Blood Bath & Beyond (21 page)

Thierry moved toward the door and knocked softly on it.

“What?” Jake barked through the barrier.

“I need to talk to you about something important,” Thierry said. “Please open this door.”

Jake groaned. “Markus will be here soon. Can’t you wait?”

“I think I’ve proven by now that I’m in no rush to escape, since I know your employer will only hunt me down.”

There was a long pause. “Fine. Back away from the door first. And don’t even think about trying anything. I have a stake and Markus has authorized me to kill you if you give me any problems.”

“Understood.”

Thierry returned to my side and I looked at him warily. “What do you want to talk to him about?”

“I need something from him and the other guard before Markus arrives.”

Was he going to try to buy them off? It hadn’t worked for me earlier, but maybe it was all in the delivery. The door opened slowly and Jake glared in at us. David stood next to him with his arms folded. I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to have shoulders that wide. He was like a tattooed mountain. They both
came inside and David shut the door behind him with the heel of his boot.

Jake’s gaze flicked to me and he nodded. “Your girlfriend was determined to get in here and see you. You must be quite a stud.”

“Is that what you think?” Thierry asked.

“Why else?” He shrugged. “But I’m surprised. You master vamps are usually all the same—all talk. I’m surprised you have any action to give. She’s just a fledgling, right?”

“She is.”

Jake’s gaze leisurely moved over me. “Just like Bernard’s wife. You know she was screwing around behind Bernard’s back, right? Fledglings can’t take it for long. They need more passion in their lives than what an ice-cold master vamp can offer.”

“Is that so?”

Jake nodded. “I’ve only been a vamp for a little over twenty years. I’m still considered a fledgling, so I still like it hot.” He grinned under the mustache. “Sarah, sweetheart, you can call me anytime if you get sick of this guy. Not that he’ll be around much longer.”

David shot him a look. “Stop trying to provoke him.”

“Me, provoke? Nah. I wouldn’t do something like that after he’s been all nice and well behaved so far.” He grinned white teeth in a feral manner. “He’s way more pussycat than any lion I’ve ever seen.”

Thierry looked utterly unenthused about joining this particular conversation. “Sarah? Are you interested in seeing other men?”

I looked at him with shock. “Are you serious?”

“Laura cheated on Bernard, starting shortly after
they were married. Trailing after him with his job as consultant bored her, so she found other ways to…amuse herself. This was not a secret, even though she thought it was.”

“I hear he did the same thing. What’s your point?”

“Bernard tolerated her infidelity because it kept her happy.”

“Are you asking if I’m thinking of cheating on you in order to stay happy?” My mouth dropped open and my cheeks flared with heat. “This is ridiculous.”

“You can’t blame me for being curious.”

My anger from before cranked back up again as I glared at him, speechless.

Thierry’s gaze moved to my hand. “We’ve only been apart for a day and yet I noticed you’ve already stopped wearing your ring. What am I supposed to think?”

It reminded me again about the light-fingered underground vamp. “My ring was—”

He raised his hand to stop me before I could say anything else. “Hold that thought, please.”

I just stared at him, stunned that he would ask me these things in front of an audience.

Jake watched us like a tennis match, his lips twitching with amusement. “Trouble in paradise, huh? Fledglings and masters are not a good combo. You’re right to wonder about a sexy little thing like her, Thierry. Personally, I like to keep my women on short leashes.”

David studied Thierry for a moment. “What did you want to talk to us about? Let’s get to the point.”

“Yes, you’re right,” Thierry said. “It’s time we did.”

I wasn’t exactly sure what happened next. All I knew was that one moment they were standing there smug and amused and the next moment they were
both flat on the ground. David was unconscious, but Thierry had his knee against Jake’s chest to hold him down and the thug’s own silver stake in his hand. Thierry pressed it to Jake’s jugular hard enough that a trail of blood trickled down his throat.

What the hell? Had Thierry moved that fast or had I just blacked out for thirty seconds? I knew he could move quickly when necessary, but I’d never seen anything like this before.

Jake gurgled and attempted to fight Thierry off, but it looked like a losing battle. Thierry dug the stake in closer to the other man’s throat.

“I’m not a pussycat,” Thierry said evenly. “Master vampires are not always what you might think we are. Time has taught us the patience to wait for others to let their guards down so we can be lions when absolutely necessary. Do you really want to hear me roar?”

For such a large and dangerous man, Jake was now staring up at my fiancé with actual fear as if he saw something on Thierry’s face that scared him to the very center of his being.

“Thierry,” I said. Then when he didn’t seem to hear me, I shouted it. “Thierry!”

He glanced over his shoulder and my breath caught in my chest. His eyes had turned black and soulless. Maybe it was the bit of blood on Jake’s neck that set him off, but he was close to the edge of his control right now.

“Don’t kill him.” I forced myself to say it very calmly and put as much strength behind it as I could. “He’s only doing his job.”

Thierry narrowed his black eyes and returned his attention to the vampire he had pinned. “You’re right.”

He tossed the stake away and it clanged to the ground over by the flat-screen television. Then he grabbed Jake’s head and slammed it down against the marble tiles. That would have been hard enough to crush a human’s skull, no doubt, but despite the vampire going very still, his chest moved to show he was still breathing.

It reminded me to breathe, too. I’d forgotten to do that for a minute.

I watched Thierry carefully, waiting for a sign that he was okay. Black eyes worried me at the best of times. Especially when it was Thierry who was sporting them. He patted Jake down and retrieved his cell phone from the man’s pocket before slipping it into his own inner jacket pocket.

Finally he pushed up to his feet and looked at me. His eyes were back to their normal shade of gray. The sight made me dizzy with relief.

“Ready to go?” he asked.

“Definitely.” As we left the suite I turned to look at him. “You said you needed something from them before Markus got here. What was it?”

He met my questioning gaze. “Their lack of consciousness.”

M
y fantastic plan to rescue Thierry had come off without a hitch.

Well, maybe one or two. But the results spoke for themselves.

Again avoiding the unpredictability of taking an elevator, we made it to the stairwell and began heading downward.

I glanced back at him. “Do we have a plan?”

“I had one. It dissolved about half an hour ago.”

“What was your plan?”

“Doesn’t matter anymore. I’ll revise.”

My stomach sank. “You
did
have a plan. A good one, too, right? You weren’t just sitting in there like a passive victim—you were biding your time. I screwed everything up when you were busy biding.”

“You didn’t screw it up. But you did scare the hell out of me.” He pulled me to a stop as we reached the fifteenth floor. “When they brought you into the suite unconscious, I thought the worst. For a moment, I thought they’d killed you.” His expression darkened. “Do you have any idea what that did to me?”

“You were happy you wouldn’t have to deal with a troublemaker like me anymore,” I guessed.

His gaze firmly held mine. “Try again.”

“Your heart shattered at the thought of losing me and you wanted to kill everyone within a one-mile radius to help ease your grief and rage over my death.”

A glimmer of a smile touched his lips. “More than a mile.”

My heart beat faster and I almost returned the expression, but I still felt deeply uneasy about what had happened. “What was that in there? With Markus’s men? I’ve never seen you move like that before. In fact, I didn’t see you move at all, it was just…done. And the look on your face afterward when you had Jake on the ground and his stake at his throat…”

His expression was unreadable. “We needed out of there and they were both very strong. I had to use whatever I had at my disposal in order to get past them.”

“And that’s something you had at your disposal? What, is that a tool you’ve been keeping in a box that I never knew about?”

“I can do certain things, Sarah. Those who’ve been around for as long as I have—have access to these…
tools
, as you say. It doesn’t mean I want to use them all the time—or even that I
can
. But sometimes it’s possible.”

I shivered despite myself. I was learning more about my fiancé every day. “Sounds dangerous.”

“It certainly can be.” He had my hand in his and he brushed his thumb over my ring finger. His eyes met mine again. “Your ring?”

“Stolen. When I was tied up in the tunnels under the city, a greedy vampire chick took it from me as payment to help me escape a couple hunters.”

He just stared at me. That was a lot of information to pack into one sentence.

“Tied up by hunters?” he asked after a moment, his voice tight.

“It’s been kind of a crazy day,” I admitted.

“Tell me more.”

I did. Quickly. I told him about my plan to talk to Duncan and how badly that went, starting with the hunters in the tunnels, the subterranean-living, black-eyed vampire, the hunter bar, and finally Duncan getting a pool cue through his chest before I could get him to confess who hired him to kill Bernard.

The taste of my failure was bitter. Kind of like the tea an aunt of mine always insisted I drink whenever I went to her house for a visit back when I was a kid. How hard was it to make tea that doesn’t taste nasty? I mean, seriously. Ever since, I’d been a coffee person. But I digress.

“Duncan is dead,” Thierry finally said after he’d processed everything.

I just nodded. “I’m sorry. I know that would have been the perfect way to find out who hired him. He was willing to talk to me for a price. And now…he’s gone. This is all my fault.”

“He would have been killed today with or without your presence. It wasn’t you who killed him, it was someone else who wanted him dead.”

I raked a hand through my still-tangled hair. “I thought Laura could be the one to blame. I talked to her, but it wasn’t her. I’m positive about that. She actually gave me back Bernard’s key to your mysterious safety-deposit box—or, at least, I’m pretty sure that’s what it is.” I touched my jeans pocket to make sure it
was still in there. “She probably didn’t know it led to a bunch of diamonds. She can’t think straight—she’s completely destroyed by his death.”

“I never suspected Laura. She needed Bernard and his checkbook too much. Dead, he’s no good to her.”

I blanched. “It just makes me feel sick.”

“Which part?”

“All of it. I believed they were madly in love, a fledgling and a master vamp. They reminded me so much of…” I bit my lip. “Well, you know. I wanted them to be a good example of that, to give me hope.”

“We do share many significant similarities.”

My chest tightened. “But she was cheating on him. And now you question whether I’m looking at cheating on you. I mean, what was that?”

He exhaled. “Sarah—”

I knew we had to get out of this hotel as soon as possible before Markus arrived, but I needed to get this out before it started to fester. “You didn’t have to ask me to marry you, you know, but you did. And I said yes. That means something to me, Thierry. It means that, despite everything, you want to be with me now and in the future and vice versa. So am I thinking of acquiring some new man candy the moment that my eye starts to wander? Absolutely not. And, FYI, I’m mad as hell that you’d even think something like that.”

He’d drawn back from me a little during my rant as my voice echoed in the stairwell.

I waited patiently for his rebuttal.

“Actually,” he began, “I said those things merely as a way to distract Markus’s men so I might get the upper hand when the time came. But I do appreciate you clarifying
these points for me and am quite pleased with this confirmation of your fidelity.”

I glared at him as his lips started to curve. “Don’t laugh. This is not funny.”

“I’m not laughing. I’m smiling.”

“I’m so glad I amuse you.”

“So am I. You truly have no idea.” Smiling changed Thierry’s entire face—from stern and coldly handsome, to open and totally heart-stoppingly gorgeous.

But I still wanted to punch him in the stomach.

I blew out a breath and tried to fight against my own grin appearing. “So what’s your new plan now that the original one imploded thanks to me?”

“First, I need to get you to safety.”

“And then?”

“By escaping that hotel suite, I’ve signed my own death warrant. Markus will assume my guilt now instead of having any doubt about it and attempt to hunt me down.” He must have seen me blanch at this. “It’s not your fault. I’d planned to leave the suite tomorrow morning if nothing had changed. I am patient when I need to be, but I have no interest in being executed for a crime I didn’t commit. Knowing you were safe helped ease my mind. If I’d had any idea you were still in Vegas…” He sighed. “I need to get you to a safe place where no one knows you and Markus can’t track you.”

“And you?”

“I’ll put distance between us. Perhaps, eventually, Markus will stop his search.”

I blinked. “We won’t be together?”

“You would be in danger. So no.” His previous smile was only a memory now and his dark brows drew
together. “It was a mistake bringing you here in the first place. You’re too—”

“—much trouble?”

His gaze flicked to mine and again that smile tugged at his lips. He brought his hand up to cup my cheek. “Too important to me.”