Chapter Five
Penny was the mayor.
Reyna couldn’t wrap her head around it. Penelope Sky, the mayor’s beautiful daughter who was in her last year of college, had been elected mayor?
The human girl who was in love with Beckham, who had been the cover for his involvement in the underground rebellion, who was everything Reyna was not.
Penelope, who had been severely burned in the Vault sex club fire a little over eight weeks ago, was somehow mayor.
How the hell had that happened?
Harrington finished his second glass of champagne and waited expectantly. He wanted her to ask more. He knew she was starved for information. Even this little amount made her want to crawl out of her skin to get to the bottom of it.
But that look on his face—that slimy, manipulative grin—said it all. If she gave him an inch, he’d take a mile.
“Interesting,” she said instead. Then she returned her eyes to the party below.
“I have to mingle with the guests and congratulate our new mayor. In the meantime, feel free to partake in the food and drinks provided. If you need anything, there is a speaker by the door. You can request it from the man I positioned outside, and he will bring you what you need.”
Then he was gone.
She released a long sigh of frustration.
She didn’t know what to think about Harrington’s plan.
Of course, logically, she would much rather live in a prison that looked more like paradise than a hospital.
But giving in had as many consequences as resisting did.
It would mean she’d given up on any chance of escape.
It would mean she was okay living the life Harrington had forced on her.
It would mean she was a willing captive, and she was so fucking far from willing in any of this.
She scanned the party as her mind continued to process.
Despite the conversation she’d had with Harrington, she was mesmerized by the ball.
All the glittering dresses and sharp suits.
The drinking, mingling, celebrating. She hadn’t seen this many people in weeks.
It was all so much. Nearly overwhelming in its intensity, after such a stark, dreary eight weeks.
Amazing to think that she had lived this life with Beckham, before being kidnapped. They had shown up at a ball just like this to celebrate Congress’s passage of the Blood Census. That felt like a lifetime ago.
Everyone’s attention drifted up to the stage as Harrington walked onto it.
He was leaning more heavily on his cane than she had seen him do in weeks.
Another of the games he insisted he didn’t play.
She wondered how many people actually knew that he’d found a blood type match.
If she knew him at all—and it was scary that she felt she was getting to—very few.
Probably even fewer knew the match was Reyna.
If he was putting on an act as the feeble old man she had first met, then he was doing it for a reason. Harrington always had a motive.
He finally made it to the microphone. She couldn’t hear what he was saying due to this wretched soundproof room, but whatever it was, he had everyone’s rapt attention. After a few minutes, the audience enthusiastically applauded and Harrington held out his hand to the back of the stage.
Out walked none other than Penelope Sky herself.
She wore a sleek sky-blue ball gown that was both alluring and demure.
Her dark mane was piled up high on her head.
Known for her perfect heart-shaped face, cute little button nose, and matching dimples, Penelope was one of the most beautiful humans Reyna had ever seen.
And even from a distance, she could recognize that Penny looked gorgeous. Yet…different.
Something had definitely changed in her appearance. The burns, even if they were no longer immediately visible, had irrevocably shaped her. Technology was a miracle worker, but even skin grafts couldn’t completely remake Penelope into what she had once been.
Not that her beauty was her only asset. She was already rich and educated, two things that were nearly impossible for humans at this point.
The income gap between the rich and poor was at an astronomical, unprecedented high; money and privilege went a long way.
Her looks were merely a bonus. Still, Reyna couldn’t help, despite everything, thinking that she pitied Penny.
She felt bad that Penny had been left in the fires.
That Beckham had had to go into the club to retrieve her and found her so marred.
Penelope wasn’t even supposed to be there that night. Whatever else had happened, she didn’t deserve that pain. No one did.
As Penelope delivered her speech, Reyna’s eyes crawled the rest of the room, searching out familiar faces.
It only took her a minute to find one of Harrington’s most trusted advisors, Roland, in the crowd.
She shuddered at the sight of him. The man who had tried to force himself on her, who had been determined to have her no matter what Beckham thought.
He’d almost succeeded, too. If Beckham hadn’t shown up, Reyna didn’t know how she ever would have come back from that.
Roland’s blood escort, Sophie, was standing at his side, clad in virginal white as always. Sophie was a willing subject to vampires, but Reyna couldn’t hate her. Every escort in the system had a story, and Sophie’s reasons for joining were her own.
Next to Roland and Sophie was the fiery redhead, Cassandra.
She completed Harrington’s treasured trio—Beckham, Roland, and Cassandra.
She was unpredictable and treated humans as if they were simply a food source.
Her last escort, Felix, had been killed in the underground club fires, but it looked as if she had a new play toy beside her.
Reyna kept searching.
Searching, searching, searching.
She didn’t want to admit who she was really looking for.
She didn’t want to hope that he might be here.
Or face what it might mean if he wasn’t.
Her heart couldn’t take the desire to see him, just to have it dashed.
Hope was the death of the oppressed. It made you hunger, only to be crushed inevitably under the oppressor’s boots.
More applause brought her attention back to Penelope, and she gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth.
There he was. Beckham.
Draped head to toe in a fuckable black suit.
His dark hair, his obsidian eyes, scruff evident on his sharp jawline.
She didn’t know if it was her mind conjuring every minute detail, but it was all there just the same.
Right before her. Fifty feet and a soundproof glass window separated them. It might as well have been a mile.
She couldn’t tear her eyes away. She drank him in like a person lost in the desert, seeing a mirage and drinking the sand to satisfy an impossible, unquenchable thirst.
Beckham was even more than she had remembered. Her dreams, though tempting, didn’t even come close to doing him justice.
He took over the space. Overshadowed the entire ballroom.
He was menacing and terrifying and threatening in one glance, and in the next, he was devastatingly handsome.
He could snap a neck in the blink of an eye and then cradle her in his arms in a loving embrace.
She didn’t deny that he was vicious, that he may have done horrible things before her, before the rebellion, but she could see through the terror and past his mask to the tortured soul beneath.
She wanted to reach out and end this atrocity. But he couldn’t see her. He couldn’t hear her. He couldn’t feel her. He didn’t even know she was here.
He wrapped an arm around Penelope’s waist. He was there…with her.
Reyna felt like vomiting. This couldn’t be real.
This couldn’t possibly be what he had been doing while she had been suffering all these weeks.
Parading around with Penelope and playing their parts for the crowd as the Saint and the Martyr, the nicknames the press had given them when Beckham had carried Penelope out of the fires.
He couldn’t be at her side. He just couldn’t be.
Reyna closed her eyes against the blurry vision before her. This was a trick. It was a plot, a con, a setup.
Harrington had done this on purpose. He knew. He fucking knew.
She had been able to hold a lot back from Harrington.
The real reason Becks had never drunk from her for almost all their time together—that he had still been drinking from Penelope.
The extent of their relationship. Everything that Beckham had told her about the rebellion and his involvement with it.
She had never betrayed him. But she couldn’t hide her feelings for him.
Harrington wanted her to see Beckham tonight.
He wanted her to see that Beckham looked happy and prosperous, that he had moved on.
Harrington wanted her doubt and her unease.
If he had those things, then he could use them against her.
He could make her realize that she was better off with him than Beckham.
She’d be better living a life of luxury rather than miserable waiting around for something that could never be.
She forced herself to look back at the stage. To see Beckham there with Penelope. To see the truth of his happiness. To know what was really happening.
This was a mask. The one he had shown her over and over and over again while she had lived with him. He was presenting this version of himself to Visage and his colleagues and the entire city. Showing them exactly what they wanted to see.
This meant one very important thing: his cover wasn’t blown.
No one knew that he was secretly part of Elle, the rebellion surge against Visage.
No one knew that Penelope had gotten him involved with it in the first place.
No one knew that he had been complicit in the underground fires or secretly working with Elle to take down the company he worked for from the inside out.
When Everett had turned Reyna over to Harrington, he hadn’t ruined everything Beckham had been working toward. Even if it meant losing her.
Logically, Reyna knew all of this. She saw it for what it was. She trusted and believed in Beckham beyond reason, beyond thought, beyond her very existence. That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt to see him down there.
Even if, miraculously, she was able to escape, she could never be with him like that.
Down there, he and Penelope looked like the perfect couple.
A power couple. A blending of Visage and the government.
How could Reyna compare? Reyna would never be able to provide him the sort of power that a Sky had or the cover that she had given him these last few years.
If the goal for the rebellion was a better world, he was better off down there, on the arm of the most powerful woman in the city.
Not to mention the fact that Reyna was a warehouse rat from the wrong side of the tracks who had stumbled into all of this.
She was nothing and no one. She never had been.
She valued her own life and the life she had created with her brothers, the one she had just started to create with Beckham, but she would never belong. Not like Penny. Not even like Becks.
Even though she saw Harrington’s trick, it still broke her heart.
She was about to look away and say enough was enough when something miraculous happened. Beckham tilted his head and looked directly at her.
It was impossible.
Beyond impossible.
His head turned. His eyes lifted. His body tensed. A muscle in his jaw twitched. He was staring up, straight into her eyes.
He couldn’t see her. He had no way of knowing she was there. Nothing about it made sense. And yet…it happened.
She was lost. Utterly lost to him, as she had always been in his presence. For a moment, everything slipped away. There was no longer glass between them, no longer a room full of people, no longer Roland or Harrington or Penelope. Just the two of them, standing in a ballroom, besotted.
She couldn’t tear herself away. She was awash with all the memories of their time together.
Her moment of terror when she had first seen him at the Visage hospital.
The time when he had saved her life from a rogue vampire and carried her back to safety.
Their first kiss in his apartment when she had finally seen his bravado thaw and the real Beckham shine through.
She had been a goner from the beginning, but definitely from that moment on.
She wanted to relive every kiss and every touch and every smile. She wanted him so much it hurt.
She reached her hand out toward him, wanting nothing more than to believe that this moment was real.
That this wasn’t all her warped imagination.
She didn’t want to wake up drenched in sweat again with his face burned into the backs of her eyelids.
She’d dream this again and again to know if this one moment was real.
Her heart fluttered, and her stomach lodged in her throat. She waited on bated breath for the moment to end. But it lingered. It could have been a minute or an hour; she didn’t care.
Then Penelope tugged on his suit jacket. His concentration broke, and he belonged to Penelope Sky.
Reyna’s heart shattered. For a breath, he had been hers once more. She didn’t know if she could ever come to terms with knowing he never would be again.