Chapter Eight
I’m coming, sister mine. J-just a moment.”
As Rhysallhan called out to the front of the mansion, he looked around the conservatory in a panic.
Their father was alive, though barely so, things twitching in horrible ways, the male’s blood spilling from the death wound on the back of his head, but also from his broken nose and his gaping, gurgling mouth.
God, the sounds were terrible, especially the uncoordinated, unsuccessful attempts at swallowing.
“—managed to get you a present, too! I cannot wait to show you!”
Carmen’s high heels started clipping across the foyer’s marble floor, and he blanched as she closed in. “Wait! Stay where you are.”
The delicate footfalls stopped. “Rhysallhan, what are you about.”
Their father’s unfocused eyes fluttered and then looked out toward her voice. That bloodied, lax mouth started to move, the chest inflating as if a deep breath was being drawn, as if Chritophe was about to yell for help—
Rhysallhan raised the candlestick over his shoulder and drove it down with so much force that when he struck their sire’s head, the skull structure caved in.
Oh, fates, the sound. The dull thwack! carried a crunch with a sodden undertone that churned his stomach, and as he wheeled toward the conservatory’s double doors, he panicked about what might have carried through to the foyer.
“Just dropped a plant!” he called out as lightning flashed again and the lights flickered. “Sorry!”
Whatthefuckwashesaying.
“Are you rearranging things in there?” she asked crossly over the rumbling thunder. “You know Father doesn’t like the acoustics to be changed.”
“It’s dying.” He cleared his throat. “I mean, the plant… is dead.”
“What is going on in there—”
As those high heels started up again, he had a momentary lapse in cognition: No idea where he was. What he’d done. Why he had this screaming need to run over and shut those—
“Shut the doors,” he mumbled. “Shut the goddamn doors.”
He hustled forward, bursting through the frosted panels and closing them behind himself.
While he did what he could to catch his breath, he prayed that the scent of all that blood was contained, but what could he do?
Jumping out around the base of the staircase, he pinned a determined smile on his face.
“Hello, d-dearest! Whatever did you buy?”
As Carmen halted, he made a show of looking at the Saks Fifth Avenue bags dangling from her manicured hands. “I see you were able to get some shopping—”
One by one, the bags dropped to the floor and flopped over. “Rhysallhan… what have you done.”
“Oh, you know m-me.” He shrugged in what he hoped was a casual shoulder shift. “I’ve just been here all evening, working on the computer.”
“There is… blood all over your face, brother mine.”
For a moment, his mind froze anew. Then he wiped the sleeve of his blazer across his forehead and cheeks.
As he dropped his arm, his fair-haired sister came into painfully clear focus.
Carmen was willow thin in the manner of all aristocratic females, her first diet imposed before she’d even come close to her transition, her latest one some version of calorie restriction based on lemon juice and cayenne pepper.
Dressed in a summer-weight Chanel suit of pink and cream, she had on a full-length Hermès raincoat in a coordinating shade, and her fragile ankles were like toothpicks beneath its damp, flared hem.
Absently, he noted that her coordinating Chanel bag was on a strap, which was the only reason it hadn’t fallen like the rest of what she’d been carrying.
And then a rush of humid, warm air gave him an excuse to look over her shoulder. “You didn’t shut things properly, sister. Why must I always tell you to close the front entry properly.”
He marched across the distance and did the duty. As he turned around, Carmen was swaying on her heels like the wind was still coming into the mansion.
“Why is there blood… on your hands,” she said hoarsely.
Rhysallhan lifted his palms and had the dissociative thought that the red stain was only on his right one.
So perhaps that was just half as bad? As he took out his pocket square and scrubbed the silk over his palm, he toyed with a variety of lies: A break-in.
An accident. A suicide he’d walked in on.
None of this was part of his careful preparations.
He chose door number two: “There’s been a terrible accident—”
“What did you do, brother mine.” When he didn’t reply, her voice rose into hysteria. “What did you do!”
The shrill syllables echoed upward, echoed all around. To the point where he wondered if the whole of Caldwell heard them.
Before she could do something rash, he caught her arm. “Do not go back to the conservatory.”
Her eyes searched his face desperately, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Who… why…”
All he could do was shake his head.
“Did you kill him?” she breathed. “Did you…?”
With a moan of fear, she began to yank against his hold, her smooth blond hair jostling out of its precisely arranged waves. “Let me go! Let me go—”
“Carmen—”
With a vicious yank, she broke away and ran for the conservatory, following the bloody footprints he’d been unaware of having left on the glossy marble. Except she couldn’t see the body. She’d already been through too much.
Rhysallhan bolted for the frosted doors. Even though pretrans couldn’t dematerialize, between one blink and the next, he traveled faster than she did, and barred her way.
“No,” he said over another rumble of thunder.
She opened her mouth like she intended to argue with him. Then shut it. “You… can’t do this to us. To our bloodline. You can’t… you surely didn’t…”
“I had no choice.” He searched her pale face. “After everything he did to you—”
“I don’t care about mating Theothore—”
“Before that. What our sire did to you… before that.”
With a shudder of horror, she put her hands in front of her as if to ward off blows and started scrambling backwards. When she hit the shopping bags, she tripped her way through them, and then didn’t seem to know which way to go. Out the front door or to the stairs.
She chose the stairs, and fell up the first four steps.
As her ankles buckled beneath her, she stripped the raincoat from her fragile shoulders, and clawed her ascent on all fours, grabbing at the nap of the golden runner like it was a rope she was pulling herself on.
Her breathing was punctuated by screams on every exhale, and with a numbing shock of his own, he could only watch her struggle—
One of those strappy Louboutins popped off and tumbled in a bumping descent. Red sole. Silver straps. Red sole. Silver straps…
Until it stopped right in front of him.
Carmen hit the second story like he was in pursuit with a weapon, and for a featherweight female, her footfalls pounded down the hall. Moments later, her door slammed shut, and he swore he could hear her throw the bolting lock.
Meanwhile, his heart thundered as loud as her retreat had been.
Rhysallhan picked up the stiletto. As he turned it over and regarded the brand’s signature sole color, he looked to the conservatory.
His sister might be uneducated in a formal fashion—outside of setting the perfect table for every meal there was and the expectations of arranged matings within their class—but she wasn’t stupid and vampires had ways of dealing with this.
If she called the emergency services line for the species…
or, worse, the Black Dagger Brotherhood?
Then he was in even more difficulty than he currently—
Knock…
Knock…
Knock.
Rhysallhan’s head owl’d around to the front door just as the great brass knob turned, the mechanism clicked, and the heavy panels his sister hadn’t shut properly before her life broke apart opened again.
The thunder and lightning that poured into the foyer were right out of a horror movie, and so was the slow motion of the swing-wide—
The lights went off as if the entire estate had been unplugged.
As another blast of hot, humid wind barreled in, a streak of lightning illuminated the outline of a tall figure standing in the doorway.
Rhysallhan knew immediately that the enemy who had been summoned by their sire had arrived, and that his only chance to survive the next couple of seconds was to take control.
“My father is dead.” He made sure each one of the words was clear and succinct. “You will deal with me now.”