Blood Games (Chicagoland Vampires 10)

Cut and print, I thought, and turned the corner into darkness.

* * *

As I walked, I thought about the GP, the testing, and the trail that was currently going cold—the manipulation of Darius West.

Someone—still unknown and at large—had used Darius to take a sizable sum of money from the American Houses, sock it away in a European bank. That he or she was stealing money from the American Houses, sending it back to Europe, suggested a European perpetrator. Maybe the European perp didn’t want to steal from his own—the European Houses.

I’d already suspected a GP member; they were the most likely to have the access and funds to get the scheme under way. Danica wanted Darius’s position, so she had the ambition to do it. But why bother with a complicated theft when you’d already issued a challenge to take Darius’s position—and control the funds yourself? If Diego and Lakshmi were clear as allies, that left Edmund and Dierks as the most likely GP suspects. Both were from European countries, so that didn’t really narrow the list.

I still hadn’t received a response from my father about the bank accounts’ origins. I had asked him to dig out information no one was supposed to be able to access. That was, after all, the point of a Swiss bank account—total anonymity. Maybe he was still looking. And he was undoubtedly busy with his new building project. But ignoring me was still unusual.

Family. Couldn’t live with them, couldn’t run a stake through them.

Cadogan House, I thought, as I glanced up at the stories of stone and glass that glowed above the fence line, was a kind of family. A big, dysfunctional, hyperfashionable family of neurotic vampires who, for the most part, wanted to make something better of the world.

And at the center of it, Ethan. The House, its Novitiates—we were who he’d made us. Vampires with consciences. Regardless his past or what happened tonight and tomorrow, he would still be a Master of vampires to us.

I should tell Ethan that, I thought. Remind him of that before the testing.

When my double circuit of the grounds was done, I walked in the front door, found vampires milling about, waiting for something to happen. The entire House was tense, as if the building floated in a cloud of anxious magic. Testing was upon our Master, and we were nervous about it.

Ethan’s office door was shut, and equally tense magic seeped from inside. I didn’t want to interrupt him, not if he was trying to focus, to prepare himself. But the words still needed to be said.

I settled on a text message: I LOVE YOU, REGARDLESS. REMEMBER THAT TONIGHT.

And remember it, I thought, before you drift so far away that you can’t find your way back to me.

* * *

I’d tucked away my phone, was preparing to go back to the Ops Room, when a familiar face stepped into the foyer.

Lakshmi Rao unbuttoned the short camel trench she wore over a knee-length black sheath, her straight black hair pulled into a low pony that settled on one shoulder. She scanned the foyer, settled her gaze on me.

I stepped toward them. “Lakshmi.”

“Merit,” she said. “Has the Heart House entourage arrived yet?” Her accent was British, and as refined as her clothes.

“Not yet,” I said, taking her coat and hanging it on a rack just inside the door. She was no longer my GP superior, but that didn’t negate a little common courtesy. “She has a couple of hours yet.”

“He is ready?” Lakshmi asked.

The question made something squeeze tight in my chest, and so did the fact that I couldn’t answer it with any certainty. He was resigned to it, was the most I could say.

But where truth was hard to find, bluffing would suffice.

“Yes,” I said simply, chin lifted confidently. “He is.” I hoped I was right.

I silently told Ethan she’d arrived. A door opened down the hall, and he and Malik stepped into the foyer a moment later.

“Lakshmi,” Ethan said, walking directly to her—and not making eye contact with me.

“Ethan. Malik.”

While they stepped toward each other to make their greetings, I stood a few steps away, secondary to the meeting of the Masters.

“We’ve set up the ballroom for your introductory comments. There’s also blood, coffee.”

Lakshmi nodded. “I’d love some coffee. Perhaps we could go upstairs, discuss the rules before Nicole arrives?”

Light sparkled in Ethan’s eyes, and I felt my chest loosen just a bit. We might have been far apart, but we had a proctor who was paying attention.

“Of course,” he said, gesturing her toward the staircase.

I watched them ascend the stairs, Malik in front, then Lakshmi and Ethan at the rear. They reviewed preparations as they walked and had nearly reached the second floor when Ethan looked back, a hand on the banister, and gazed at me.

His eyes were dark, the color of deep forests. He didn’t speak, or blink, or make any gesture. He just looked at me, as if words were perched on the end of his tongue, but he was powerless to release them.

Tears threatened, but I pushed them back, kept my gaze solid and steady. I had needs and wasn’t ashamed of them. But tonight, here in the House with the edge of fear and magic, when the balance of power rested on a knife-edge, his needs were paramount.

I looked back at him and nodded. Just once, just barely, but enough to acknowledge his feelings, his fear, his pain, and the war that waged within him. The war that had consumed both of us.

It seemed to be enough. His posture didn’t change, but something softened in his eyes. Would that something be enough? Enough to get him—and us—through these trials?

I’d offer him more if I knew what to offer. If I understood what solace I could provide that would make him feel better about his past, about Nicole, about us, I’d provide it. In a heartbeat.

Chapter Sixteen

GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF BEST

As time ticked down to Nicole’s arrival, House security ticked up. Vampires trickled into the ballroom, waiting for a glimpse of the contender, or perhaps just wanting to surround Ethan with support.

The room on the House’s second floor was lovely on its own—a large space with wooden floors, gleaming chandeliers, and gilded mirrors on the walls. The ballroom glowed with light and smelled like hazelnut coffee and warm chocolate. A table draped in crisp white linens stood on one side of the room, beverage dispensers and baskets of pastries set atop it.

Ethan and Malik stood apart from the rest of the black-clad vampires who mingled in the room, the magic nervous and leaving a tingling edge in the air. We were riding on nerves, on possibilities our lives—and our House—would change substantially in a matter of days.