in Blackthorn. Or if Sophie hadn’t made it, bounced to Alisha who was already trapped.

Panic clenched her chest.

But how was she to know what she really felt amidst the emotional turmoil she’d been subjected to ever since arriving there? If love, the intensity of the real love that would be needed for her to lose it, was even
possible
in such a short space of time.

She struggled to unsteady feet as she stared down at his still-unconscious body.

She had to get out of there. Far away from there. From Blackthorn. From him.

She stumbled across to the door.

Another moment with Caleb could be the death penalty for all of them. She’d be no use to him anymore. Her sisters would be next in line.

She had no choice, no other option.

Reaching the door she looked back across at him. She resentfully wiped away another tear. She could not allow herself these feelings – these insane, unforgiveable feelings.

She stepped across the threshold, hurried past the balustrade and to the stairs, her legs threatening to collapse beneath her.

She’d get to a phone. She’d call the VCU. She’d tell them her sister was being kept hostage. They’d descend on the club within the hour. Alisha would be in trouble when they found out the truth. Her own life would be over if they discovered what she was. But the alternative was unthinkable.

She clutched the banister all the way down, the blood loss making her head throb, a deep sense of loss still consuming her despite her pending freedom.

Freedom out into Blackthorn. Because she still had to get through Blackthorn. She’d already seen what was out there waiting. If one of those crowds saw her leaving without Caleb they were bound to investigate. She’d have to sneak out. She’d have to keep her head down. Maybe only navigate the back alleys.

She stopped and sank onto the bottom step, clutched one of the spindles as she rested her temple against it.

She was kidding herself. She couldn’t go. Not yet.

She couldn’t walk away from the opportunity. Maybe the only opportunity she’d ever get.

She looked back over her shoulder up at the stairs.

She had to muster up whatever was left of her physical strength, whatever was left of her emotional strength.

She either ran now or finally faced it.

The choice was hers. And hers alone.

Chapter Twenty-five

C
aleb woke to stare up at the damp, patchy ceiling.

It took him a moment longer to realise why he couldn’t move.

His attention snapped to the cuffs on one wrist, the barbed wire wrapped around the other –his outstretched arms bound to the rusted metal headboard. He had no doubt the same was digging into his ankles, making any movement as painful as the ache at the back of his head.

He snapped a glare to Leila sat to the right of his waist.

Knees drawn to her chest, arms wrapped around them, she stared down at him intensely with sullen hazel eyes.

Anger and frustration swept through him in an icy shiver.

Leila let her legs fall loose into a crossed position, her hands relaxed in her lap, the breeze through the cracked window to her left blowing lightly through her hair. ‘Welcome back,’ she said.

He couldn’t answer her at first, his jaw too clenched for him to speak. He tightened his fists into balls, his glower fixed on her.

‘I guess now you know how it feels.’ She looked around. ‘You’ve been here before, right?’ she said, looking back at him. ‘You had to have to know the shower is here and that it works. Just how many liaisons have you had here, Caleb?’

He still couldn’t bring himself to speak, defying the acceptance of it being real.

‘There’s some dodgy stuff tucked away here,’ she added. ‘I managed to find the handcuffs, obviously. The barbed wire was already part of the bed. Some people clearly don’t like to clear up after themselves.’ She pulled the kitchen knife from out behind her and twisted it in her hand. ‘I even found some self-defence.’

He looked at the blade then back at her.

She wouldn’t. Every part of him wanted to believe that. Not Leila.

‘You’re very quiet,’ she said, echoing one of their first conversations. ‘I thought you would have had more to say for yourself.’

‘Get me the
fuck
out of these restraints,’ he said, his glare locked on hers.

She didn’t even flinch. ‘And that will help me
how
, exactly?’

He inhaled deeply through his nose, his jaw locked again. If he could rip himself out of the restraints, he’d finish what he’d started in the bathroom with no further hesitation. The indignation was infuriating enough, the humiliation worse.

And the fear. That long-suppressed sense of fear now crawling up his spine sickened him.

‘You don’t look like the big, bad vampire now, Caleb. In fact, you’re looking rather helpless there. And ever so slightly afraid.’

He narrowed his eyes. He’d make her pay. She’d pay for this.

‘Still,’ she said, glancing down at his chest, raking her gaze tauntingly along the length of his body before looking back into his eyes. ‘Dare I say it? There’s something very sexy about that vulnerability. Or maybe it’s just the serryn in me. The serryn you’ve been instrumental in creating. Poetically ironic, don’t you think?’

He looked away for the first time, the fury too painful.

The images flashed in front of his eyes again. The raven-haired beauty who had led him to a bed that was not dissimilar. A location that she had purposefully chosen away from where anyone could hear him scream.

The agony that followed.

Three weeks she’d chosen to keep him alive.

The taunting. The torture. The degrading and debasing acts she had performed on him, to him, and forced him to participate in. The things she made him watch and experience.

Even worse, if it could be, was seeing the little ones sob and being able to do nothing to help them, their pain intensifying if he didn’t watch as she demanded him to. The pleasure she took out of torturing them. The helplessness he had felt bound and manacled knowing if he had been free, he could have overpowered her, stopped it, torn her to shreds for her cruelty.

‘You’re thinking about her, aren’t you? That first serryn. What did she do to you, Caleb? What did she do that was so bad that you think all of this is acceptable? The way you’ve treated me. What did she do to warp your mind and perceptions so badly? Because this is just as much about her, isn’t it? Killing me isn’t just about the prophecies – it’s about redemption for you, for whatever she did to you.’

He feigned a fleeting smile – an instinctive reaction to the ludicrousness of her thinking he would open up to her.

He hadn’t even told Seth. Seth hadn’t needed to know. Walking in that room had been enough. Looking at what the serryn had done, what she had used on his younger brother and how. The shock and pain in his Seth’s eyes had been enough to confirm some things needed to be left unspoken.

Leila lifted the knife to his chest and slid it down to the tops of his low-slung trousers, before looking back up at him. ‘Tell me what happened. Help me understand.’

He irritatingly caught his breath as the cold, hard metal touched his skin. ‘Imagine the worst things you can conceive, short of leaving me permanently mutilated, and you won’t even come close.’

Her eyes flared a little, but he knew better than to believe the glimmer of empathy they could be mistaken for emanating.

‘Yet even now,’ she said, ‘even after what we’ve done together, shared, you
still
think I’m capable of
anything
like that?’

He opened his hands to divert her attention to his restraints. ‘I’m getting the message loud and clear right now.’

‘I can’t talk to you any other way, Caleb. I’ve tried.’ She swapped the knife to her left hand as she stretched her right arm across his body to lean across his waist.

She gazed down into his eyes, her body enticingly close. The body he couldn’t touch, the body he couldn’t get his hands on; the body, to his frustration, he couldn’t pin down on the bed there and then. Even then she smelt amazing, refreshingly pure against the density of the dense, dark space and, inexplicably, despite his fury and fear, he felt a jolt of arousal.

‘Tell me,’ she said, placing the knife on the mattress, to free her fingers to explore the buttons on his shirt. ‘What would any self-respecting serryn do now?’

He forced a closed-lipped smile. ‘A self-respecting serryn would take me on one-on-one. A cowardly serryn would strap me down to a bed as she knew it was her only chance.’

She almost smiled, unfastened his shirt buttons one by one, before running her warm hand down his chest.

Despite the confidence she was trying to portray, she couldn’t hide the slight tremor in her hands – undetectable no doubt to the human eye, to the less sensitive human flesh, but he could feel it. He knew her too well not to feel it.

He looked back into her eyes. Eyes that had always betrayed a myriad of emotions to him.

‘A cowardly serryn, or a smart serryn?’ she asked, those beautiful, dangerously deep hazel eyes meeting his fleetingly before she returned her attention to her fingers tracing the definition in his chest. ‘You wanted me in control before, didn’t you? To take the lead. To prove myself. But back then you had every intention from the beginning to take the power back. You always take the power back. Only now it’s different, isn’t it? You have no power, Caleb. Not over me. Not anymore. You’re not the Tryan yet. And I can stop you becoming the Tryan, can’t I? I can stop it all. Isn’t that what any serryn would do in my place? And as you lie here, all manacled and defenceless and exposed, wouldn’t any serryn make the most of it?’

She ran her hand back up his chest to stop over his heart as she locked gazes with him again, enrapturing him even through his indignation and fear.

‘Only I’m not her, Caleb. Just like I’m not Feinith. I wish I could have made you see that.’ She reached for the knife and slid it slowly down his chest. ‘And I might not be active, but I’ve studied. I know things you don’t.
Lots
of things you don’t. You asked me if I know how hard it is to drive something into a vampire.’ She slid the blade around to his side. ‘But it’s only hard if you try to go through the sternum, Caleb. Not so much so if you come in from the side,’ she traced the blade up along his skin, ‘up under the ribcage. The heart’s so vulnerable there. It sounds so clinical, doesn’t it? But so much more effective.’

She slid the knife back over to his heart.

‘What if I told you I did know about Sophie?’ she added. ‘That I knew she worked for The Alliance. That I knew they were targeting Jake and you. That I came rushing here because I believed you’d found out about us. What if I also told you I knew what you were the moment our eyes met? That I’ve been waiting ever since for my chance to get you alone, away from Jake, away from the safety of your club, away from where anyone can hear you scream? Would you still believe that?’

No.
As his heart lunged, as his stomach clenched into knots, he wouldn’t believe it.

As he stared up into her eyes, as he felt a deep stir of betrayal, it was the last thing he could tolerate believing right then.

‘Do you?’ she asked. ‘Believe it?’

‘Is that some kind of trick question?’

‘I want to know if you really have learned nothing about me. If you think any of that could possibly be true. I want to know if you are still so locked in your preconceived ideas that you’ll never see beyond them.’

‘The only way I’ll see beyond them is if you untie me.’

‘And what will my punishment be then, Caleb? How far will you push it this time? What exactly were you going to do if we hadn’t toppled out of the bath?’

He feigned a smile. ‘I’ll leave that one to your imagination.’

She lifted the blade so it was upright over his heart.

He held his breath and tensed.

‘Do you deserve this?’ she asked, meeting his gaze. ‘Do you deserve me to end it?’

He squarely held her gaze. If she wanted to take his life, he sure as hell wasn’t pleading for it. She was bluffing. Every instinct in him told her she was bluffing – every defence mechanism that wouldn’t accept that she could finally be the one to destroy him.

And, no, he didn’t believe she knew anything about the set-up – he knew that somewhere locked deep in his heart. Something he couldn’t accept for fear of what it could develop into – those feelings that had been growing ever since she’d stared back at him, clenching the straps of her rucksack and trying to bargain with him.

‘What do
you
think?’ he asked.

She slipped astride him in an easy, sensual move. Her soft hair brushed his cheek as she leaned over him, the knife still clenched in her hand as she braced her fists either side of his head.

‘Do you I deserve the way you’ve treated me?’ she asked.

‘Based on now? Absolutely.’

Her eyes flared, telling him it wasn’t the answer she was expecting.

‘And you feel no shame, no regret for your behaviour?’ she asked.

‘You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?’ he said, unable to bite back his resentment. ‘The power over me? What’s running through your head? What possibilities? What deep, dark suppressed fantasies are you longing to fulfil? I can see it in your eyes. I’ve made you. Why would I feel shame and regret for unearthing what I said was there all along?’

‘Because there’s a whole world of vampires beyond those doors. Only now without a pending Tryan to protect them. Like you said – you brought me here and that makes me your responsibility. That makes what happens from here your responsibility too.’

She looked over at the window, clearly purposefully to taunt him.

She looked back at him. ‘If I were you, I’d be feeling a hell of a lot of regret and shame.’ She leaned close enough to kiss him. ‘You might be the chosen one, but just remember – so am I. Your sanctuary can be my playground within minutes from now. I’ll find Marid again. I’ll find my sister. And I will get Alisha once I’ve finished what The Alliance started with your brother.’

He bucked in his restraints, the fury too much even to curse her.

She sat upright, her eyes flaring in shock at his ferocity, despite her trying to conceal it.

‘Because that’s what you expect, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘That’s what’s plausible. That’s what’s logical. That’s what makes sense. That’s what’s well within my capabilities. So you need to ask yourself why I won’t. You need to ask yourself why, right now, I’m going to walk away. Why I’m not going to kill you, Caleb. Just as I’m not going to kill your brother. Just like I didn’t last time I had the chance.’

She picked up the knife and eased off him.

As she strode across to the balustrade, his slow-beating heart pounded painfully.

She was walking away. She wasn’t bluffing. He knew her well enough to know that look in her eyes.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘To get Sophie. Then I’ll work out how to get Alisha.’

Caleb examined her profile as she reached the top step and started her descent.

There was no way she was stupid enough to go out there without him. Not into Blackthorn. Not that part of Blackthorn.

His chest tightened. ‘You’re going after Marid? Without me?’

As she stopped three steps down, met his gaze, it was confirmation enough.

‘You’re not ready,’ he said, more concern echoing in his tone than he’d intended. ‘You can’t go out there on your own.’

‘Worried about what will happen to your precious goods?’

He stunned himself with the realisation that hadn’t even crossed his mind. The only thing he thought of was Leila,
his
Leila, going out there alone. The prospect of what would be waiting for her.

Even amidst his fury at her, it was nothing compared to the thought of anyone hurting her. And she would get hurt, even with that toxic blood flowing through her. It would only take a group of them…

As she continued her descent, he strained his wrists against the barbed wire until blood seeped.

He had to stop her. Somehow he had to convince her to come back. ‘Leila.’

She glanced across at him, but she didn’t stop as she disappeared from sight.

Let her do it. Let her learn her lesson. Let her go out there and discover what it’s really like on the streets. He’d track her down soon enough. And he’d enjoy it – being on the hunt again.