Romani Armada (12 page)

“Then we agree about something, at least,” Justin told him smoothly.

Deonne raised her hand. “Just a moment. If you two are going to argue about me in the third person while I’m standing right here in the room with you, then you can both get out. I’m not the latest
objet d’art
on the auction block. Damn it to hell!”

Justin picked up her hand. “My apologies, Deonne.”

“Do you have to do that in front of me?” Christopher asked.

“Do what?” Justin returned, genuinely puzzled.

Christopher’s mouth curled up in distaste. “Touch her.”

Deonne could feel her jaw loosening in shock as she stared at her father.

Justin lowered her hand gently, also studying her father. Unlike her, he showed no shock at all. “And there lies the rub,” he said softly. “It wasn’t danger to her career that got you into that semi. It was proximity to vampires.”

“This is none of your business,” Christopher told him shortly. There was a vein throbbing in his temple.

“Deonne made it my business by asking me to stay.” Justine pushed his hands into his pockets. “Me being vampire makes it my business whether she invited me to stay or not.” He declared his vampirism flatly, with no hesitation or embarrassment or the coyness he usually exhibited when revealing it. Deonne might even have thought he was proud of the fact, except for the discussion they’d had a few hours before.

Christopher was growing angry. His nostrils flared and the sight provoked memories that Deonne had forgotten…that she had been glad to forget, now that they came flooding back. Most of the memories featured her standing in her father’s home office, listening to him lecture her in his precise, clipped tone, his words cutting and sarcastic, while he dismantled her latest efforts in school work, homework, sports, and later, her sprouting career, pointing out her flaws, errors and weaknesses and why what she had attempted had failed – even if it had been a success.

Her father could
always
see the downside.

He was getting ready to blast someone now. She didn’t know if he was angry enough to give Justin the benefits of his withering lecture, or if he would pour it all over her, but Christopher was going to vent on one of them and Deonne was suddenly tired of it.

“Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here, father?” she asked quickly, before Christopher could let loose. “It’s not just because you’re a bigoted vampire hater, or you would have come and hauled me out of their grip six months ago.”

Christopher let out a gusty breath of air. “How
dare
you speak to me that way.”

“I dare, because it’s the truth and you know it,” she snapped back. “Father, you woke me in the middle of the night without warning. You’ve insulted my friend, his race, Swedes and their décor, my security chief, and you’ve only been in the country for, what? An hour? You used to be better than this at diplomacy.”

Christopher pushed his hand through his thinning hair, ruffling it, and Deonne knew she had ruffled his composure just as much in order for him to discard concern about his appearance. “What do you want me to say?” he asked, after a long silence.

“The truth usually works well,” Justin suggested.

Christopher scowled at him. Then he sighed. “Very well,” he said, looking at her. “I want you to come home, Deonne. Come home with me now. Tonight. This morning, I mean.”

Deonne stared at him, trying to encompass that Christopher Rinaldi was actually speaking the words that once upon a time she had fantasized about hearing. “What?” she asked, sounding vacant and stupid in comparison. “This is a joke, right?”

She glanced at Justin to catch his reaction to this extraordinary development.

He wore a small, wise smile. It even seemed cynical. “Tell her the rest,” he said.

Christopher scowled at Justin. “Does he really have to be here?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said flatly.

“Ask him to tell you the rest,” Justin said, still not raising his voice above the even, placid tone he’d been using all along.

“What ‘rest’?” she demanded, looking at her father. “What else could there be?”

“Just the money,” Justin said.

Her father’s nostrils flared again, but then she saw something majestic: She saw her father fight to bring himself under control. He breathed and swallowed back his ire, his gaze on the floor. Then he lifted his gaze back to her face. “Your…
friend
…naturally uses the most unflattering phrase he can reach for.”

Deonne stared at him, bewildered.

Christopher held his hand out to her in supplication. “I wronged you, all those years ago,” he said. “I know that now. I came here to make amends.”

Justin snorted.

Christopher ignored him. “I have arranged a transfer of five million credits to your old credit card…you still use it, don’t you? It’s the first step in my plan to make up for the years we’ve lost.”

Deonne was genuinely speechless.

“
If
you go back with him, of course,” Justin said. “If you don’t, he’s going to rip the money out of your account quicker’n a lizard on a hot tin roof. Care to lay a bet on it, Deonne?”

Deonne could feel her heart drop into the region around the bottom of her stomach with a breathless little freefall that made her feel sick, as she realized that this was a horrible possibility. She speared her father with an accusatory glance.

Christopher was glaring at Justin, his fury glowing a deep red across his face.

Deonne moaned, clutching at her heart. “Justin is right, isn’t he?” Her lips were thick and uncooperative.

Christopher tried to haul in his anger. He tried to recover and slide on a civilized mask. She watched him do it as he turned his face to look at her. When had he become so transparent? Or had she learned how to read him, finally, after all these years?

“Get out,” she whispered.

“Deonne…” Christopher began, using a warm, conciliatory tone.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Dee…”

She looked at Justin. It wasn’t exactly a plea for help, because in all the years she’d had to deal with her father, there had never been anyone who could stand up to him, including her. But she couldn’t bear to look at her father now, to see the held-back fury behind the veneer of civility. The worst was that he seemed to think she was ignorant…that she couldn’t see hiss crass manipulations for what they were.

Had she simply grown up? Or had she out-grown him?

So she turned her gaze away from her father and looked at Justin instead.

Justin’s eyes narrowed. “Right,” he said, his voice still the same even, reasonable tone he had been using all along. “I think we’ve had about enough of this.” He moved over to Christopher’s side and took hold of his arm. “Come on, mate. You’re out of here.”

“I bet your pardon?” Christopher said. He looked down at Justin’s hand on his arm. “Take your hand off me at once.”

“I will, in about sixty seconds. Either you walk through that door under your own steam or I push you through. Your choice. Fifty seconds.” Justin glanced at Deonne. “Could you do me a favor and punch in the security code? It’ll save me a couple of seconds.”

She wanted to protest over this manhandling of her father but really, he had brought this upon himself by behaving so badly. It was about time he got to suffer through the consequences of his actions instead of everyone being too scared of him and tiptoeing around him and letting him get away with boorish crap. It took a vampire with their centuries of experience dealing with bullshit combined with their physical strength to overcome him.

She hurried over to the door and punched in the security code again. The door unlocked with the same heavy mechanical thud as before. She remembered Kieran’s instructions and cracked the door an inch or two and looked out, before swinging it open wider.

There was no one in the passage, so she stepped out of the way.

“Thirty seconds,” Justin told Christopher Rinaldi.

“I see I am not welcome here,” Christopher said. He moved his head, as if he were trying to stretch and clear his throat. “I am more disappointed in you than any words I say can possibly express, daughter.”

Deonne held herself rigid, as if that would stop his statement from sinking any deeper than surface level.

Christopher moved toward the door and Justin shadowed him all the way there. Her father glanced back at her once before he stepped through. “They will destroy your life in so many ways. They don’t stop at just blood, Deonne.”

“Get out,” she said, for the last time. She had to fight to keep her voice low and contained or she would have screamed it.

Christopher didn’t try for the last word, or even a last glance. He just strode through the door as if he was heading out for coffee and would be back in a moment, leaving Deonne standing at the door and Justin on the other side.

Justin shut the door gently behind her father, leaving them alone.

Chapter Nine

Stockholm, Sweden, 2264 A.D.:
Justin lifted up his hand and considered his fingernails. “That was…interesting.”

Deonne cleared her throat, but had nothing to say. She needed to think, first. She needed to absorb what just happened. She went over to the
chaise longue
and sat on the square end, looking out the window. Pale streaks painted the night sky. It was close to dawn already.

Justin settled himself on the low arm of the chair opposite her. “You called your father a bigot,” he said.

Deonne wince. “It was deserved.” She tried to meet his gaze. There was no judgment in Justin’s expression and that made it easier. “I had no idea he was…like that.”

“He’s the one who should be apologizing. Not you.”

“I’m not. Apologizing.” She sighed. “I think.” She bit her lip. “I don’t know what I think, Justin.”

He tilted his head to look at her more closely. “You’re embarrassed.”

Deonne grimaced. “I suppose…yes.” She sighed again. “I really didn’t know he felt like that. He’s hidden it from me.”

“Until now.” Justin leaned over and picked up her hand, tugging her to her feet, and pulling her closer to him. She bumped up against the insides of his thighs and he dropped his hands to her hips, keeping her there.

“Can someone be a bigot for hating vampires?” he asked. “Bigots hate different races. We’re not even the same species.”

“You’re human under the vampire overcoat,” she told him.

Justin smiled, but there was no humor in the expression. “Is that what you think?”

“You started out human,” she reminded him. “That didn’t go away.”

He let her go, pushing her gently back so he could stand up. “I think we’ve all been behaving too nicely around you. You haven’t seen enough of real vampires.”

Deonne propped her hand on her hip. “Like threatening to take my head off for me? That sort of behavior?”

“That was playtime.” Justin shrugged.

“What are you trying to say, Justin? If I witnessed your…what, your inner soul, I’d curl up and wilt away because it would be too much for me?”

“We don’t have inner souls,” Justin shot back. “We’re damned according to every doctrine out there and the atheists think we’re unnatural aberrations, just to add the final kicker. Despite two hundred years of respectability we still haven’t won approval or social acceptance because deep down in their gut, humans
know
. They know we’re no bloody good and they’re right.”

Deonne stared at him, appalled. “What are you saying? You just helped me kick my father out because he doesn’t like vampires and now you’re saying exactly the same thing…and you
are
one!”

Justin shook his head. “Your father hates us based on fear and ignorance. Prejudice, pure and simple. I distrust vampires…I don’t like the breed in general because I
know
them, Deonne. I’ve watched them for centuries and nothing they have done has endeared them to me.”

“Despite being one of them,” she finished.

“Despite being one of them,” he repeated, bitterness dripping from every word.

Deonne realized she was breathing hard, like she had run a quarter-mile dash. She was frightened. Dismayed. “What about Ryan? Brenden?” she asked. “Surely you cannot consider them to be the lowlife trash you’re painting vampires to be? You work with so many of them. Christian, Tally and Rob. Nayara. You spend time with them. What does that make
you
?”

“The Agency is the exception,” Justin shot back. “The Agency and nearly everyone in it…they’re different. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s something to do with having a purpose.” He shrugged. “Ryan and Nia and Godfrey built a good thing. They saved my life.”

Then his eyes widened in surprise, as if he had just realized what he had said, and who he had said it to. A moment passed, then he blew out his breath, slowly. He shrugged again, a tiny movement. It was an acknowledgement that he had said too much.

Deonne shifted a few steps to her left so she was facing him properly. “I have no idea who Godfrey is. I’ll find out later. But how did Ryan and Nia save your life?”

Justin shoved his hands into his pockets. Hard. He rolled his eyes. “You really need a picture painted for you?”

“Pretend I do,” she replied. “Pretend I don’t want to think the worst of you, that I’d rather you tell me the truth so I don’t imagine it blacker than it needs to be.”

Justin’s gaze drilled right through her. He wasn’t looking at her, she knew that. He was focused on internal thoughts. It was a struggle that went on for long seconds, while she stood holding her breath until his gaze focused on her again.

“Can’t you just pretend I’m a good guy, Rinaldi?” he asked softly. “I like…having you around.”

Her heart was banging against her chest so hard it hurt. “Just having me around, huh? That’s it?”

“Well…” He began to smile, a wicked gleam in his eyes.

“Don’t finish that thought,” she warned him, lifting her finger.

He didn’t. His hands, she noticed, were still pushed deep into his pockets. He studied her. The predator was watching, somewhere in the back of his mind.