Chapter 10
TEN
PHOENIX
I slam the door on the car and glare at Lucian, my driver. “I don’t want anyone hearing a word of what happened tonight.”
He just stares back at me with his sunken eyes beneath his too-broad, pale forehead. Always the same with my uncles. “I report faithfully to my Master,” he says in heavily Slavic-accented English.
I try to hold my shit together. “Obviously, I know you’re going to cry to Daddy. I mean, I don’t want word getting to anyone else in the compound. This is not going to become the latest gossip while you all get together in the basement and fuck your blood bags or whatever it is you do down there.”
“Ugly language for such a pretty little girl.” He reaches forward, and I jerk back before he can touch my hair with his too-long, yellowed nails.
He and my other uncles have been trying to touch my hair since I arrived here as a little girl.
Fucking creepy. I cut it all off when I was fourteen to make a statement: Leave me the fuck alone.
I glare at him. “I’m a little girl about as much as you’re a man. We’re both monsters. Don’t make me make you crawl on your knees again to prove it.”
He hisses at me, exposing his fangs.
I stand still, cross my arms over my chest, and wave a hand pretentiously at a large yawn. Seen it all a thousand times before, buddy.
But then I stand tall again. “I’m serious. If I hear one word of this around the compound, you’ll wish all I was making you do was crawl.”
“What?” he demands. “What can you do?”
I smile at him. “You’ll just have to wait. And wonder.” I make a pow motion and walk away from him. Better to be thought of as a scary monster than a pretty little girl.
Most times, I didn’t think I was either, but on nights like tonight…
Then, of course, Layden is on me from the second I get near the door of my room.
He’s waiting for me outside my door and follows me as soon as I push inside.
We’re always in and out of each other’s rooms since there’s nothing else to do down here, so it’s not strange—just not at all what I need right now.
“Hey!” he says, full of all his bubbly good guy energy. “What have you been doing? Where have you been? I’ve missed you.”
I look at the clock on the stove as I drop my keys on the counter, then glare at him in exasperation. “It’s only been like four hours.”
He steps back a little, looking puzzled. “Yes, but you’re are usually around in the afternoons.”
Shit. I scrub a hand down my face. What are we even still doing? It’s been a week since the circle where his curse was lifted. And more and more each day, I’m starting to think Sabra was right. About everything.
“Did you look any more today about getting a job?”
“Yeah!” he said, still all but bubbling over with enthusiasm.
“And I was thinking. This compound and all the surveillance work you do for your grandfather. That’s gotta be a job for more than one person, right?
I’ll stay here. And help.” He grins so big I can see he really does see it as a perfect solution.
Especially when his expression softens. “And I could stay with you.”
I start to back away from him. After the night I’ve had, this is too much. Too much! Too much, too much, too much.
Averting my eyes from Layden’s bright, simmering-with-life gray ones, I murmur, “I’ve got to go wash my hands,” and leave the room.
But Layden has never met a boundary in his life, or if he has, he was asleep too long in the forest to remember them, so he follows me to the little bathroom off the living room.
I start to close the door, and he says, “I thought you said you just needed to wash your hands.”
“Goddammit, Layden, it’s like you’re a needy little puppy that’s not housebroken yet! Just give me some fucking space!” I slam the door in his face. And then immediately feel like a piece of shit.
I look at myself in the mirror.
You are a piece of shit. You killed a man tonight.
The reflection shows what Lucian saw. Pretty, petite. Long black hair. Pointed chin. Big, full cheeks. Full lips.
Tonight was supposed to be just a routine visit with a statesman. I’ve met with him before. There’s new legislation that’s come up, and Vlad needed votes to go a certain way.
But as soon as I got in the room with the man, he started trying to maul me, telling me how much he loved me, how devoted to me he was, and how I was all he could think about. He wanted to leave his wife and kids for me. I shoved him away, but he wouldn’t stop. He’d do anything I wanted, he said.
Which is when I should have mentioned the voting Vlad wanted from him.
Instead, I screamed at him that I wanted him as far away from me as possible. I can’t stand them when they get like that, all but suffocating me.
I turn on the tap, bending over to splash my face with water a few times before standing back up and looking into my eyes again. Water drips down my face and the front of my hair. I get these frightening flashes as if the liquid were blood. The blood I longed for so long in the dark.
“You sure got what you wished for,” I whisper.
“Phoenix?” Layden knocks on the door.
I close my eyes, except when I do, all I can see is the statesman saying, “Of course, Mistress!” and spinning exactly where he was standing in his third-story office building where we were alone after hours.
And then he sprinted full speed toward the window of his office, splitting his head open on the glass and plummeting to his death three stories below.