Chapter Eighteen
Days passed and Brian got no better.
Genevieve brought more and more blood. Beckham and his inner circle spent endless hours locked in the room with Brian. Reyna learned not to ask how it was going. The answer was always a grim look and a shake of the head.
“What do I do if he doesn’t recover?” Reyna asked Jodie one afternoon. They’d locked themselves in Washington’s lab. He hated having them there chatting while he was working, but he relented when it came to Brian.
“He’ll recover,” Jodie assured her.
“Washington, are you sure there’s nothing you can do?”
“I’ve already told you that this is beyond the matters of medicine.
Brian has undergone a severe form of torture.
It has reduced him to a wild animal. You are attempting to tame the beast within.
Under normal circumstances the correct type of blood is sufficient to regain strength and mental cognition.
This is not a normal case. He may never be the same again. I’m sorry, Reyna.”
“I know,” she said.
Jodie turned the computer to her. “My pictures aren’t as pretty as yours, but Perspective is sure to make a splash now, huh?”
“Looks good,” Reyna said.
On the computer was the website that Beckham had designed for her when he had first given her a camera. He’d wanted her to have a secure place to put the images she had taken and Perspective had been born.
Reyna scrolled through the images. Most of them were of the secure compounds Harrington had built.
It showed the around-the-clock guards and barbed-wire fencing to keep people in rather than out.
Someone had gotten close enough to see the holding facility inside where it looked like any other picture-perfect apartment building office space.
They’d talked to a few people about the place, and everyone made it seem like a dream.
Except that the people who went in never came out.
“We’re going to need to go in there,” Reyna said, glad to have something to take her mind off Brian. “Discreetly. We need pictures of the inside.”
“Yeah. One problem.”
“I know. If we send a human in, then they won’t ever come out. I’m working on it.”
“We could see if anyone wanted to volunteer.”
Reyna groaned. “I can’t ask someone to do that.”
“You wouldn’t be asking.”
“What we need is someone who Visage doesn’t know, who will slip us information somehow. But I don’t know who that would be.”
“Or perhaps you could send in a vampire to feed,” Washington said from the corner.
“A vampire Harrington doesn’t know? Who the hell would that be?”
“Or one he does know like Penelope.”
Reyna cursed. “She double-crossed us.”
“What she did was horrible,” Washington agreed. “But I think given a second chance she would make a different decision. It wouldn’t hurt to send someone persuasive to ask.”
“Beckham?” Reyna asked.
“She may be petty and opportunistic, but she has a soft spot for him.”
Jodie held her hands up to prevent Reyna from venting. “Let’s put fuckface Penny on the list. A backup, last resort, if the world is burning and she’s the only double-crossing asshole left. Fair?”
“Fine,” Reyna ground out.
The door to the basement cracked open. Philippé’s stoic face appeared at the top of the steps. He grunted and gestured upstairs. Reyna was on her feet, running as fast as they would carry her. Her heart pounded in her chest as she came to a stop in front of Brian’s door.
Her eyes adjusted to the low lighting almost immediately.
And there was Brian seated in the same chair, with chains wrapped around his body.
He held a dark mug in his hand, looking normal, and not like the monster who had flung blood all over the room, stained and shredded his clothes, and cut chains so deep into his wrists and ankles that he bled from the sores.
“Brian?” she whispered.
“Get out of here,” Brian said, his voice low and deadly. Not the voice of her overprotective, caring brother. The voice of a killer.
“It might be harder for him to face you than us,” Beckham warned her.
“Brian, it’s me, Rey,” she whispered.
“I know who you are,” he said into the mug. “I said get out.”
Reyna’s eyes met Beckham’s. He gestured for her to take another step forward.
“Are you…are you feeling better?” she continued. “Drinking again?”
“I’ve been well fed,” he snarled.
“That’s good. You need to keep your strength up. You lost a lot of weight. I didn’t want to see you die.”
Brian’s eyes snapped up to hers. “I already died and now I’m in Hell.”
Reyna swallowed. “You’re not in Hell. You’re at Washington’s home. Beckham and I brought you here. Do you…do you remember us bringing you here?”
“I remember slaughtering all those people, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Reyna winced. “That wasn’t you.”
“Who was it, then? I was there. I drank their blood. I killed them. I am a murderer.”
“That was the beast within. They starved you on purpose and let the virus ravage your body. You weren’t in control of yourself.”
Beckham put his hand on her back. She sank into that embrace as if it was a life raft in the ocean.
“Just leave me,” Brian snarled. He bared his fangs at her threateningly. He threw his mug across the room. It smashed against the wall and splashed the blood all over the room and onto both Reyna and Beckham. Reyna screamed at the outburst and took a step back.
“I said get out of here!” Brian yelled at her. “I don’t ever want to see your face again.”
“No, I won’t accept that. I won’t abandon you. Drew and Laura are still alive. You’re going to be a father.”
“I’m nothing,” Brian said. He wrenched against his chains. His teeth snapped together. “Tell them I’m dead.”
Reyna swallowed back the tears and then she ran out of the room. She shouldn’t have come. He wasn’t ready yet. She should have waited until he was one hundred percent better. Until he wasn’t still so aggressive. But she had been so excited to see any progress.
She threw open the door to the room she shared with Beckham and headed immediately to the walk-in shower.
She stripped out of her blood-soaked clothes, dropping them onto the floor with a squelch.
Then she turned the shower on to the hottest setting and stepped into the spray.
She scrubbed at her skin to get the blood off of her.
No matter how hard she scrubbed—until she was pink and aching—still she felt dirty.
Beckham appeared at the shower door. He removed his many layers of clothes and then entered the shower.
“I can’t get clean,” she gasped.
“Let me.” He took the loofah from her hand and ran it gently down her back, over her shoulders, and down her arms.
“Becks…”
“I know.”
She threw her arms around him and finally let the tears fall hard and uncontrollably. Her body shook with the force of it. Heat flooded her chest and cheeks as her sobs took over. She felt ravaged from the inside out.
All the while, he stroked her back and held her firmly against him.
“Is he ever going to want to look at me again?” she said through the tears.
“I don’t know.”
“Oh God,” she said. “What will I tell Drew and Laura?”
He tucked the wet hair back from her face. “The truth.”
“What if I can’t?”
“You can. They love him as much as you and will want to know.”
“It’ll break them.”
“No. It will help you all to share the pain.” Beckham tilted her face up to his. “Share it with me. I can handle it.”
Her eyes, bloodshot, stared up into his as her emotions exploded outward.
He clutched her harder as the pain hit him fresh.
But in the process, she felt his resolve to help her.
To love and care for her. And for the first time, she wondered if maybe she hadn’t dreamed his conversation with Katarina.
“Grieve for the dead, not the living,” Beckham said. “This is not the end. Just the beginning.”
…
The next day, Gabe finally called to be picked up. And as much as Reyna wanted to stay behind, it had been five days since they’d found Brian. Drew and Laura had the right to know that she’d found him.
They met Gabe a couple blocks away from Five Points, the club run by the Irish mob of which Gabe was the leader. He hopped into the backseat and slammed the door shut.
“How was the club?” Reyna asked.
“Some fuck is trying to take over, and all hell broke loose when I was gone. I had to put a few people to fucking ground while I was there. Jesus Christ, you’d think it’d be easy enough to intimidate the fuckers. But no, they want to come at me like I’m fucking new here,” Gabe barked.
Beckham cleared his throat. Reyna’s eyes were round as saucers.
“It’s fine,” Gabe said with a laugh and a wink. Typical Gabe. “It’s back under control.”
“Did you say you put people to ground?” Reyna asked.
Gabe shrugged a shoulder. “All in a day’s work. Didn’t think I was all rainbows and sunshine, did you, sweetheart?”
“Going to find out how much of rainbows and sunshine I am if you call her sweetheart again,” Beckham threatened.
Gabe ignored him. “Yeah, well, motherfucking contact won’t respond. I keep getting rebuffed. I mean, it was a last resort to try to reach out to him anyway, but the dude could have had the decency to tell me to fuck off properly.”
“We weren’t expecting a miracle,” Beckham said. He almost sounded satisfied that Gabe had failed.
“How’s Brian?” Gabe asked.
Reyna winced.
“That bad?”
“Worse,” she whispered.
“He’s coming around,” Beckham said. “Just not too happy with himself.”
“I bet. He was a do-gooder type. Can’t see him being okay with killing all those people.”
“It gets easier with time,” Beckham said.
“Sure does,” Gabe said.
Reyna realized that she was in a car between two killers. Both had remorse for their past, but they still seemed unaffected when they had to kill to get business done. Reyna thought back to her brother’s face, and she hoped that Beckham would be right. That this would all get easier with time.
…