There was the slightest tinkling as the bullets from Oskar’s chest hit the tile floor. He was almost all the way healed. “Well, dipshit?” I said to him. “You tried to murder the woman you were going to marry?”
His lips curled. “This whore murdered my true father. The one who gifted us with immortality. Who gifted this harlot with—”
“Yo, Kylo Ren,” Jesse snapped. His gun was still trained on Oskar’s chest. “Say one more horrible thing about Molly, I just fucking dare you. You might heal fast, but I know you still feel pain.”
“You don’t understand,” Molly said in a helpless voice. Her face was twisted with anguish. “All this, everything that’s happened, it’s my fault.”
“How the fuck is this clown your fault?” I demanded.
“Alonzo promised me he would leave my family alone if I came willingly,” she whispered. She turned toward Oskar. “But I didn’t know that Alonzo knew about you.”
“Because you never asked,” Oskar said, with acid in his voice. “I was right there, the whole time, if you had only looked.”
“I thought you would marry someone else,” she said. “I thought you would forget all about me. It would be better.”
“Forget about you?” He laughed. “I suppose I did, for a little while. But then Alonzo began visiting me. He would knock on my door in the dead of night and tell me things. Some of them were about you, beloved.” He spat this last word like most men would use the c-word. Like she was filth. “How you were defiant. Rebellious. Alonzo bestowed the gift of vampirism on you, and you were so ungrateful that it hurt him.”
Molly just stared at him with her mouth open, and I couldn’t blame her. Katia’s words rang in my head. Sometimes he would set his revenge in motion even before he had been betrayed. Alonzo had noticed Molly’s independence and begun grooming her former fiancé, intending to use him against her.
But Oskar wasn’t finished. “I begged him to turn me. I would make you fall in line. Make you obey, as you were always meant to obey me. Alonzo made me wait, though, until I was ready.” His voice turned worshipful. “And then I was. He chose me to be his heir. His son.” There was enormous pride in his voice, and if I hadn’t thought the guy was nuts before, this would have tipped the decision.
“You weren’t chosen,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You were leverage. An insurance policy in case Molly got stabby after her apprenticeship. You’re just a brainwashed pawn with daddy issues.”
“Better a pawn than a whore,” he said nastily, and Jesse shot him in the chest.
“No!” Molly yelped. Jesse gave her an innocent, bewildered look, like maybe the gun had gone off by itself. I approved.
Oskar’s hand clutched the wound, but his eyes didn’t leave Molly. “I was supposed to protect him from you!” he yelled. “We thought—we both thought—you had moved on. Why did you come back? Why did you kill him!”
“Because he killed them,” she said flatly. “I went home, decades later, to see what became of my family. Only as it turned out, they had all died the night Alonzo came for me. My parents, my sisters, my brothers. He had killed them even before he promised to leave them alone. He used them to control me, and they were already dead.”
For one brief instant, something almost human flicked across Oskar’s face. “I did not know about his promise,” he said sullenly, and in that moment he reminded me of a teenage boy who’s realized he was in the wrong. “I apologize for nothing, but . . . I did not know.”
She gave him a tiny nod. I could already see him straightening up, looking less pained. We were running out of time.
“What’s the plan, Molly?” I asked. “You don’t want him to die, fine. I think it’s garbage, but whatever. What are we doing with him instead?”
“We take him to Dashiell,” she said, but her voice was uncertain.
“Then Dashiell will just be the one to kill him,” I pointed out. “And if you let him go, he might leave LA, but he’s definitely going to take more women. He’s going to keep doing this.”
Oskar said nothing. He was eyeing Jesse with a wary look, one hand still clapped over the bullet wound. The guy was crazy, but not entirely stupid.
“I don’t know,” Molly wailed. “Alonzo fucked with his head, and it’s my fault! He wouldn’t have done any of it if Oskar hadn’t known me.”
“Maybe not,” I said gently. I gestured toward the vampire, who was still covered in Molly’s blood. “But he’s broken.”
“So were you!”
Touché. That stung a little bit, but she wasn’t wrong. After Olivia fucked with my head, I’d been broken, too.
But now that I was seeing this whack job, I realized that I had only been manipulated. Oskar had been full-on reconditioned. Or maybe he’d always had a little seed of misogyny and violence, and Alonzo had simply spotted it and helped it grow. Either way, the guy didn’t strike me as redeemable.
I glanced at Jesse, but he just shook his head. He didn’t know what to do either. We all stood there, waiting, until the new bullet tinkled to the ground. Then I took a step toward Oskar. Jesse shifted his body so he could keep the gun on the now-human vampire, and Molly wrung her hands, giving me a pleading look.
I walked right up to Oskar until we were almost nose to nose. He smirked at me, but there was a little bit of uncertainty behind his expression. Good luck hiding behind vampire superpowers now, asshole. “You got a raw deal,” I said briefly, “I get that. But how can you not see that selling the bodies of unwilling women is just plain wrong?”
His smirk faded. He looked at me with incomprehension. “Why?”
I blinked. “Why? Why is it wrong to kidnap, rape, and torture young women? Is that a real question?”
“Women are not thinking creatures,” he said, his voice perfectly reasonable, like we were arguing about the cognitive power of, say, kittens. “Alonzo made me see that. They do not know what is best for them. I take them in; I give them a place to live, blood to drink. I make them immortal,” he went on. “What is a little pain, a little time spent pleasuring the greater sex, in exchange for that?”
I felt a terrible anger building in my chest, and at that moment I couldn’t have controlled my radius if I tried. It was expanding by the second. I felt a tiny zip at the new edge of it—the familiar sensation of a vampire’s press, fizzing out against my radius—and a terrible idea was born in my head. I just needed to keep Count Asshat talking. “And the eight girls who died?” I said. “What about them?”
“Twelve was too many to control,” he said, in the same reasonable tone. “Too many bodies to move to this location. The dead girls were collateral damage.” He shrugged in a dismissive way, like when you spill your drink and have to pay for a new one. What are you gonna do?
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement. It was too far back for Molly or Oskar to notice, although Jesse might have. Louder, I said, “If Dashiell’s so powerful, why risk coming to Los Angeles? Was it because of the motorcycle club?”
He gave me a look of condescending approval. “Their leader is a moron who can be easily controlled,” he said. “And he has connections in prostitution and pornography. He can watch the business for me during the day, and if the police ever become interested in me, he will make a perfect scapegoat.” A sardonic smile. “Besides, this city comes with revenge on my whore of an ex.”
Molly flinched. I just stared at the guy, genuinely astonished. The guy was still talking in present tense, as though we were all going to just let him walk out the door and pursue his perverted dreams.
But I needed to keep him on topic. “Three of the MC guys died here tonight,” I pointed out. “You got them killed.”
Oskar just spread his hands with a smile. “There are always more.”
Even though I’d been expecting it, the shot was loud. It rang through the small, empty space like a banshee wail, and before the echo died down Oskar had fallen. Molly screamed and dropped with him, kneeling beside him as blood drained from the bullet hole in his forehead. Jesse turned and jerked his gun up, pointing it at the aging, bushy-haired biker, who stood there with a gray face, a big-ass pistol, and no apology in his eyes.