“Do you know what my husband wanted most?” she said. “He wanted to build the most powerful vampire brood on this Earth. One powerful enough to challenge the might of the Ronin brood that we left behind in the Realm. I gave him two sons, but that was not enough for him. I understood his desire to breed with his pathetic sheep in the hopes of creating more children. But over the years none of them succeeded. Not a single one. Only I gave him his blood-kin children.”
“So you’re saying that Gaius would have happily used her for breeding purposes?” I said with distaste. “It still doesn’t explain why you would feel threatened. Surely she would have been the same as all the others? She would have tried and failed to give him children. He would have grown tired of her like he grew tired of her mother Constance. You would have carried on being his favorite.”
She nodded. “That’s what I thought at first. And then on the week before the party I found out that everything that I thought I knew was a lie. I overheard Leonie and Constance arguing. I discovered that Constance wasn’t Leonie’s aunt but her mother, and that Gaius knew all about it. And I thought why would the three of them lie to me about that? And then I realized the answer, and finally I understood why Gaius had agreed to let that scheming child stay in our home. It all suddenly made sense. She was his daughter!”
I was shocked but I did my best to hide it. I kept silent. I didn't want to interrupt her flow of words. It didn’t make sense. Leonie couldn't have been his daughter because that would have made her a sanguith. Sanguiths were weak and sickly. So fragile that they tired easily and spent much of their early years bedridden. Sanguiths needed to drink blood to survive. Leonie had been sickly but not weak. She had been strong and lively. Yes, her XP meant she had to stay out of sunlight, but she had been raised from a baby by Darya Palmer, who would have noticed if her baby had needed to drink blood.
Leonie could not have been a sanguith.
“They lied about when they met. Constance and Gaius had met a year before Constance moved into our home. He would never have had any interest in her, except she had managed to successfully grow pregnant with his child. So he kept her hidden away until she gave birth, and then they sent the baby to live with her brother. Because Gaius knew that I would have killed the child.”
“Would you have killed a baby?” I said.
“If she had been an ordinary sanguith, weak and sickly as they all are, perhaps not. But she was not ordinary. She was strong like me. And Gaius knew it. That is why he had to keep her hidden away. She was his secret hope for the future. For eighteen years he lied to me about it. Constance’s twin brother Joshua fed the child blood in secret, not even telling his wife. The pathetic man thought that he was protecting the child from Gaius. That was the lie that Constance told him, her own twin. And then, when the girl was fifteen, Gaius decided it was time to bring her to our home. So he arranged for Joshua Ashbeck to die in a car crash.”
I could not contain a gasp of surprise. It turned out that Darya Palmer had not been paranoid about that after all.
Audriett nodded. “He knew that the girl would begin to sicken straight away, now that her father was no longer there to secretly feed her blood. Even the girl had not known that blood was the special ingredient in the so-called medicine smoothies that her beloved father had made for her to drink twice a day. The girl weakened rapidly without the blood, and then Gaius swept in like a hero to save the day. She only learned what she was when she came to live with us. And Constance forced her to keep it secret, telling her that I would kill her if I found out. Too bad for them they were so pathetic at keeping their secrets quiet.”
“She was just a girl, a victim. She didn’t even know what she was! None of this was her fault.”
Audriett gave a snort of derision. “Oh how she had loved it when she realized that she was a sanguith. She came around to the idea very quickly, rejoicing that she wasn’t sick as she had been told her whole life. Suddenly she was special. How quickly her thirst for power grew. She thought she could replace me a mistress of this brood. The foolish creature.”
“So you killed her because you thought Gaius would want her to breed with? To give him more dhampir children? Didn’t you care that Steffane had fallen in love with her?”
“Gaius may have loved Steffane, but he did not know that Steffane and Leonie had grown besotted with each other. It would have incensed him. He would never have allowed Steffane to take Leonie. Leonie was born of Gaius’s blood. She would not have been able to resist Gaius’s mesmerism. She would have bent to his will like a flower in a storm.”
“Did Steffane know that she was a sa
nguith? Did you frame him because you were angry he had not told you?”
“Steffane did not know. The girl was glorying in keeping her special little secret, even from him.”
“Then how could you let Steffane take the blame for Leonie’s murder? You said he was your favorite. You said you loved him.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be Steffane who took her to bed that night,” she said. “I knew Gaius had been planning to bed her that night, and I was so angry with him for betraying me. I had done everything he wanted. I bore him many children though they all perished in my womb. I had weakened myself for him and nearly died giving him the dhampir son he so desired. But I was no longer useful to him. He was ready to move on. And I would not allow myself to be used and discarded. Not me.”
“You wanted to make him pay for it. So it was Gaius that you planned to frame for the murder?”
She nodded. “I spiked his glass of blood with the magical narcotics that Steffane had been imbibing all night. A strong dose, and I added a mixture of Vaerus X and colloidal silver to help it along. Enough to knock him out cold, so that when he awoke beside Leonie’s dead body he would not remember whether he had done it or not. And he would have been arrested, and been sick from the Vaerus X for weeks, unable to defend himself until it was too late for him to wriggle out of it. And I would have been free. Finally I would have been free of him. Free to rule this family as I saw fit.”
Woah. She was cold. I could not help feeling a smidgen of respect for her plan.
“And then it went wrong.” I stated, as if I knew exactly what had happened.
“I had already stabbed Leonie. All that was left was for Gaius to take her to bed. I had arranged for that fool Constance to be in Gaius’s bedroom so that he and Leonie would be forced to go to Leonie’s bedroom where I had planted the murder weapon.”
“The spike that you had stabbed Leonie with?” Suddenly I realized that I had seen the moment of the stabbing in my vision of Leonie in the rose garden cavern. She had been putting a flower in her hair and Audriett had bumped into her. That had been the moment, and I had not realized what I was seeing!
“Yes,” she hissed with satisfaction. “My plan was done. I retired for the night. How could I have known that was the night that Steffane would finally seduce Leonie and disappear off with her before Gaius could get to her? She went to Steffane’s room and Gaius ended up in bed with Constance, and I awoke the next day to discover my son being arrested for murder. Constance had discovered Leonie missing from her room and grown hysterical and already called the police.”
“Was it you that stole Leonie’s body from the morgue?”
“I arranged for a servant to do that. I could not afford for the coroner to discover that she had been stabbed and start asking questions.”
“And it was you who paid off Constance Ashbeck to say that Leonie had been terrified of Steffane? The cowboy worked for you?”
Her mouth twisted into a little smile. “The cowboy worked for Steffane and was loyal to him. But he could see the way the tide was turning and he was smart enough to make an arrangement with me. After all, who would keep him supplied with the vampire blood he was addicted to after Steffane went to jail if not me?”