Chapter Thirty-Six
“Fuck,” Gabe spat. Meghan covered her mouth with her hand. Reyna just stared. And stared. And stared some more.
Harrington waved his hand and said something into the microphone, but she heard none of it.
All she saw was Penelope standing there healed and yet…
rotten. Not that being a vampire automatically made you a bad person.
She knew too many who weren’t. But Penelope had done this post-Beckham.
This was not a clearheaded choice. This was desperation.
“Abort,” Gabe said into their earpieces. “It’s a trap.”
He tried to grab for her, to pull her out of the room, but Reyna yanked away from him.
They had not come this far to turn around and do nothing.
If Harrington obviously could not sense her, then she would make him see her.
They still had this one shot to get at Harrington.
She wasn’t going to squander it just because of Penelope Sky.
With her plan clicking into place, she took a deep breath and pulled off her own mask, revealing her face to the entire crowd.
Harrington’s head turned toward the back of the room. His eyes widened as he took in Reyna standing under a spotlight for all to see. A slow smile crossed his face as their eyes locked. His seemed to say, Well met, little queen.
Instead of walking off the stage as he’d come in, Harrington took the stairs down to the front.
He ignored the excitement and congratulations of his fawning admirers.
His vice presidents pulled in behind him automatically, but Reyna didn’t dare glance at Beckham.
She still didn’t know how much Harrington knew and wouldn’t tip her hand if she didn’t have to.
“What are you doing?” Gabe hissed.
“Getting his attention.”
“Fuck,” he ground out. Then he and Meghan slid out of view to move into their designated positions.
Harrington was walking directly toward her, and as he got closer, she backed slowly out of the ballroom and through the exit.
An empty patio opened onto the entrance to the secluded park that Penelope had cleared for her guests.
She could see her breath in the frigid air as fear of the man striding purposely for her threatened to overwhelm her.
She had learned at a young age how to compartmentalize the horrors of her youth. Visage had only intensified that skill. Survival. She knew how to function when survival was her only option, and she put those skills to good use for what was to come.
Harrington cleared the doorway and followed her into the cold.
“My little queen,” Harrington said in his lilting voice that made her teeth grind, “you have come home.”
That fucking nickname. If she never heard it again, it would be too soon.
She saw the chessboard before her and made her move, praying no one would beat her.
“I’m here.”
“Very elaborate attire for such a thing,” he said casually as if they were back underground and she had to listen to his insufferable chatter. “I do prefer you in white, though. Much more angelic.”
“Black suits me,” she said.
“Not in the slightest,” Harrington said, taking another step forward. He swung his cane in circles. She had been right. He still didn’t need the damn thing. “You are innocent and soft and so very human.”
Reyna clenched her jaw and released it. She hated the way Harrington’s words mirrored what Beckham had said to her earlier this week. How could both men enjoy these qualities in her and be so utterly different? Want such different things from her?
“However, you could have simply walked back into my life. You didn’t need such a dramatic entrance.”
“You like dramatic entrances.”
He smiled. “You know me so well.”
If she didn’t know better, she would think William Harrington was infatuated with her.
She knew he was not. He wanted something from her, and he was a master manipulator.
He would play whatever game was necessary to get her to come to him of her own free will.
That would be easiest for him. Kidnapping was an extra step. He preferred to cut out the middleman.
A shuffle from behind Harrington drew both of their attention. Reyna stiffened when she saw Roland exit onto the patio. Then Cassandra. Then Beckham.
“You know my colleagues,” Harrington said, gesturing to Roland, Cassandra, and Beckham as they followed him outside.
“Yes,” she squeaked out like a mouse.
She was prepared for the possibility of facing all of them, had even hoped that Beckham would be in attendance to protect her. But her preparation didn’t meet with the reality of their horror. Harrington with his lethal calm. Roland, the devious sexual predator. Cassandra, the deranged sadist.
“Mr. Anderson is in a mood,” Harrington said with a wide smile for Beckham. “He’s not pleased that we turned his girl.”
She finally steeled herself to glance at Beckham. He was not her Beckham. He was the senior vice president of this deplorable organization. He was a vampire lord. A murderer, a killer, a monster.
“Ruined her,” Beckham spat instead. His arms were crossed, his eyes flat and lifeless.
“You’ll find another O negative beauty. You always do, my boy,” Harrington said dismissively.
Reyna couldn’t believe Harrington still addressed Beckham as if he were a treasured son. A prodigy. They’d suspected Beckham was on the outs. Had they been wrong? What was an act…and what wasn’t?
“We wouldn’t risk you that way, though, dear Reyna,” Harrington said. “You are much too valuable. But I see that I did it wrong the first time. You can come back and live a normal life. Come and go as you please. We’d be more careful with the blood donations. I’d negotiate to once a week, even.”
He was…negotiating with her. She hadn’t expected that. Truthfully, she hadn’t expected any of it. Harrington was acting as if her presence was totally normal. What he had always expected.
“A normal life?” she asked, hoping she sounded earnest.
“Of course.”
She was pretty sure her definition of normal was about as far from William Harrington’s as imaginable. Any life in which she had to “donate” her blood to keep the biggest murderer in history alive was not a life she wanted to live.
“You’ve already seen what the alternative is like,” Harrington said.
“Yes, I remember clearly what my alternative is.”
He made it seem as if those were her only options. A life as a prisoner or a life as a willing prisoner.
“Certainly, you’d rather have what I’m offering.”
Reyna frowned. The fact that he honestly believed he was tempting her was ludicrous. She suddenly saw again exactly what her life had been like: a white bedroom, IVs ripped out, needles, insanity…B. Always B. The woman she could have been. The vampire Harrington had made into an unstable monster.
“I will not be like B,” she spat, unable to keep up the facade. The idea still haunted her dreams. She suppressed them when she was surrounded by people who cared for her, but staring into Harrington’s face, they all returned.
She saw Beckham’s face crease. She was going off script. She couldn’t mask the anger in her voice.
Harrington laughed. “Ah, B. Perhaps my demonstration was too severe.”
His eyes darted to Beckham. There was careful calculation in that look. A person contemplating poking a bear to see if it would bite.
“But surely you know her name is not truly B,” Harrington said, a slow, creepy smile crawling onto his face.
Reyna stared at him in confusion. She had never thought about B’s name. She had assumed B was just a label. A designator.
After a heartbeat, Harrington said, “Her name is Bronwyn.”
Everything slowed to a stop.
That name. Bronwyn. B was Bronwyn.
Bronwyn was Beckham’s sister. B was Beckham’s sister.
Reyna couldn’t process that. How could that creature possibly be Beckham’s sister? How could she have been his second?
“What?” Beckham snapped. He lost all sense of decorum and stalked forward. Cassandra and Roland blocked his path, standing between him and Harrington.
“Come now, Beckham. Don’t hate me. I’ve had your sister exactly where she belonged all these years—locked up.”
“You fucking bastard,” Beckham snarled.
Harrington found that amusing. “You are the one who created her. It was only safe for the maintenance of a well-run society to remove the loose ends.”
“My sister is not a loose end.”
“She most certainly was when I encountered her. You tortured her into insanity over the course of several years, Beckham. What did you think would happen to her?” He smiled that wicked, pleased smile he wore when he was needling someone.
When he was about to go on one of his soliloquies about how brilliant he was.
“She certainly wasn’t going to regain her sanity working as second-in-command of your army.
If anything, she was only getting worse.
I saw her for the menace to society that she was.
So, I took her out of the equation. Killed two birds with one stone with that one.
Her disappearance was the only reason you ended up working for me.
All worked out in the end, don’t you think? ”
“You bastard,” Beckham said. “I know what I did to Bronwyn, and there is no atoning for that. But she is my sister, and you lied to me and killed someone else to stage her murder. Yet you’ve held her all this time?”
“Well, it was an easy way to get someone else out of the way,” Harrington said as if he were so clever.
Reyna’s heart pounded in her chest. Her eyes darted to Beckham, though he had completely forgotten her, standing there in the cold.
Beckham had done that to Bronwyn. Beckham was the one who had destroyed her mind.
She was one of the people he tortured before the blood type cure.
It pained her beyond belief to think Beckham had created her nightmare, even as her heart was breaking for him.
And suddenly a conversation with Beckham all those months ago in his penthouse came back to her. His words rang in her mind…
“I’ve sought people out, tortured them, drove them mad just to kill them slowly through their insanity. I’ve done horrible things and enjoyed it, Reyna.”
She realized she had never truly examined that statement. He’d done this to Bronwyn, to his own sister. She’d seen firsthand exactly how thorough he’d been. How ruthless he must have been at the time to ruin her in such a way.
Her heart broke for him. For the weight he must carry around. How destroyed he must have been by it that he couldn’t even tell Reyna the full truth to this day. And how difficult it must have been to hold that guilt and try to become a better person post–blood type cure.
“My sister is not a pawn for you to use,” Beckham said.
Harrington shrugged. “I use all my pawns as I see fit, and she is not a menace I want walking the streets of my city.”
“My city,” Beckham growled. “I own this city. I bought it in blood. Bronwyn at my side.”
“That was long ago. Cities no longer belong to anyone. The world belongs to me,” Harrington said. “I did you a favor by getting her out of the way. Haven’t you thrived without her?”
Reyna saw the instant something inside Beckham snapped. Harrington had kept Bronwyn from him all these years, and now he was trying to justify it by calling it a favor.
Beckham unleashed. He lunged for Harrington, who took a step backward in displeasure. Cassandra and Roland still stood in his path. Beckham would have to go through them to get to Harrington. Always another barrier. But there was nothing left in Beckham except revenge, death, and destruction.
He was savage and uncontrollable. She’d seen him fight Roland before, but this was beyond anything she could imagine. His movements were lightning fast. So fast she could hardly register them. He took on Cassandra and Roland as one, hands flying, arms moving, legs kicking. It was a blur.
Beckham was larger than both of them. Roland had a slimmer frame with equally quick movements, and Cassandra was tall and lithe.
She had none of his supreme strength, but she was slippery like an eel, evading capture and delivering blows that would have incapacitated an ordinary man.
Roland was the opposite of Cassandra’s stealthy movements, diving right into Beckham’s calculated advances.
And then the fight shifted.
Beckham had Cassandra in a neck hold, her back to his chest, his arm across her shoulders. His hand cupped her chin. A sickening snap rang out, and Cassandra’s body went limp. The light left Cassandra’s eyes. When Reyna’s gaze snapped back up to Beckham’s there was nothing in his eyes, either.
He didn’t stop there. He used the rest of his strength and physically ripped Cassandra’s head from her shoulders.
He let the body drop, the severed spinal cord showing through.
Blood coated the patio floor. Vampire blood.
Beckham still held Cassandra’s head. Her mouth was still open in shock and fear, her red hair blowing in the winter breeze.
He tossed the head at Harrington’s feet, wiped his bloody hands on his tuxedo pants, and turned to face Roland. He lifted one hand and beckoned Roland forward.
“If you dare,” he snarled.
Harrington toed the decapitated head of his ex–senior vice president with disdain. “Now you’ve made a mess.”
Beckham and Roland weren’t listening. They were circling each other like champion fighters.
“It will be with great pleasure when I finally end you,” Roland said. “After what you did with that little bitch.”
“You always were all bark and no bite,” Beckham said and then lunged.
“Enough,” Harrington said.
But neither of them were listening to him any longer.
Reyna’s eyes were wide with fear. This wasn’t how any of this was supposed to happen. Beckham had snapped. Finding out Bronwyn had been alive all this time had wrecked him. Would he be able to come back from the brink after this ended?
Then she felt Harrington’s hand on her elbow. She shrieked and tried to wrench herself out of his grasp, but he was too fast. He put her body in front of his and held her in place in the same manner that Beckham had just held Cassandra.
He was going to snap her neck.
Fear rolled off her. As if sensing the danger, Beckham tore himself away from Roland and rounded on Harrington. His eyes cleared, and he saw the position she was in. That he should never have allowed her to be in.
One move, and she’d be dead.