Bastard.
He’d called Daniel, just to let him know he had the weapon and that he wanted to talk because certain possibilities had come to mind.
Daniel had grown silent, then finally agreed. “Son, if you’re interested in a trade, I know I have something you’d be more than willing to exchange for the weapon.”
His first thought was Claire, but Rumy had a security detail on her in Santa Fe and they’d been reporting in every fifteen minutes that all was well.
Knowing, therefore, that Daniel wasn’t offering up Claire, he couldn’t imagine what could possibly tempt him. He’d already killed Marius and as far as he knew, Adrien was still hidden away in the Amazon cavern system.
After he’d set the time of the meeting with Daniel, he’d called Gabriel to warn him what was going on and to let him know where Claire was. Gabriel said he’d keep his eye on things until Lucian had finished off Daniel once and for all.
With Claire protected, he stayed with the bomb and the extinction weapon. He watched both put aboard the boat, a job performed beneath several layers of disguises, the trip wire attached.
Dawn crept close—it was an hour away, no more, when Lucian finally piloted the small craft out to the center of Lake Como, alone, to face his bastard of a father. Lucian knew that he sat on enough firepower to get blown into a million pieces, but he really didn’t care. He might even have to pay that price, but he’d do it, for Marius’s memory alone, if it meant ridding his world of Daniel Briggs forever.
* * *
Claire held the curtain back in her room and stared down at twelve, twelve, vampires in the hotel parking lot. She could see a variety of disguises around a team that looked like a special ops force.
Lucian’s concern for her safety had driven a stake through her heart all over again. And now that she’d admitted exactly how much she loved him, tears had been just one of the effects of her exile in Santa Fe. And she wasn’t a weeper. She’d only been in the hotel a couple of hours, and it already felt like a decade.
She kept thinking about her family and returning to them after a two-year absence, what that would be like. She tried to imagine picking up the pieces of her life once more, listening to her friends complain about things like bad haircuts, or the hardship of having to choose a new car, or the price of gas.
She stretched out on the bed and kept staring at the ceiling as though the drywall and texture could give her answers to questions she couldn’t quite bring herself to frame in actual words. She longed to see a cavern ceiling again, maybe the one with light-blue wavy lines where she’d first taken care of Lucian.
She couldn’t even ask her questions, however, because they were ridiculous. Could she make a life with a vampire in a world on the brink of annihilation? Could she live a life that played out only at night? Could she feed a vampire from her vein for years and decades on end? Could she truly leave her family and her life behind?
She’d already made her decision, anyway, so she didn’t need to pose the questions at all.
Rolling onto her side, she saw Rumy’s present still sitting unopened on the nightstand. Maybe because she was feeling so low, she thought this might be a good time to see the smallish thing he’d given her as a going-away present.
She sat up and drew the gift onto her lap. She pulled the bow apart and lifted the lid.
What stared back at her was a set of double-chains, exactly like the ones she’d had removed, only the links were all intact.
Then she understood. The moment she put her fingertips to the chain, a familiar vibration passed up her arm. She felt all that Lucian was flow through her like a welcome cool breeze on a warm day.
A card lay within.
She opened it and saw that the author wasn’t Rumy at all, but Gabriel. “Claire, this is a second blood-chain forged from Lucian’s blood. I wanted you to have it, just in case. I know my son; he’ll never bind himself to another woman. He won’t want to. I have no expectations—but should you change your mind, and feel the need, you’ll have the chain in hand. He doesn’t know I’ve done this; he would be furious. But you have a practical turn and I know you’ll do what you need to do. You’ve proven yourself a dozen times over the past few nights. One last bit of information: I’ve modified this chain, and distance shouldn’t be an issue. Godspeed. Gabriel.”
And Claire’s heart started to ache all over again.
A new blood-chain.
And Lucian.
All she had to do was put it on.
The call to do just that was more powerful than she could have imagined.
* * *
Lucian sat on the boat waiting for Daniel. He held a beer in hand, wanting to look casual, though feeling anything but.
Five minutes till game time.
He wore battle leathers stocked with chains and daggers, no jacket, just a formfitting tee, fighting boots.
He didn’t know what Daniel expected to happen tonight, but Lucian intended to go to war.
Once again he crossed his arms over his chest, the bottle of beer dangling from between two fingers. He wished that Claire was here, that he was still bound to her, but only for one reason: He missed the hell out of her. That damn ache in his chest kept expanding.
And there was the hard truth about Claire and what the blood-chains had really done to him: They’d forced a love he’d never expected to feel.
He loved Claire.
He knew that now.
He loved her with all his heart.
Since the chain removal, he could no longer blame the chains for what he felt, for the intensity of his feelings toward her. He’d been told from the beginning that the blood-chains didn’t lie, but he’d never quite believed what he’d felt for Claire, not until this moment. With the chains gone, he could no longer deny that, despite who he was, despite that his DNA gave him the soul of a monster, he’d fallen in love with a human and for the first time in his life he could picture a different kind of life.
Claire. Claire.
He’d sent the telepathic word shooting into the void before he could stop himself.
But nothing came back.
* * *
Claire.
Still sitting on the bed, Claire tensed up, having heard Lucian’s voice, as a clear as a bell, dead center in her brain.
Lucian?
Though she responded immediately, she could tell her reach, without the blood-chain, went about as far as the wall in front of her. As an Ancestral, he could reach her—yet he couldn’t hear her.
Was he okay?
She rose up from the bed and started to pace. She kept glancing at the chain in the box on the bed. Her heart started to race.