CHAPTER 63 #2
“I was … he was … it was …” I couldn’t catch my breath, the fear and sickness still twisting up my insides. “I swear there was someone.”
God, maybe I’d imagined it again. Maybe the sight of Angelo had triggered the visual. With a trembling hand, I rubbed my forehead, and took long, easy breaths.
“Lilia, are you sure you’re all right?” Her voice held a guarded edge of uncertainty.
Head lowered, I let out an exasperated exhale and nodded. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
“What happened to your face?”
“I fell,” I lied, watching the skepticism deepen her frown.
I needed to get back inside, to shut her out before she got nosey.
With quick strides, I hustled back up the stairs for the door, frowning when the strangeness of her visit finally struck me.
Devryck had told me no one would know I was here.
Had he sent her? “What are you doing here?” I asked, my voice as guarded as hers had been moments ago.
“Perhaps I should be asking you the same question. It’s my understanding you left.”
Devryck hadn’t sent her, then.
“Devryck isn’t here,” I said, backing myself into the house, ready to slam the door in her face, if necessary.
“I’m here, Beautiful.” At the sound of the deep, spine-tingling voice, I turned to see him casually strolling down the hallway, toward me, his hands tucked in the pockets of his dark jeans. A black, form-fitting T-shirt was a contrast to the white button-down he’d worn earlier.
Confused, I took a step back, as he approached. “Where …” Gaze shifting toward the opened door of the cellar staircase and back, I shook my head. “When did you return?”
“Just a few minutes ago,” he said, slowing to a stop. Eyes adoring, he cupped my face and gave a gentle stroke of my cheek just outside of the scar, the urge to turn away from him pulling at me.
In returning my attention to the driveaway, I noted his car wasn’t there. Had he parked it in the garage? Or out back? Had he arrived with Gilchrist?
When I turned back to him, I caught sight of a red splotch at the corner of his eye, as if he’d broken a blood vessel there. My staring also drew attention to a scar just outside of the same eye that I hadn’t noticed before.
The corner of his lips curved to a smirk, and he turned his attention to Gilchrist. “I trust you brought what I asked?”
She held up a black memory chip, and he stepped past me to her side, grabbing her by the waist in a way that looked too intimate.
He pressed a kiss to her lips.
What the fuck .
Jaw unhinged, I stared back at the two of them, trying to discern whether, or not, I was caught up in a nightmare. Perhaps a hallucination. My heart withered, and it was only when my chest punched for air that I realized I’d held my breath.
“What is this?” I managed through choked breaths.
Devryck twisted toward me and smiled, swiping the chip from Gilchrist’s hand. “Isn’t this what you wanted from her, Lilia? All the files on the Crixson Project?”
I shifted my gaze from him, to her, and backed myself further away from the two of them, my head spinning in chaotic confusion. It must’ve been a dream. A horrible, fucked-up dream. “Devryck? W-w-why would you do this?”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t wear a single ounce of remorse in his apathetic expression, as he stepped toward me, reaching out a hand that I swatted away.
“Don’t fucking touch me!”
“Don’t be like that, baby,” he said, while I mentally fought to make sense of the scenario.
Baby? He never called me baby. What the hell was this?
The smug grin on Gilchrist’s face twisted to repulsion as she stared back at me.
“Oh, God, your … your wound is bleeding.” An air of disgust clung to her words, and I lifted my hand to my wet cheek, drawing my hand back to show bright red blood painted across my fingertips.
“That looks positively awful,” she added, still grimacing.
Devryck’s lips curved to a snarl, and he took a harsh grip on Gilchrist’s hair, tugging her head back, the reaction so out of character, I jumped back on a sharp breath.
“Devryck!” she said, her voice affected by the angle of her head. “What are you doing?”
He turned back to me and, from a holster strapped at his hip that I hadn’t noticed earlier, he tugged out a knife, pointing it at me.
Air exploded out of my lungs on a shocked exhale. He planned to hurt me ?
“Go, have a seat in the den,” he commanded in a gruff tone. “We need to talk.”
I didn’t want to talk. I silently begged my head to wake up. Wake up from this horrible nightmare that was tearing at my heart.
“Just let me go. Please. I won’t say anything, just let me go.” My gaze shifted toward the door, gauging if I could slip past him and Gilchrist.
As I lurched toward it, he released Gilchrist and stepped to the side, blocking my escape. “Sit.”
Fuck this.
I spun around on my heel and headed in the opposite direction.
A sharp woosh rushed past my ear and thunked against the wall ahead of me.
I skidded to a halt.
The hilt of his blade stuck out from the wall, taunting me with the realization that it’d just missed my head.
“Don’t make me hurt you.”
Hurt me? I hadn’t thought him capable of such a thing.
I turned around to find him unlatching a second holster at his hip, and before he could remove what I assumed was another blade there, I shuffled past the two of them into the den.
Arms crossed, I plopped down on the couch, my whole body trembling from a mix of adrenaline, anger, and fear. Something I never imagined I’d ever feel with Devryck. I studied the room in search of escape, while my head continued to spin in disbelief.
What had happened in the moments from when he’d left until now?
He directed Gilchrist toward a chair and removed the sheet covering it.
As she took her seat, he placed his hands on her shoulders, rubbing them, and again that smug grin found me. From the floor where he’d discarded it, he swiped up the sheet that’d covered the chair and held it in front of her. “Arms crossed,” he commanded.
Frowning, she kicked her head to the side. “Excuse me?”
Instead of answering, he grabbed one of her arms and pressed it into her chest, then the other, roughly forcing her to cross them.
Wearing a mask of confusion that mirrored my own, she held them there without moving, and he trapped her inside of the sheet, gathering the ends of it behind her chair, back around to the front, and behind her again, securing her.
“We’re gonna play a little game. Lilia. I’m going to ask her some questions, and she’s going to answer. If she doesn’t, you get to watch me soak this sheet in her blood.”
Jesus.
Gilchrist gasped, her face twisting with new fear, and I watched her throat bob with a swallow.
I eyed the exit again, wondering if he had the balls to throw a knife in my skull.
Once she was secured, he stepped back and turned to me. “Are you ready?”
Still frowning, I stared back at him, searching for any sign that this was some crazy scheme he’d conjured, and I just hadn’t caught on yet.
I looked back to her, and for once, I imagined we both agreed on one thing: something was absolutely fucked about this.
“How did Lilia’s mother become infected?”
I snapped my gaze to him, taken aback that he’d ask the very question that’d plagued me since I’d found out about the Crixson Project. The very one she’d offered to tell me, had I left Dracadia.
While I suspected, from my mother’s note, that she had somehow gotten infected in her meeting with Lippincott, I wanted to see what Gilchrist knew. If there was something tangible that I could use against him.
She didn’t answer at first, but with a hard nudge from Devryck, she glanced over her shoulder and shifted in her chair.
“Her mother seemed to have natural resistance, as was documented in her chart. When that changed, I don’t know.
What I do know is, I saw Vanessa with Lippincott four years ago.
About the time she got sick. And I firmly believe it was that encounter which sealed her fate. ”
“ How do you know this?” he asked, as if he were inside my head right then.
“If you’re asking for proof? All I can say for fact is that I distinctly remember her leaving his office. Beyond that, it’s speculation. Who else would’ve wanted her dead?”
I didn’t like this game with him, but I couldn’t deny the relief in knowing that her timeline seemed to match the one from my mother’s note.
“Did you kill Jenny Harrick?” Devryck circled her, coming to a stop in front of her.
At first, she didn’t answer, but when he reached for his holster, she cleared her throat. “No. Of course not. She nosed around, but she wasn’t a threat to me, by any means.”
“In other words, I didn’t want to fuck her, so you had no reason to be jealous.”
She shot him a disgraced-looking glance and nodded.
“Tell her what you told me about Spencer.”
“I learned from Spencer that Mel had made a drunken confession to him, the night he drugged her.” She seemed to shift in her chair, as if uncomfortable in her restraints.
“She claimed to have a sexual relationship with his father.” Her eyes fell on me, the expression in them far less cavalier. “Your father, essentially.”
“And? Why do I care about that?” I snipped, eyeing the door again.
“Don’t be so quick to dismiss the small details, Lilia,” Devryck warned. “They might be important.”
“So we’re clear, I had no part in getting you expelled. I may be a bitch, but I’m not that ruthless.”
I begged to differ. “Spencer mentioned that someone had put him up to drugging Mel. Was it you?”
“I asked him to see what he could gather from her. Drugging her was not my idea.”
“But you manipulated him. Took advantage of him. Why?”
“To live among the wealthy, you have to learn how to manipulate the game, or they will eat you alive. There’s no better way to learn your enemy’s secrets than befriending the son he can’t stand. Spencer was merely a pawn and nothing more.”
Eyes narrowed in disgust, I shook my head. “I was right. You are a horrible woman.”