Chapter 37
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
bloom
Maverick dropped Carter in one of the cages as soon as we got back to the tower. Not the one I’d been in twice, which smelled like cleaning supplies now.
I knew how Maverick and his pack worked well enough to be pretty damn sure they would put his sister in the cage next to his.
To no one’s surprise, a few enforcers walked his sister Riley into the room thirty minutes later. I watched on a security camera from a few rooms away with Maverick, Nolan, and a few others.
My throat closed when I saw her.
She was skin and bones, but otherwise she looked crazy similar to Carter.
Her entire body trembled as she folded into a ball in the center of the cage, looking completely and utterly terrified.
I watched them silently, knowing damn well that Maverick and his pack weren’t going to kill her.
Not when she looked like that.
I understood why Carter had done it.
Hadn’t I just gone against everything I knew in an attempt to keep Harper alive?
But there were lines you couldn’t cross, even for the people you loved, and Carter had crossed them. He intentionally killed both Arthur and Celeste. He’d chosen to poison me.
His options had sucked, but those were still choices he made.
I loved Harper, but even in my darkest moment, I wouldn’t have killed innocent people for her.
I glanced sideways at Maverick, uncertain what lines he would cross for his pack. His family. Me.
Maybe you could cross those lines after all, if you were powerful enough to take down anyone who called you out on it.
Carter wasn’t, but Maverick was.
“You’re going to kill him,” I said quietly, into my Alpha’s mind. I didn’t phrase it as a question. We both knew it was true.
“I am. You won’t be watching.”
No, I definitely wouldn’t be.
Carter sank to his knees next to his sister’s cage. He shoved his hand messily through his hair, devastation written in every line of his face.
I knew the feeling.
I had lived it.
“How are you feeling?” Carter demanded.
“Hungry.” Her voice wobbled. She was only a few years younger than me, but she looked so small. So sick.
“Whoever turned them has been starving her,” Maverick said aloud, dragging his hand over the stubble on his chin a bit roughly as we watched the siblings in the cameras. “We can’t kill her. She has to get a fighting chance.”
“I’ll find a few volunteers to feed her,” Nolan agreed. “I’d use that as a negotiation tactic, though.”
“Obviously.”
“I want to talk to Bloom,” Carter said, standing up straight and staring at the enforcer in front of him.
It was Ryker. He was kind of everywhere. I wondered absentmindedly how he felt about Harper being a turned vampire, since they’d screwed before.
The expression on Maverick’s face told me exactly what he’d said to the enforcer.
Not a fucking chance.
“Unfortunately, your opportunity to talk to the Alpha’s mate has passed,” Ryker said coolly.
“Then you’re not going to find out what I know,” Carter said bluntly. “I’m not talking to anyone else.”
I let out a slow breath.
If he stuck with that, the situation was going to get messier.
“Not even for your sister?” Ryker asked. “We could help her. You’re a lost cause, but she could survive this.”
“No. I don’t trust any of you,” Carter spat.
I obviously didn’t know him as well as I used to think, but I doubted that he was going to bend on that. Who would?
“Let’s grab some food and check on Harper. We’ll see if he changes his mind afterward,” Maverick said, grabbing my hand.
I nodded.
It wasn’t ideal, but Maverick wasn’t going to let me speak with him this soon after he’d gotten close enough to kill me. I needed to give the Alpha time to cool off.
We stopped to grab a few bags of takeout food from the pack’s food court on the bottom floor—I hadn’t even realized it was there—and headed up to the floor Harper was on.
When we stepped into the viewing room and found her lucid again, talking to Oren, my shoulders relaxed.
She was okay.
Rhone was on a chair again, and he and Maverick communicated mentally for a minute before Maverick tugged me toward the door that connected the rooms. The one Harper was in didn’t seem to have any other entrance.
I lit up immediately. “Really?”
“Yeah. If she devolves, you have to get your cute little ass out of the room as quickly as possible.”
“Deal.”
Rhone silently followed us into the room, leaning up against the wall near the door.
Harper’s gaze lifted from Oren to me, and she was immediately on her feet. I threw my arms around her for a fierce hug, and she hugged me back even tighter.
“I told you we should’ve gone to the wolves,” she whispered.
“Next time, I’ll listen to you.”
“No, you won’t.”
“You’re probably right.”
She dabbed at tears beneath her eyes as she let me go.
“How bad is it?” I asked her, hesitating as I pulled away.
“Not great, but I’m surviving for the moment.” She glanced at Rhone. “Thanks for that.”
He dipped his head once.
I wondered if they’d had the conversation where he said he didn’t want her feeding on anyone else yet, but wasn’t going to ask. He had time to change his mind, and she would stand up for herself if he was being a pain in the ass.
“Those look like real, official bites on your neck. Congrats,” she added with a small smile. It reached her eyes, but she still looked like she was in pain.
“Thanks. We also found the killer. Kind of.”
Her eyes widened. “What?! Tell me everything.”
I took a seat on the edge of her bed.
Maverick brought my food in from the other room when I made no move to leave. Harper’s eyes kept flicking toward it, but when I tried to hand it over, she shook her head.
I wasn’t eating fast enough, so Maverick tried to literally feed it to me himself. I swatted him away, but when he declared it a mate thing, I reluctantly took one bite.
Oren and Nolan’s snorts from the other side of the room told me he was bullshitting me, so I smacked his arm with approximately zero force and stole my fork back.
Rhone reappeared in the room a few minutes later with a plate identical to mine. He told Harper she was going to eat it whether she wanted it or not. She threw her plastic fork at him for bossing her around, but when he tossed it back, she managed to get one bite down.
She seemed to shrink inwardly over the short time we spent in the room. When I could tell she was getting close to losing control, Rhone barked for all of us to leave.
I gave her one last hug before walking away.
Harper was going to fight.
I just knew it.
We went back to the cage room after that, and I prepared myself to talk to Carter.
He was still refusing to speak to anyone else. And while Maverick was pissed about it, he had cooled down enough to acknowledge that the turned vampire wasn’t a threat to me while locked in a cage.
We needed to know. Sooner was obviously better.
I understood his reasons enough to bring him and his sister food and coffee when we went down to the cells. He didn’t touch the coffee. Probably assumed it was poisoned, but I wouldn’t stoop that low.
“Hi, Riley.” I stepped in front of her cell, far enough that she couldn’t touch me. Maverick’s hand was locked in mine, his eyes on the man in the other cage as Riley looked up at me with big, beautiful eyes. “How bad is the bloodlust?”
She blinked rapidly, and I realized she wasn’t making tears. She really was starving. “I think I’m dying.”
She probably was.
“Help her, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” Carter said, his voice cracking.
“I’m sorry, but the werewolves aren’t going to help her unless you tell them what you know first,” I said quietly.
It was a lie.
They weren’t going to let her starve to death. Like Maverick said, they would give her a fighting chance.
Carter’s expression was dark. “They’re going to kill me.”
“You knew that before they brought you here.”
Carter’s darkness faded, leaving just anger and exhaustion. “They were supposed to save her. They said they would save her.”
“Who’s they?” I asked.
He clenched his jaw and shook his head, like he couldn’t tell me. “Help her first.”
“Eve,” Riley whispered. “Her name is Eve. The woman who brought the vampire who turned us. Please, let me bite you.”
“Biting another vampire won’t help anything,” I said.
Her gaze lifted to Maverick.
Despite the cage between them, I stepped in front of him quickly. “He’s mine.”
Riley blinked faster.
My heart clenched.
Fuck. She was starving.
“What’s Eve’s last name?” Maverick asked her.
“I don’t know. I was barely conscious. She has long, brown hair and pale skin. She’s cold and unkind.”
The blood drained from my face.
No.
Fuck, no
“Riley, could her name be Neve? With an N?”
“Probably.”
“Was she with a tall, skinny white woman?” I added. “One with blonde hair?”
“Yeah. Molly, I think.”
Holly Valenti.
Velour’s mother. Pepper’s, too. She was the vampire Rhone had killed a few months earlier.
Somehow, she and Neve were behind this. It wasn’t another werewolf pack at all.
“I assume those names mean something to you,” Maverick said into my mind.
“Neve is Harper’s mother. She runs the Guild.”
“The vampire guild?”
“Yeah.”
“Why would they do this?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
It was terrifying, but it was the truth.
“Help her,” Carter plead, his gaze fixed on me. “They’re going to kill me if you don’t. Whatever the cure is, give it to her.”
“Do you have another room like the one Harper’s in?”
“We do. We were attempting to rehab a dozen turned vampires at one point.”
“Would one of your wolves be willing to feed her, so she and Carter can say goodbye before you move her there? He only did this to try to save her.”
Maverick dipped his head. “I can make it happen, but I don’t want you in the room. Not for your safety. For your sanity.”
I didn’t want to be there any more than he wanted me there.
I felt shitty enough for my mistakes with Harper and was still reeling from what we’d just learned.
Maverick squeezed my hip, and I slipped out of the room without allowing myself a look over my shoulder.
Elise and Ken followed me to our apartment, waiting outside when I closed the door and locked it behind me. My back met the wood, and I shut my eyes tightly.
How did things just keep getting more complicated?
Maverick opened the door thirty minutes later, and found me curled up in a ball on the dog bed, under a blanket.
“I need to be alone,” I told him, my voice muffled by the cushion beneath me.
He plopped down next to me.
“I’m serious, Maverick. I need time to process. Alone.”
He tugged the blanket away long enough to slide under it with me and pull me into his arms. “Then be alone, with me.” The soft rush of his voice in my mind sent goosebumps climbing over my arms.
He tucked me against his chest. He’d ditched his shirt, so it was deliciously bare.
Not in a sexual way. Just a comfortable one.
“When I asked Harper about your ring, she told me there are two rules of being friends with you. I told her what we had was more than friendship, and she told me to fuck off with that bullshit. That the best relationships are friendships first and foremost,” he said aloud.
“She’s not wrong,” I said into the dog bed.
“I know.”
“What were the rules?”
“The first is that when you say you want to be alone, you’re lying. You spiral when you try to process alone.”
Damn her for knowing me so well.
“The second is that you always stuff your emotions away, and they often have to be dug out brick by brick, so whoever is mated to you is going to have to be really damn stubborn.”
“My best friend is a bitch,” I informed him.
“No, she’s a vampire. And looking back, I realize she was only telling me those things because she thought she was going to die.”
I sighed into the dog bed, and finally turned my head to the side so I could look at him. He’d pulled the blanket over his head, forming a tent over us with it. “I don’t know how to deal with this, Mav. Any of it.”
“It’s a lot,” he admitted.
Somehow, the admission cracked something within me. Something that hadn’t broken yet, by some miracle.
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to take a nap, and then we’re going to deal with it like we deal with everything else. One step at a time.”
“I don’t know how you always make things feel so… manageable.”
“You can add it to the long list of qualities that make me irresistible.” He leaned down, and kissed me lightly. “Whatever else happens, wherever else the future takes us, you’ve got me, and we can handle it. Agreed?”
“Agreed. Love you,” I said against his chest.
He chuckled. “You’d better, because I’m fucking lost to you.”
My smile was so wide it hurt.