Adria’s rapt voice brings me back to her.
“He didn’t know what I was going to do, Isaac. He didn’t know.”
I look to and from Adria and Harry, searching for an explanation.
Harry shakes his head. “She’s telling you the truth,” he says. “She was supposed to infect Aramei…not kill her.”
I blink back, stunned as much as Harry was before.
“What?” Nathan says. “How is it you couldn’t see that!?”
Harry breathes in deeply and his gaze strays toward the trees before falling right back on me.
“It doesn’t always happen the way it’s supposed to,” he clarifies. “And I’ll face the consequences of my failure, later. But not from you or anyone else.”
Adria and Daisy’s heads whip around to Harry at the same time.
“Harry, what’s that supposed to mean?” Daisy says.
He walks up and takes her shoulders into his hands, looking upon her with calming eyes. “That’s not important; right now the only thing any of us needs to be doing is getting as far away from here as possible.” Then he looks back at me, seeking my approval. “That is if you don’t care I come along for the ride.”
I’m still thoroughly pissed at Harry, because after all, he knew Adria was going to do something to Aramei and whether it was killing her or infecting her, the result as far as my father is concerned would likely have turned out the same way. I don’t know. We’ll never know. But right now, Adria needs all of the protection she can get.
I don’t answer Harry directly because I can’t. A verbal response just feels too forgiving at the moment, but when I don’t force him away, he’s fully aware of my decision.
Daisy breathes a quiet sigh of relief and laces her arm around his.
“What about Eva?” I say, looking to both Adria and Harry.
Adria lowers her eyes, indicating another unfortunate outcome and I’m not sure how many more of these I can take.
“She was a Praverian,” Adria finally says.
It seemed that Harry was about to be the one to tell me this, but Adria took over for him.
“I drank her Soul,” Harry says. “She revealed herself to me. I think much like Aramei, Evangeline was tired and just wanted to be at peace and so I drank her Soul.”
He doesn’t seem remorseful because of her death, but I get the distinct feeling that he is relating to how Eva felt.
I wonder just how old Harry really is himself.
“No one ever goes inside the cabin except the servants,” Adria adds. “Your father might never know about Aramei until he gets back here.”
Adria chokes out another sobbing fit and Alexandra hugs her tighter. Adria may be strong and she may be able to come to terms with what she’s done sooner than some, but she’s still devastated over it. She cries into Alexandra’s shirt for several long seconds until she forces herself to suck it up.
I let her have her moment with her sister; there will be more, after all.
I look out at everyone else, my sisters and brothers, Rachel and even Sebastian who has been standing beside her the entire time (yes, I find it interesting, too, but this isn’t the time) and I say, “I guess the real question here is, whose side are you all on?”
Nathan pats me on the back. “It’s not even a question, bro.”
Xavier steps up and smirks. “I go where you go.”
“Me too,” Daisy says.
I glance at Sebastian and Rachel.
Sebastian points his finger in the air. “This is and will always be my family, so I’m in.”
Rachel grins wickedly from the side. “I go where the eye candy goes,” she says, and although that’s not much of a loyal response, like always I have to set aside her Vargas lineage.
The few others left who have always lived in the house with us, but were refugees and related to no one, step up to declare their loyalty to me.
“Let’s get on the road,” Alexandra says, holding Adria’s hand. “The only one here I’m worried about is my baby sister.”
More Vargas sensibility, but entirely forgivable.
Xavier’s mouth lifts into a grin as he looks across at Alexandra. “I totally defended your honor with that bitch-ass ex-boyfriend of yours today, not to mention, when I rushed into the depths of Hell to try and break you free from that crazy white-haired chick—I still don’t have your appreciation?”
Alexandra rolls her eyes and her head falls back. “The depths of Hell? Really?” She shakes her head. “Dramatic, aren’t we?”
“What about Viktor and Ashe?” Nathan says to me.
I have been thinking about what to do with them all along.
I look toward the basement where on the other side of it they are still chained to the wall.
“Adria,” I say and she looks up from Alexandra’s chest, “you have five minutes to grab whatever’s most important to you and get in the Jeep.”
Everyone else knows the demand also applies to them and so they all take off together into the house. Alexandra seems reluctant to leave Adria, but finally she heads inside, too. Nathan stays with me.
Adria walks up to me and just stands there, looking at me. Then she wraps her arms around me and lays the side of her face against my chest.
I kiss the top of her head and say, “What are you doing? Five minutes, okay?” I want to just hold her forever, but we need to get on the road.
She looks up into my eyes. “You are what’s most important to me.” And she pushes up on her toes and kisses me gently on the lips.
Viktor is smiling hugely when Nathan and I stand before him in the basement. Ashe doesn’t look happy at all and the other two just kind of sit there.
“You think you can defeat your great father?” Viktor says dramatically. He sits on the floor against the rock wall with his knees drawn up, his hands bonded by chains behind his back. I know one as old and as powerful as Viktor could set himself free from these shackles—not much can hold an Elder and they weren’t made for Elders—but he hasn’t even tried.
“How does it feel, being unbound to her?” I say. A small hint of mockery lies in the question, but I also genuinely want to know.
A flicker of pain moves across his eyes, but he retains the sadistic and humorous aspect of the situation, flawlessly. He smiles wide and says, “It feels wonderful.”
I know that the biggest part of him is telling the truth, that he is happy to be free of her after two hundred fifty years, but there is that small part that not even he can hide entirely, in which he is devastated by Aramei’s death and her connection to him severed. A Blood Bond of that measure, one that has endured for so long, isn’t something any werewolf can just forget. It will take time and discipline and determination, but none of these things are things that Viktor Vargas has. He is his own worst enemy. He always has been. And I think that what’s happened will only push him further over the edge of insanity and that sooner than later, he will be his own downfall.
“You can’t leave us down here,” Ashe growls, jerking his hands and legs, trying to get to me.
“I can and I will.”
“You know this war isn’t between us,” he says. “We could give a shit less about you, or about your tyrant father—let us go!”
I shake my head almost unnoticeably, but I don’t mock him or give in to the argument he wants.
But what Ashe said is entirely true. This war, generations of conflict between the Vargas family and ours, has always been about Viktor and my father. Viktor could’ve killed me that night I rushed in to save Adria from him. He could’ve killed me and bonded Adria to him as forcefully as he did Aramei. But he didn’t because it was never about me or Adria or wanting her as his mate. I know this now.
It has always been about my father and Viktor’s hatred of him. And Viktor took it out on anyone that had ever meant something to my father.
But Viktor is far from innocent in all of this. His treachery and his lies and the pain he has caused so many runs too deep. He passed any point of forgiveness a long time ago, though I know too that Viktor would die before asking anyone to forgive him for anything. He isn’t a broken soul that needs mending or absolution, nor does he want it.
I nod to Nathan, indicating to him that it’s time to go and he follows me toward the stairs.
“WAIT!” Ashe calls out. “You can’t be serious! I just came here for Alex! I just wanted her back!” I hear his chains pulling and loosening and pulling, over and over.
“Bro, I don’t mean to question your decisions, but shouldn’t we take them with us?”
I shut the basement door after Nathan steps out into the hall near the kitchen and then I slide all of the new locks recently installed in place. The door is made of solid steel.
“It would be more of a headache than anything to take them with us,” I say, sliding the last lock over. “And Viktor hates our father so much that I know he would never betray us to him. He’s really on no one’s side.”
Nathan nods thinking on it a moment and then agrees.
“And when Viktor wants out,” I say, “he’ll get out.”
Chapter 30
WE MAKE IT INTO the depths of Sugarloaf Mountain by early morning. The sun hasn’t even broken through fully in the sky. We park our line of vehicles along one secluded makeshift road and get out to travel the rest of the way on foot through the treacherous terrain. Humans rarely tread here. It’s why my father chose this spot to hide Aramei, where he kept her hidden for nearly a year before moving her to the cabin. The cave is deep in the mountain, away from the skiers in the winter and more than three hours off the nearest hiking trail.
We shift into our mediate forms and glide along the tree-filled terrain with the quickness and dangerous grace of cheetahs gliding over a flat landscape.
Adria is beside me the whole way and I’m so awed by her agility and the elegant nature of her movements. It’s as if she’s been a Black Beast even longer than I have. So powerful and adaptive and…so incredibly hot that I….
Focus. I have to stay focused.
The entrance to the cave finally materializes and the sixteen of us enter the area two by two and stop. Harry was able to keep up somehow; another Praverian ability I suppose, but I don’t care enough about that right now to ask.
We edge ourselves through the slim entrance in a single-file line and follow the cold path as it snakes in one direction and descends deeper into the earth. I hear water dripping from several far off spots in the rock and the echoing of their whispers from behind me. Adria grabs my hand and squeezes it.
“Are you okay, babe?” I whisper quietly.
She presses her thumb tighter against my hand.
“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”
I know this must be hard for her, coming here, to see the place again where she saw Aramei the very first time. I know it’s hard and it quietly breaks my heart.
Several minutes later and we emerge from the pathway and into the enormous area that had once been my father’s ‘meeting room’. The only real evidence that anyone had ever been here before are the torches mounted on the rock, which Nathan lights as we pass, the enormous stone table situated in the center of the room and the skeleton of the man my father killed when Adria and I were here. It sits slumped against the rock wall, still wearing the modern clothes he had been killed in; they fit ridiculously over his skinny bones. The skull’s jaw is lopsided and hanging wide open. Its neck hangs haphazardly to one side and I can see the bones where my father’s hand had been just before he snapped them.