Thirty-Three
“I’m not interested in anything you have to tell me,”
I say as I slide a knife across Alejandro’s flesh. It’s a shallow cut across the tip of his penis. Number nine hundred and one out of a thousand. He screams for mercy, howling in the chair he’s tied to, the silver chains around his arms and legs draining away his strength, making him weak.
Helpless.
Just like my wife and Rudy.
“Take comfort in the pain of today,”
I tell him as I cut a short line down the length of his cock. He offers up more secrets about the Death Hunt, trying to get me to stop.
I don’t.
He has already told me Antonio tells them nothing, so anything he spits out under torture will just be lies said to get the pain to end.
It won’t.
“For tomorrow will be worse,”
I say calmly. “As will the day after that.” Another cut, this one around the base of his cock, right above his balls. “And the day after that.” I slice open his sack, following the crease in the middle. “For the rest of your life.” Cupping him, I squeeze a testicle out of the hole I’ve just made. He screams, high-pitched and hopeless, and I meditate to that noise, to these actions.
I normally go nine rounds with a bag when I can’t sleep, but that just isn’t fucking cutting it these days.
Not when I can feel her pain even through the wall I’ve erected. It’s a dull ache in the back of my mind, a constant weight on my shoulders. I want to lower it and feel her fully, to experience it with her so she’s not alone, but I can’t risk using up any more of the blood bond. We already have a deadline of only a few months before it kills her. If I decrease that any further, it could prove fatal. Besides, Antonio needs to think I’ve given up on her, that I have abandoned her like an empty bottle. Otherwise, he’ll take more than just her eyes.
My fingers tighten on the blade, my control slipping as my emotions rear their volatile head.
A week and a half ago, I went to meet one of my capos. After destroying the Death Hunt nearly overnight – with only a few loose threads still needing to be trimmed, Aleric and I have been busy running our expanded territories and businesses. As much as I have wanted to focus all of my energy on finding my loved ones, I am still the Boss, and playing that role has helped me sell the lie that I don’t give a shit about either of them.
But when I came out of that meeting, with Maddox, Enoch, and Stormie beside me, there was a small box sitting on my windshield. Dark teal with a blood-red bow. The colors of the Death Hunt. Inside was a pair of eyes I would recognize anywhere despite how badly they were crushed. I’d never had a favorite color before I’d looked at my wife.
But I knew he would be watching.
Unable to let my grief show, it took everything I had to drop the box onto the pavement and climb into the car. I did not let the others see what it was.
The door to the garage opens. Dayne walks in, unable to sleep either. Ever since we learned that Antonio had taken his breeding women with him, we’ve been in here every night.
When I saw the mess he had left behind at the school – female werewolves with their stomachs ripped open and their babies torn from them, I assumed he had only taken those who were childfree. But according to Jona when we tortured him for info about it thirteen days ago, showing him photos of the dead, he told me Antonio had taken the only women who had successfully given birth to hybrids, all of whom were pregnant at the time we attacked. The others were only carrying full wolf pups; that’s why they were left behind.
Which means my earlier idea of waiting until Micha was pregnant before we rescued her isn’t going to give us the advantage I hoped it would.
“What’s the time?”
I ask Dayne as he moves over to Greyson, the wolf with the missing bone in his arm.
“Four-ish.”
Pulling out a knife, he starts carving Micha’s name into the man’s flesh. Over and over again. We cut out Greyson’s tongue days ago, and now he’s just a pathetic, whimpering mess.
I continue my count of a thousand cuts across Alejandro. My hand stays steady despite the increase of my pulse. We only have one more hour before we need to go.
Ryker Ezwail’ik, the Boss on the other side of the portal connecting Earth to one of the Seven Planes called Blódyrió, has found me two highly skilled teleporters. It’s taken him fifteen fucking days and cost me a hefty fee five times the normal rate, but I would’ve paid it a thousand times over.
Without them, we have little hope of rescuing my wife and Rudy. Vampires can’t phase to somewhere they haven’t been to if it’s out of sight. I could track her down through the blood bond, but it’ll take weeks for us to catch up to the super yacht (if we manage at all), and they’ll spot us from miles away. I highly doubt their boat will be unarmed either. They could easily sink our ship or teleport her out of there before we ever board.
So we need someone to hijack Eduardo’s teleportation network, but if we hire a witch from Earth, there’s a good chance Antonio will be alerted. Then he’ll know what we’re planning and that I care very much about what happens to his captives. For now, I have managed to convince him that Micha is broken goods, yesterday’s trash, and Rudy is a defective Shadow, unable to kill like the rest of us. A softie, a liability, and Antonio taking him has been nothing but a favor.
If we don’t save them in our next attempt though, they will be cut into pieces.
I jerk my knife as intense pain crashes down the blood bond. Alejandro screams as the shallow cut I was aiming for slices off the head of his penis. I push to my feet, no longer squatting between his legs. My heart pounds hard as I turn northeast. Dayne is in front of me a second later.
“What’s happening to her?”
he demands, his haggard eyes full of rage and pain.
Khalid enters the garage, Micha’s soul doll is in his hand. The two of us turn to him, but I don’t need to hear him say the words I already know.
“She’s pregnant with a hybrid.”
“Abort it,”
Dayne demands, and I want to tell Khalid the same. She should be carrying our child. Not one of theirs.
But if Antonio finds out we still have some alexandrite, he’ll take more than just her eyes. He might even kill her and Rudy, deciding to cut his losses and bank on the three breeding women he already has to juice him up enough to rescue Siome. Micha’s only alive because she isn’t too much of an inconvenience. I can’t risk changing that. Can’t risk revealing our hand just to give her momentary relief.
“No,”
I say, turning to Dayne, forcing down my own desires. “They won’t want to risk causing a miscarriage. She will be tortured less while pregnant.”
His jaw tightens, but he nods, and I turn back to Khalid. “Call Vlad. I want an updated list of locations.”
Aleric owns half the police force in this city, and his men have been interrogating the members of the Death Hunt they rounded up. The capos and the higher fish have been transferred to more secure facilities, but he has connections in most of those places too.
When phasing, a vamp jumps to a known coordinate – with a bit of magic to push them out of any solid objects – assuming it goes well. With teleporting, a witch has to make the portals first, etching them into the ground or other flat surface, then connecting them together. Once the gateways are established, they can step onto the portal area and draw a black circle within it. This is the ‘key’ that lets them open the door, and it allows them to only take or send the items they want to go through.
However, the creator isn’t the only one who can hop between them. Any witch who can read their workings can do so, which is why they need to be secured through other magic. An average witch would put the spell around the portal. For someone like Eduardo though – smart and paranoid, they’ll weave it into the portal itself. Meaning a brute force attack will most likely trigger an explosion that destroys it or an alarm that alerts him to tampering.
I’m hoping the witches Ryker is sending me today are good enough to bypass Eduardo’s security. If not, we’ll kill them and get some more. There isn’t a causality number too high when it comes to rescuing my wife.
Rudy will hate me for killing innocents to save him, but he can hate me when he’s back home.
Dayne does not say anything as he follows me to the front porch. Khalid goes inside the house through the side door to make the call, then to rouse Stormie and Enoch.
She’ll need to come with us as I’m still unable to control my powers. It’s common among those who pulse to struggle for months or even years. It’s the equivalent of being tossed a bomb and having to stop it from exploding. The eruption of power is too intense, too blinding and deafening to even hope to know what to do. It took Rudy two and a half years to stop pulsing. Every time it happened, Mother sucked him into the Plane of Monsters. To save the rest of her kids, she had to terrify him. The pain she’s endured holding this family together…
I understand now why she doesn’t believe in true love. If I have to choose between Micha or Rudy…
Perhaps I should ask Mother how she decides.
And how she lives with herself afterwards so if it comes to that, I don’t hesitate in the moment and end up losing them both.
“If this fails,”
Dayne says, finally breaking the heavy silence, “what’s plan B?”
“We kill your sperm donor. And every other teleporter on Earth.”
We’ll still have the issue of finding the ship, but if we can kill or run off Eduardo after he’s teleported Antonio to land, then we’ll have a much better chance of rescuing my family.
Of course, tracking him down will be the difficult part. A coward like him won’t venture off alone.
“Eduardo,”
Dayne says, an almost hiss full of trauma and fury. “I get to kill him.”
“Micha –”
“Will want this for me.”
I glance at him, the words of refusal on my tongue.
I bite them back though. Micha might be my wife, but no one knows her better than Dayne. I might not trust my family when it comes to her, but I trust him.
Because she does.
“He’s yours,” I say.