The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (30 page)

If he dies now, he’ll never get to see the ring that would announce to the world that we chose each other. And I’ll be left with the ring that says he was my dirty little secret, that he loved me too much to let me go and I didn’t love him enough to admit I didn’t want him to.

Damon Salvatore should never be anyone’s dirty little secret.

I spread my fingers and grip the railing of the balcony. The stucco is rough under my palms and I can feel its brittle fragility. I’ll crush it against its wire skeleton if I’m not careful. My head falls forward and I watch unseeingly as the breeze swirls and tugs at the long, flat strands of my hair.

We’ve talked about getting our own place. After that fight we had when I comforted Stefan about compelling Cali, and in little moments over lunch or in bed since then. Never very seriously: we thought we’d always have the boarding house. But we’re vampires so we knew we would have to live other places, too, and it was fun to talk about what we’d want. An apartment high in a city, or a little cottage overgrown with vines, filled with small rooms and crooked ceilings. Damon’s villa in Italy or a bungalow on a beach, with the sound of waves washing through every sun-warmed corner.

Sometimes we talked about a place just for us, sometimes one big enough for Stefan and Ric and Jeremy, as if they’d always be around though I know they won’t. In my mind, the house was always a little vague but I could see the kitchen perfectly. Our sleek, black coffeemaker and the cabinet above it with Ric’s bottle of aspirin and Jeremy’s comically oversized mug.

My brother can’t stand the idea of having to come back to the kitchen for a refill but he invariably gets caught up in whatever he’s doing and forgets to finish it. Every day I find the mug half-full somewhere in the house: on top of the piano or precariously tangled with the cords of his Xbox, maybe leaving a wet ring on his cluttered desk next to his sketchbooks.

To me, the idea of our own place isn’t so much a floor plan as it is Jeremy’s coffee bucket, Ric’s aspirin and crumpled Starbucks receipts and Damon’s favorite black mug with the chip in the bottom that we both use more than any other dish in the whole house.

It’s matte black, a dangerous-looking color for such an innocuous object and it was flawless when I first saw it. The chip came from me dropping it when I was human, one of the many times Damon startled me by appearing right behind me, perfectly silent and perfectly beautiful. He loved to catch my first, unguarded reaction, even though it usually ended up with me yelling at him, and sometimes smacking him, too.

My fingers press painfully against the balustrade, the texture of the stucco imprinting itself on me like new fingerprints.

Damon’s fingers always toyed with the flaw in the bottom of the cup when he used it, the same way he’d idly run his hand across the chip in the window of the Camaro when he drove. Even though I’m alone, I flush a little thinking of how I damaged the window with the airborne button of his pants that I ripped off when I got a little too excited during the drive home from Whitmore.

How is it the only mementos that my unsentimental boyfriend treasures are things I broke because I couldn’t control my ridiculous attraction to him?

But then that’s just me and Damon: magma-hot sex appeal and a trail of broken things in our wake.

Including the house that used to hold that mug.

My hair tickles my cheeks and I shove it away impatiently, the scratch of my ring against my cheek suddenly reminding me there is one more thing he kept: the partially-eaten Hostess cupcake, tucked into a Ziploc bag and carefully packed into his suitcase.

I shoot back into the room, falling to my knees beside his suitcase that I brought in for no good reason, nearly mangling the zipper when I pull it open too fast.

The cupcake is a handful of crushed crumbs, the disc of hard brown frosting with white curlicues the only thing that’s still recognizable. I open the bag and inhale the slightly industrial scent of sugar and flour and dye, remembering how gently he fed the bite of cake to me.

In my most secret thoughts, when I fantasized about things I’d never admit to my boyfriend, I figured he would be the kind to playfully smash the wedding cake into my face during the reception, heedless of my makeup and the watching guests.

But somehow when he placed that bit of cupcake on my tongue in the aisle of a Mini Mart, it felt like the most sacred moment of my life.

I open the Ziploc bag, a smile touching my lips when I remember how he threw the box on the ground without even looking, but handled this cheap cupcake like it was the only piece of gold in a world sculpted of mud and spit.

With two fingers I pinch a few chocolate crumbs and bring them to my lips. It tastes like salt, from my earlier tears, and it’s already a little stale. I hold the bite on my tongue until it dissolves, like I can take the memory of Damon into me and hold it safe inside my body until I see him again.

He’s not dead. I won’t let him be dead.

It’s been barely a day and a half since we got engaged, less than 24 hours since he was taken from me. We can still find him in time. Can’t we?

Damon’s phone startles me, rattling against my hipbone with a jarring electrical buzz. I dig it out of the front pocket of Jeremy’s old hoodie. My brother gave it to me the night the boarding house burned and it doesn’t fit at all but I can’t seem to stop wearing it.

I don’t recognize the name of the person who sent the text, but it must be one of Damon’s compelled human spies because no one else has this number. And when I open the attached picture I nearly drop the phone.

It’s Katherine, walking across the Whitmore campus with Professor Maxfield. And it was taken yesterday.

My eyes narrow on the phone until I can’t see anything else, my heartbeat pumping deafeningly in my ears. Katherine must have been so angry with us for not treating her like the queen of the universe that she joined the Augustines, and whatever horrors they have planned to get their revenge on Damon, I know that Katherine will only make them more cruel.

I close my eyes and press the phone to my forehead, as the taste of our anniversary cupcake fades away to nothing on my tongue.

*
              *              *

DAMON

“So we’re right back where we started,” I say to Lia. “Only this time we have one cell instead of two, and you have a hell of a lot of insider information. You wanna give me the Cliff’s Notes version of how you’re not dead?”

Lia looks away, her fingers burrowing deeper into the sleeves of her sweater as if she feels like the less of her skin is exposed
, the safer she’ll be. There’s a plain foam mattress on the floor in here, but neither of us moves to sit down. The walls are smoothly painted instead of made of open iron bars, and she didn’t lock the reinforced door behind us, but this is no less a prison than where the Augustines kept me the first time.

“They caught me, that night we tried to escape together,” she begins, fingers fidgeting inside her sleeves. “I didn’t get to open a single cell before the guards nabbed me. They took me out of there and held me at one of the leader’s houses in the country so I couldn’t stir up the other prisoners, who all knew we’d tried to escape. The night you came back and freed the others and burned the lab, they were torturing me to try to find out where you would have gone.”

I swallow hard. They didn’t kill her for trying to escape. I should have known the Augustines well enough to realize they wouldn’t be that merciful.

She reaches out, laying a cool hand on my arm and giving me a quick, comforting squeeze before she lets me go. “They didn’t do anything we hadn’t been through a hundred times before, Damon. And I fed them all kinds of nonsense about how you had this safehouse in Florida, and another one up in Maine. By the time they realized I was giving them the runaround and went to check the boarding house, there was no one there, not even the relative supposedly caretaking the place.”

My lips twitch, but I don’t bother to tell her I’d already killed him. It wouldn’t matter to her anyway. Lia transitioned before blood bags were easy to steal, just like me, and we had both drained enough people to stop counting long before either of us ended up as unwilling guests of the Augustines.

“After your clean sweep of their old lab, I was the only vampire subject they had left, so they couldn’t kill me.” She drops down on the foam mattress and nudges my leg with one foot, clad in stylish black ankle boots. “Which means you basically saved my life. So stop looking like you just strangled a puppy, okay?”

I dig up a crooked smile for her. “Hey, when an old friend comes back from the dead, sometimes it takes me a second to reboot.”

She wrinkles her nose and pokes me a little harder with the toe of her shoe. “Your
best
friend, jerkface, not just an old one. Don’t even try and tell me I’ve been replaced. You’re not charming enough to scrape up another best friend with only fifty years to work on it, especially without the handicap of having them locked in next door to you.”

I smirk. “Oh, I’m plenty charming. But I wasn’t going to waste it on the likes of you.”

She gasps in feigned indignation. “Keep it up, buddy, and I won’t even smuggle you in any bourbon.”

My shoulders tighten. “Lia, they tortured you to find out where I was, and now you’re somehow close enough to them to escort me to my cell, get your hands on booze, and check on other prisoners? How exactly did that happen?”

I’m trying to be gentle, because I know none of this is her fault. She can’t be sired to the Augustines’ crazy vampire ally, because she was already well past her transition when they captured her. But they’ve obviously found some way to get inside her head and turn her to their side. I’m going to have to get her to realize that before I’ll be able to get her to escape with me.

Lia’s face is solemn. “They’re not like that anymore, Damon,” she says quietly. “When you went on the warpath, one of the scientists took me and went underground at one of their safehouses. He was scared, and terribly alone as the rest of the Augustines vanished, one by one. He didn’t have anyone to talk to except for me, and by the time he was the only one left, we were pretty good friends.”

I don’t bother to hide the curl of my lip. Friends? If I were locked up with one of those scientists, I’d have had to be vervained most of the way to paperweight status to keep my fangs out of his jugular, no matter what kind of cage they built for me.

Lia tilts her head, her hair slipping down over her shoulder. “Dr. Manning knew me too well by then to keep thinking that all vampires were evil, and I helped him realize that it is just our predator instincts that make some of us turn bad. He continued his experiments but changed the focus to finding a way to combat the bloodlust.” She sits a little straighter, her chin lifting as if she’s preparing for a fight. “I volunteered to be his subject.”

I scoff, too loudly so that my denial sounds almost desperate. “You were his prisoner. Somehow I doubt there were too many informed consent forms running around in the basement he had you locked away in.”

If anyone could forgive someone for torturing her, it would be Lia. She’s just like Elena that way: she feels for others so deeply that it makes it all but impossible for her to condemn them. But I don’t want to—I can’t—believe she would join them of her own free will.

Lia isn’t a vampire hater. She never even hated the other prisoners who attacked her for her blood, in the violent days after they took us off our human blood ration. She worked in a hospital as a nurse for years because she liked to help people. But she’d killed humans, too, and it didn’t leave her brooding into ten thousand journals like Stefan. She did the best she could after her transition, and I think she figured other vampires did the same.

Lia didn’t judge. It’s one of the reasons we used to get along so well. And it makes no damn sense that she’d join a secret society based on nothing
but
condemning vampires.

She leans forward, her delicate jaw set hard. “
I
rebuilt the society, Damon. I helped Dr. Manning fake his own death so you’d stop looking for him, and I helped him select allies who wanted to find a way for vampires to live in peace with humans. I even figured out how to help the new vampires control their nature so they could be trusted not to leave and start feeding on humans.”