Secret Unleashed

Now I had her attention.

Getting my face within an inch of hers, close enough I could smell the fear coming off her, I said, “Maybe I do want that. Maybe you’re the next best thing I have right now.” When I released her, she scuttled out of my reach, touching her neck.

“You’re insane. No one has ever—”

“I don’t care what anyone else has or hasn’t done, Ingrid. I care what Sig has done. Now, I’ll ask you one more time. Get. Him. On. The. Phone.”

The elevator door slid open on our floor, and Maxime was waiting. “Tribunal Lea—”

“No. None of that right now, please. If I hear the words Tribunal Leader one more time tonight, I’m going to snap. Call me Secret or call me nothing, but those are your only two options.”

Maxime gave Holden a helpless glance, to which my vampire consort shrugged. “I once called her Queen of the Bitches, but I think she’d frown upon that becoming commonplace.”

The valet looked appalled. “I… Secret?”

“Yes?”

“Can I get you anything?”

“A glass of blood, my sword and some privacy.” I was deadpan when I said it, but for some reason Holden snorted.

“Here.” Ingrid’s voice was downright frosty as she handed me her cellphone.

“Did you tell him what I did?” I asked.

“I don’t need to tell him things like that. When something happens to me, he knows.”

I snatched the phone from her hand, and knowing Sig was on the other end, I dispensed with any niceties. “You have a lot of explaining to do.”

“If you believe it is necessary for me to explain myself to you, you are sorely misunderstanding the dynamics of our relationship.”

I walked ahead of the others and into my suite. Holden and Maxime were close behind, but I went into my bedroom and shut the doors, wanting the illusion of privacy for this conversation.

“I can’t believe you sent me in here without any forewarning. I think you’re the perfect person for the job,” I said, repeating what he’d told me before I left. “Well, fuck you. You might have mentioned you thought that because the missing vampire was my goddamn father.” The plastic casing around the phone cracked, and I had to calm myself before the whole damned thing shattered in my hand.

“Are you quite finished?” he asked after a period of silence.

“No.”

“Will you allow me to say something?”

“Could I stop you if I wanted to?”

“No.”

“Then go ahead.” I sat on the end of my luxurious bed, the satin bedspread rustling under me. The faint aroma of night-blooming jasmine filled the room, but since I couldn’t see any flowers around me I assumed it must be coming from the foyer.

“What, precisely, is it that bothers you most about this? Is it that you were unprepared to meet your father, or is it discovering—through Sutherland—you and I have a deeper connection than you previously believed?”

His question had me stumped. I still didn’t fully grasp what Sig was to me through this new development, and that set my internal compass spinning.

“What are we?”

“Is that it, then? That’s what has you so upset?”

“Everything about this has me upset, Sig. You surprise attacked me with my father, knowing he was the one you were sending me to deal with. Some warning would have been great, but it’s more than that. I don’t know what this makes you and me.”

“What did you think we were before today?” He sounded so calm I wanted to strangle him through the phone. But none of this was news to him. He’d known everything.

“I don’t know.” Friends and colleagues didn’t seem right. We weren’t lovers, though sometimes he treated me in a way that suggested he’d considered it. But now I wondered if his affection towards me had been for another reason entirely.

That I hadn’t known the difference between attraction and a familial bond skeeved me out.

“If you don’t know what we were, why does it matter so much to you what we now are?”

“Don’t play games with me. You’ve known about this the entire time we’ve known each other.”

“Of course.”

“Is that why you allowed me to hunt for the council? Why you didn’t just kill me on sight when I showed up at your door?”

“Yes.” Blunt. I’d been expecting him to soften his honesty to make things easier on me, but that had been a foolish hope. I had threatened his servant mere minutes earlier, so perhaps he didn’t want to play nice either.

“Holden asked me once if I’d let you drink from me because he couldn’t understand why you were always able to find me. It’s because I carry your bloodline, isn’t it?”

“I think you answered your own question.”

I gnawed on my lip in an apparent attempt to take my frustration out on myself. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters,” I snapped.

“Very well, if it’s so important to you, ask your questions.”

“What am I to you?”

“In what sense?” I didn’t think he was being intentionally evasive, but the question rankled me all the same.

“In every sense.”

“According to vampire genealogy, you are of my line but not directly mine. So while it is my blood that ignites the vampire spark within you, we are not…related. Not in the way humans consider it, anyway.”

That made any past innuendo slightly less sketchy than it had felt a moment before. If I’d had to think of him as my great-grandfather, it made all those times he suggested getting me out of my clothes to be really creepy. Knowing his blood was in me, though, made it difficult for me to think of him as anything other than a parental figure now. As handsome as he was, I didn’t think I could ever get past that notion.

“So we’re connected but not related.”

“Yes.”

“If you don’t think of me as a relative, why the extra attention? Why were you so interested in me? You protect me from Juan Carlos and go out of your way to make things easy for me. You wouldn’t do that for just anyone.”

“You’re correct. I have taken a special interest in you. Imagine my surprise when you came through my door at sixteen, full of spite and angst, and you demanded to be given a job. Picture it from my side, knowing the instant I saw you I’d had a hand in creating you. The spark igniting you had—in part—begun with me. I loved the fire I saw in you, and wanted very badly to know how my line had ended up in this spunky hybrid girl who was more attitude than she was monster.”

His impression of me at sixteen still summarized me in the present, except now I had the power to back my attitude up with something.

“And what did you think when you got to know me?” I lay back on the bed, staring up at the gray ceiling. With the lavender accents in the room I was reminded of Desmond’s eyes, and my heart clenched with longing for him.

“I think you’re an amazing woman, Secret, and I’m proud to have you in my lineage. But you’re as much a pain in my ass today as you were the evening we first met.”

For some reason that made me smile.

“I still don’t understand why you never told me. I shouldn’t have found out this way. It blindsided me, and I was unprepared.”