The Doctor held out a dress. It was the same color as his jacket, which explained why I hadn’t noticed it strung over his arm when he’d arrived.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a dress.”
He didn’t tell me to wear it, didn’t give me any long-winded explanations of why he wanted me to put it on. He just held it out, and I took it. That might have been the thing about him that bothered me the most. The way I obeyed.
Six years working with the council hadn’t broken me.
Two years with Lucas and his pack hadn’t broken me.
Nine days with this man and I would have come if he snapped his fingers.
I didn’t want to obey. I loathed myself for not putting up a fight, and I knew my wolf was thinking of me as a traitorous coward, but I was doing what I had to do. I’d long believed there were two options when it came to survival—fight or flight.
Now I knew better.
There was a third option, and no one talked about it. Fighting was brave and running was smart. The final choice was neither and both at the same time.
Confronted with the end of my life, I didn’t go down fighting.
I kneeled.
I bowed to my goddamn captor. Rolled over and showed him my belly. It disgusted me how easily I’d let it come to this, but the sad, honest truth was…I didn’t want to be hurt anymore. I was standing on a thin line between sanity and absolute madness, and for the moment I was still myself, but I wasn’t sure how long that would be true if I had to see what my own internal organs looked like again.
Wasn’t I already flirting with a very dangerous version of myself? Who was this woman who threatened strangers for doing their jobs? Who was I to imagine taking a life because someone had measured my blood pressure?
Who was I?
Maybe the scary truth about this place wasn’t that they studied monsters. Maybe this was where monsters were truly made.
Chapter Thirty
The Doctor was a consummate gentleman.
He held doors open for me, pulled out my seat at a lavishly set dinner table, and waited until my beverage was poured before helping himself. I stared at the wineglass, wondering if he expected me to drink it, and whether I’d be punished if I didn’t.
The dress he’d made me wear was pretty, and under normal circumstances I’d have been thrilled to receive it. It was knee-length chiffon with a swishy hem and a sweetheart neck. My collarbones stuck out, showing how much weight I’d lost while being here.
The blood-red material made me seem paler than I did normally, but without a mirror I couldn’t tell if it made me look sick. I couldn’t imagine I was very attractive.
Thankfully the dress fit tight in the waist, meaning I didn’t have to worry about it slipping down without straps. He’d even provided me with shoes, a nice pair of flats so I couldn’t contemplate using the heel as a weapon.
I played with the dress’s hem and stared down at the empty plate in front of me, wondering what kind of experiment this might be.
“Can you eat?” he asked.
Ah. So this was going to be the old “see if a rat will eat a cupcake” scenario. He knew I needed blood to live, but now he’d see how I responded to human food, was that it?
“I can.”
“What can you eat?”
I lifted my gaze from the plate and met his. I hated that he could meet my eyes fearlessly, yet I got squeamish from his attention after mere minutes.
“What can you eat?” I wasn’t necessarily trying to be defiant, but I wanted him to know who I was. I was not a meek and cowering puppy. But I would flinch if he came at me.
“Touché.” He took a sip of his wine, and I watched his throat as his Adam’s apple bobbed with each swallow. I could almost see the quivering pulse in his artery, could practically taste the flavor of his blood laced with the wine.
“What do you prefer to eat?” he asked, maintaining a polite tone.
My stomach growled, a comically timed response that made him chuckle. “Steak,” I admitted. If I was going to pretend to be a willing participant in his fact-finding mission, I might as well play along for a while. “My werewolf half can get sustenance from meat, but the closer to raw it is the better. Wolves don’t eat their kill off a barbeque, and I guess our internal wolves are no different. I can eat anything a normal human can, but I don’t gain anything nutritionally from it. Blood and meat, that’s it.”
I half-expected him to start taking notes, but he set his wineglass down on the table and regarded me with quiet contemplation for a moment. “Internal wolf?”
Mine growled at him, but thankfully the sound was something only I could interpret.
“You’ve never asked a werewolf about it? How it works?”
“I’ve observed the mechanics of it a number of times, but most of those subjects were not as forthcoming as you.”
“Shocking.”
“Please, go on.”
“I can’t speak for others, only myself, and for obvious reasons my experience may be different from theirs. I…coexist with my wolf. She is her own entity, has her own thoughts and her own personality. I can feel her as if she is a part of me, but she is independent as well. If that makes sense.”
“And why do you believe this to be different from the experience of others?” He seemed utterly fascinated. I don’t think Jane Goodall would have been this thrilled if her gorillas walked up and started talking to her one day.
“I was born with active lycanthropy.” I wasn’t going to get into the finer details of how werewolves turned one another. He didn’t need to know about the Awakening ceremony, or the hierarchy of the werewolf pack. But any idiot who had seen a creature feature would know it’s not normal to be born a werewolf.
“Born?”
“Yes.”
“Is such a thing even possible?”
I held my hands up in front of myself as if to say, Well?
“Remarkable.”
“It’s rare but not unheard of. It…” I stopped, not sure I wanted to tell him any more details. If I told him babies were only born with active lycanthropy when the mothers experienced physical trauma, what would he do with that information? To me it was just a known fact, but in this man’s hands I could picture a dozen pregnant werewolf mothers being abused in God knows how many ways, trying to turn their babies into wolves. “It’s rare,” I concluded.
Now that my mind had gone down this new track I didn’t want to tell him anything. If he knew how I’d been created, what was to stop him from bringing in those pregnant werewolf mothers and force-feeding them vampire blood?
I was suddenly dizzy.
What if that was his ultimate goal? Not research or scientific understanding, but reproduction? Did he want to study me so he could learn how to make more of me? I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea of a mass-produced army of vampire/werewolf hybrids.
For one thing, they’d be a pretty ridiculous army. Couldn’t go out in sunlight, couldn’t shift without the presence of a pack, basically…strong but not stronger than vampires. All of the weaknesses, only half of the perks. Story of my life.
Why would anyone want more of me?
Maybe if I could make him understand the negatives outweighed the positives, he wouldn’t want to do it. But if he hadn’t yet conceived of the idea, would I be giving it to him?
Or worse yet—for me anyway—would I be handing him a list of all the best ways to hurt me?
My plate became the most fascinating thing in the room again.
“I can’t give you more blood today, I hope you can understand why.” Why did he have to sound like Mr. Nice Guy all the time? It made it difficult for me to think of him as a villain. And he was a villain.
There weren’t a lot of heroes in my life, but I’d met more than enough bad guys to recognize one when I saw them.
“Where did you study?” I asked.
“University of Vienna for my undergraduate. Stalingrad for my Master’s.” Stalingrad. He’d been in Russia when it was still the Soviet Union. That made me feel very, very young. “My PhD was received in Berlin.” So he really was a doctor.
“What was your specialty?”
“I started with research on the mutations caused by nuclear fallout, spent a great deal of time investigating the Chernobyl meltdown. People said the children born from radiation poisoning were monsters, but they were not. Just…different.”
My wine was teasing me, coaxing me to drink it. I needed something to keep me from going stark raving mad in here, but I knew alcohol would only hinder me. I had to stay sharp.
“How did you make the leap from deformed babies to vampires and werewolves?”
“Is it not a natural progression to look at what humanity deems monstrous and wonder what is a real monster? I wondered what it was about ugliness or cruelty that would make someone call another human a monster. So I began to search for the real monsters. It wasn’t difficult, not when you really look. Especially in cities like Moscow or Berlin. Big cities always have what you need, as long as you know which rocks to turn over.”
“What about Paris?”
He went still, his smile shriveling up faster than a deflated balloon. “I didn’t mention Paris.”
“No, but you lived there, didn’t you?”
His silence was all the answer I needed.
“You had someone there to help you find your monsters. Didn’t you?” I’d been thinking a lot about Peyton while I’d been locked up, playing out the ways he’d have known The Doctor and how he would have been able to convince a man like this to take me. My capture had been a risky one, not just picking up a single wolf or vampire in the night. I’d had protection.
“That’s enough.”
“I know. You’re not the only one who can see other people’s secrets, Doctor.”
He got to his feet slowly and came around the table so he was standing behind me. I knew I’d made a mistake the moment his hands rested on my shoulders. I shouldn’t have played the Peyton card, shouldn’t have let him know what I knew.