The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (29 page)

But I forget all about blood when I sit up and look to see who is guarding me.

Lia leans forward in her chair, a grin breaking across her face with the warmth of pure, sweet sunlight.

I blink once, then twice, and then I check my whole body for the burn of werewolf toxin because this is one serious acid flashback I’m having.

Without waiting for me to speak, Lia bolts across the room and pulls me into a tight hug, burrowing into my neck with a happy little gasp that sounds like my name. My arms twitch as I try to reach for her and remember that I’m cuffed.

Over fifty years since the last day I saw her and yet her hair smells exactly the same. It makes me dizzy like I’ve stepped into a past life, into a version of myself that I hardly recognize anymore. Even after a thousand days in a damp, stone-walled cell, her hair always carried a hint of warmth, as if she just stepped out of the sunshine. I inhale it now with tears stinging at the back of my eyes that I’ll be damned if I’ll let her see.

She reaches back and releases my handcuffs with the small click of a key and I let them dangle carelessly from one wrist as I pull away and catch her shoulders, my eyes darting between hers while I check for the flaws that will tell me this is a dream someone is sketching into my mind. She kneels in front of the couch, her eyes an uncannily clear grey-green, with a single fleck of black in the right iris that I had completely forgotten about. If someone is creating this dream for me, they’re damned good.

“Lia,” I growl, “tell me right now that those mad scientist idiots didn’t find a way to create clones or some other crazy bullshit, because I am sick of doppelgangers like you wouldn’t believe.”

My old prisonmate rolls her eyes. “If I were a clone, would I tell you I was a clone?”

My mind feels like it is racing jet fuel fast and is frozen concrete still at the same time.

Cloning duplicates genetic material, which means tattoos and scars aren’t reproduced because they aren’t carried in the genes. I grab her hand and shove up the thin, soft material of her sweater. She doesn’t resist, just waits quietly while I inspect the angry red circle of an old cigarette burn just above the crease of her elbow, given to her by the man who would later turn her into a vampire. The man she would one day kill.

I look up at her and she beams at me, her eyes a little damp. “How,” I say, my voice so raw it doesn’t even sound like me, “in the fuck is that possible?”

Lia ducks her head, using her key to unlatch my second handcuff. “That’s a pretty long story. Sorry for the cuffs; they wouldn’t leave me unguarded with you without them, because they um,” she says and clears her throat, “weren’t exactly sure how you’d react when you woke up.”

“They’ve had you for fifty-seven fucking years?”

The math is throbbing through my head; years dividing into months, weeks into days, days into hours into minutes that remind me of every long night we spent talking through the bars of our cells half a century ago, during the imprisonment that felt like my whole life and was less than a tenth of what she’s suffered.

She takes my hand, our fingers finding each other the way they used to, palms clasped and her thumb cuddled around mine, as if she needed to hold on just a little bit tighter to the only thing we had to reach for.

I can’t stop staring at her, at the face that I thought was long since buried.

Her father was Israeli and her mother an Irish Buddhist, so Lia ended up with an explosion of obsidian black curls, skin like the inside of an almond, and a personality that is all serene sweetness spiked with a fierce hunger for the kind of righteous war that changes the world.

She looks healthy: happy even. Her cheekbones don’t stand out as hard as they used to, so they must have given up and started feeding her a decent ration of human blood somewhere along the line.

But wait, no, Maxfield said that the Augustines could live on vampire blood now. Which means every drop that’s rounding out her cheeks and making her hair so shiny has been wrenched out of a fellow vampire’s veins. The thought makes my stomach kick violently, and as happy as I am to see that she’s alive, I don’t want to touch her anymore.

I pull my hand out of hers, sitting back on the couch of this bizarre waiting room and crossing one ankle over my knee, wriggling my toes inside my boots as if to remind myself that my body is my own, that I’m alive and it’s 2011 and no one has cut into my eyes for decades.

I make my posture casual, but the act can’t touch the rest of me, and I don’t even try. Lia would see through my bullshit anyway, just like she always has.

“I’m going to get you out of here,” I tell her, my voice so serious it scrapes in my throat.

She’s still here because I left her behind, all those years ago. Because I let her stay to try to save everyone, when I only wanted to save myself.

Her face softens. “Don’t worry about me. I’m safer here than anywhere else on earth. It’s different now, Damon. Let me show you.”

My throat twists like someone just crammed a screwdriver into my trachea. Safe? With the Augustines? Did they finally perfect the brainwashing they were screwing around with all those years ago? Or has she just been here so long she can’t imagine any other way to live?

Then again, she’s not exactly in prison stripes: her well-tailored slacks and cashmere sweater are pure Lawyer’s Wife Casual and she even has a little charm bracelet around her wrist. My eyes narrow in confusion and I shake my head, trying to throw off the last of the vervain grogginess.

Lia rises to her feet, taking the handcuffs with her and opening the door across the room. “This is just one of our meeting rooms. Let me take you to your room.”

I try not to hesitate before I look to what’s beyond the door, but my throat catches on memories of bars and damp stone walls scratched with the initials D.S.

Instead, it’s something more like a high-end spa. I step over the threshold, my footsteps strangely muffled on the smooth bamboo floors as if they’re acoustically buffered from beneath. The main room is littered with soft couches and lounge chairs in smaller groupings, though there are only a few people in evidence right now, two talking and one girl sketching with charcoal pencils who looks up to watch me pass by. I toss a mocking air kiss her way and she frowns slightly until Lia gives her a comforting smile and a little wave.

To our right, there’s a whole wall of glass leading to three different rooms, each of which is occupied by a few yuppie-looking vampires. The first room is full of weights and cardio equipment, the second is backed with mirrors and has a floor punctuated with brightly colored yoga mats, and one, unbelievably, is scattered with meditation cushions facing a blank wall with a stylized OM symbol on it.

You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.

I map the layout in my head as we pass closed doors that smell like the cedar and heat of home saunas. There’s not a window in sight, but there are no cages, either. Of course not: these people all joined the cult and nobody has to keep them locked in anymore.

Their sire bonds do that.

All the walls are painted soothing, warm hues, and there’s a subtle watermarked border of leaves along the top edge of the hallway. But the effect is ruined by the harsh, colorless light that leaves everything feeling vaguely industrial and surreal.

“You’d think they could have sprung for something other than cheap fluorescents in their fancy lair,” I complain.

Lia looks sad. “Full-spectrum lights. It helps keep morale up, since we don’t have the luxury of daylight rings.” She glances down at my left hand. “You never figured out how yours was made, did you?”

“I’m not part of the hocus pocus contingent,” I say evasively, still scanning for possible exits as Lia stops in front of a nondescript door and pulls a fat key ring from the pocket of her slacks.

She obviously has enough keys to get around inside the facility these days, so all I need to do is get us through the external layer of security, but I can’t do that until I know what they did with Jeremy and Cali. Assuming they didn’t just drain them.

“Any idea where they’re holding my friends?” I ask, stepping closer and dropping my voice. “Couple of kids barely past puberty, one kind of emo-Abercrombie and one pint-sized punk rocker princess?” I try a smirk, but it feels weak. “About ten seconds after they open their mouths you want to kill them, but they kind of grow on you after a while.”

They have to be alive. There’s no way the Augustines would spare my life and not theirs. Unless they were killed by accident. I remember with growing nausea how easy it is to break a human’s neck. It would only take a moment’s carelessness in a fight and Jeremy is all out of second chances.

“They let the humans go,” Lia says, looking concerned as her eyes narrow on my face. “We have no quarrel with humans.”

My relief is immediately drowned out by the blare of that single word. “We? What the hell do you mean, we? And what about Elena? If you know they let Jeremy go, have you heard if they found any of the others?”

She’s already shaking her head. “There’s been no sign of them. You’re the only prisoner they brought back.”

I close my eyes briefly. As stupid as it was for Jeremy to just take off for the bus station, at least he led the Augustines away from his sister. I just hope like hell she has no idea where I am. If she gets so much as a clue, she’ll sign her own death warrant trying to save me and I doubt they’ll go easy on the vampire daughter of one of their former members.

The rasp of bolts drawing back catches my ears and I open my eyes to find Lia opening a door that looks normal on the outside, but is built like a bank vault when she opens it, two-inch bolts retracting all along both edges that will extend into the thick metal doorframe when she turns her key again. She avoids my eyes as she leads the way inside, and when she closes the door, she doesn’t re-engage the bolts.

Somehow, I don’t get the idea that makes me any less trapped.

ELENA

I can barely feel the bed I’m sitting on, everything that’s left inside of me focused on the ring on my third finger. Lapis lazuli and flawless diamonds, protection and guilt. I love that Damon chose it for me, that the ring I’ll wear for all my immortal life came from him, just like the blood that bought me all those extra years.

And I hate that this might be the only ring he’ll ever give me.

He slaughtered the entire Augustine Society and whoever rebuilt it, they’re certainly not going to forgive him for that. They could have already staked him by now and I wouldn’t even know.

If this were a movie, I’d tragically declare that even if all we got was a summer and pa
rt of a fall to be together, it would be enough. That it was all worth it.

It may have been worth it, but it’s not enough, not by a long shot.

In all his lifetimes, Damon has never been married, and the gravity of the fact that he was finally ready to change that is not lost on me. He doesn’t promise many things, the man that I love, because he knows how uncertain the world is and he can’t stand to let people down.

He was going to promise to be with me and now he’s gone, before he could give me the ring to show that vow, before I could live through even the first day of the decades we should have had together.

It’s not about the jewelry. I’d grind every diamond on the planet to dust for him and everyone knows it. It’s that I wasn’t supposed to know this daylight ring came from him.

I shoot off the bed, my legs twitching angrily as I pace to the balcony and pull open the doors. This vacation rental is beautiful and private, just the kind of place Damon would have chosen. And I hate it because the air from the courtyard is cold and tastes of lies, like the wind on the roof that dawn with Stefan.

Bonnie made this for you last night.

Damon bought me this ring because he loved me enough to look out for me even after I chose his brother and left him to die alone. When I tried to kill myself because of the Hunter’s Curse, he jumped off a bridge with me and searched blindly through the mud while I waited, shivering, in the shadows of the bridge. And he never told me, not even then, that the ring I threw away so cavalierly was one he designed just for me.