Cold Hard Secret (Secret McQueen) (8 page)

“Say hello to our guest, pet.” He yanked her head back so hard I thought he might break her neck. She was human and fragile, and sometimes vampires forgot their own strength.

With her neck exposed, I saw how many bite marks he’d left on her, not bothering to lick them clean after. A vampire’s saliva contained natural healing agents which allowed most of them to cover their tracks after feeding on a human. Peyton had let her wounds heal the old-fashioned way, meaning she was festooned with scabs, all of which would leave scars later in life, if she was allowed to live beyond this. I was willing to bet her inner thighs looked the same.

“Say
hello
,” he commanded again.

“H-hello.”

When I didn’t reply, Peyton’s hands went to the woman’s throat. “Aw, our guest doesn’t like you, pet. She doesn’t like your greeting. You know how much I hate it when you displease our guests.” His grip tightened, and the woman’s eyes bulged. She started gagging, struggling for breath, but with her hands chained to the bed she was helpless to fight him off.

“
Stop,
” I pleaded.

“You didn’t say hello.”

“Hello.
Hello.
There, I fucking said it. Now stop.”

“Not so cold after all, are you?” He released her, and she stumbled, fighting to stay on her feet, but his hand was soon in her hair again, holding her upright.

“Would you like to sample her? She has marvelously sweet blood.”

This was a trick. If I said no, as I desperately wanted to, he would punish her. If I said yes…

Was he trying to prove to me that I was as much a monster as he was? If so, he didn’t need to put me through any elaborate tests. I wasn’t pretending to be a good person these days.

“I’d sooner eat a piece of meat someone threw in the gutter.” I sneered, and the girl seemed both relieved and sad. “You’ve made a mess of her. Look at her neck, for God’s sake.”

The tooth marks weren’t all his. Peyton had his distinctive one-fanged bite, and not all of the holes were from him. “It appears you’ve shared her quite freely already.”

“As I said, she has a fine flavor.”

“I don’t like to share.”

“I could bring you another, in that case. Someone fresh.”

“I thought you said you were done playing childish games. I don’t want to eat from any of your idiot humans. Anyone stupid enough to find their way to you deserves what they get.” I didn’t believe my own words. I knew very well the vampire thrall could convince people they wanted things they did not, and this girl was likely brought here against her will. I’d save her if I could, but I wasn’t going to show her any mercy before I did. “I’m not here to chat over neck cocktails. I came to kill you.”

“And what a fine job you’re doing.”

“Well, to be fair, I didn’t think you’d have gotten this smart in your old age.”

“I’ve had to make adjustments to my standard methods. I suppose I learned a few things after our last encounter.”

Now it was my turn to play dirty. “Didn’t want to end up in those silver chains again? They were so fetching on you.”

I pride myself on being fast. I thought I was cunning and clever and a talented fighter. Until tonight I had believed I was the best, good enough to beat Peyton without even trying. But a moment after the words were out of my mouth, I was off my feet and flying across the room.

A second after that I was on his bed, my sheathed sword jammed hard into my spine and a snarling vampire on top of me.

Peyton’s spit dampened my face, and he cupped my chin with almost crushing force, demanding I look at him. His eyes were an inky black, a sure sign he was no longer in control of himself. I was not in the best position right now.

His fingers tightened on my throat, and his sharp fingernails pierced the skin. A sudden wetness on my neck told me I was bleeding, not the most ideal thing when a hungry berserker vampire was on your chest.

This wasn’t at all how I pictured tonight going.

I struggled, getting my arm up under his chin, shoving his head as far away from my neck as I could—which wasn’t far given the ferocity of his determination—and tried to wriggle free of his nails. All I succeeded in doing was opening the wounds more.

I could smell my own blood, so Peyton certainly could as well. His nostrils flared, and for the briefest second his grip faltered. I kneed him in the groin and lifted my head fast, angling for the hit. My skull cracked into his as he howled in pain from the blow to his junk, and as he recoiled from the head-butt, I flipped him over so I was now in control.

My guns had been taken away, but they weren’t too thorough because the knife in my boot was still there, and before his guards could reach us I had it at Peyton’s throat.

“Keep your distance, kids. I have a twitchy knife hand.” To prove this to them I let the silver blade sink into the vampire’s neck enough to draw blood. “Look, now we match. Back. Off.” I glared at the guards, keeping the knife in long enough the blade started to make his skin sizzle.

The room stank of melting flesh.

“
Go,
” Peyton ordered.

The guards hesitated but stepped backwards, going back to their positions by the door. I lived up to my unspoken end of the bargain by withdrawing the knife. I held it lightly in my hand though, ready to stick it all the way into him the second he did something to piss me off.

I would love nothing more than to kill Peyton then and there, but I couldn’t.

You could.

Oh, that voice. That sneaky, cool, devil of a voice. My wolf could not choose a worse time to come out and play. I loved her, the animal part of me, but our relationship was strained and tenuous at best. Tenuous because I didn’t always have control over her.

Who was I kidding? I almost
never
had control over her.

She was a part of me, but totally her own entity. It was like living with multiple personalities, where one of those personalities was a wolf who wanted to solve all her problems by murdering people.

I sucked in a breath through my nostrils and pulled the knife farther back. It wasn’t going to stop her if she wanted to kill him. Back during my time with The Doctor she had helped me partially shift just so I could stick my hand inside his chest.

She’d do it again, and she wouldn’t wait for my permission this time.

We could end it all right here, you know.

I did know. I could cut Peyton open, gut him like a fish beneath me and crush his heart in my bare hands before those damned guards had a chance to cross the room.

But then what?

They’d kill me.

I could deal with that if it meant Peyton was dead too. But they’d also kill Desmond, which I
so
wasn’t okay with.

I reminded her of our mate, the one thing both she and I could regularly agree on.

Fine.

“You could kill me,” he said, practically daring me to.

“I will. Just not yet.” Soon though. So, so soon. He would die tonight, and I’d make sure of it, but I needed to know where Desmond was first. “But you wanted to talk to me, I thought. I didn’t think you meant in bed.”

I was trying to keep things light, pretend I wasn’t on the verge of falling apart and trembling into a useless pile of goo on the floor. I had revenge to exact, only I was starting to wonder if I was smart enough to see the plan through.

“If I get off you, will you attack me again?” I asked.

“I don’t know, that sort of all depends on you.”

I couldn’t imagine how. “I’m not going to use this unless I have to.” The knife glinted between us in the warm candlelight, reminding him of its presence.

“No, naturally you’d seek to use the much larger one on your back. I thought by allowing you to keep that you might not be so inclined to assault me. Clearly I was mistaken.”

“You went first. I was playing by the rules you made up.”

“Can we dispense with the metaphors? And could you kindly get off my chest? For a small woman, you are much weightier than I gave you credit for.”

Great, he tried to kill me, and now he was calling me fat. Tonight was pretty much par for the course of my life. Insult to literal injury.

I got off him, replacing the knife in my boot. He was right. When I attacked, I wanted to cut him in half with the sword, no mucking around with piddly handheld weapons.

When I murdered him, I would do it with bloody style.

Chapter Eleven

After our little tussle, Peyton apparently no longer felt safe in close quarters with me. Why he hadn’t made the guards take my sword away yet, I still couldn’t comprehend. Maybe he figured killing me would be too easy if I was unarmed. Was his sense of bravado so intense he wanted the element of challenge to be there?

He led me out to a large common area where his collective of minions were seated, awaiting his attention or whims or something weird and creepy like that.

I’d never adjusted to being in command of people. As queen of a werewolf pack and one of the Tribunal leaders, I had a great deal of power and control at my fingertips, and sometimes I wielded it, but typically it felt creepy and wrong. I guess being the council’s bitch for so long made it strange for me to suddenly be one of their three most powerful members.

Seeing all these vampires and humans sitting back awaiting Peyton’s attention, as if they were nothing more than puppies hoping to prove their obedience for a pat on the head, made me sick to my stomach. Where was their individual strength? Where was their will to function on their own?

I swallowed hard when one of the guards prodded me in the spine, and we continued to follow Peyton.

The benches formed uniform half-circles on either side of a wide-open section in the middle of the room. Everyone seemed to be facing towards the center. I scanned the group for a sign of Desmond, and my heart sank when I didn’t spot him. The guards who had dragged him off were sitting front and center, staring at us as we walked in.

If they were here, who was watching him?

Maybe he no longer needed to be watched.

My belly hurt. If something had happened to Desmond while I was off having my tête-à-tête with Peyton, I would make them pay. All of them. I’d go down swinging in a bloodbath that would be talked about for decades to come.

Provided any of them made it out alive.

“This woman has come here to kill me,” Peyton announced, his accent-heavy voice filling the low room in a potent and dramatic way. With the dim lighting and the black-clad henchmen, this felt like a scene out of some cultish horror movie.

The group muttered amongst themselves, and a few laughed.

I knew exactly what their laughter meant, though it had been quite some time since anyone had been bold enough to do it within earshot. Back in my vampire-slaying days, the monsters used to get a kick out of me. They called me
Buffy
a lot. That’s what I got for being a petite blonde who kicked undead ass, I guess.

They tended to stop laughing once I killed them.

Funny how hard it can be to get out a good belly chuckle when your head has been cut off.

“Normally, we just dispose of would-be assassins. That’s why I have you all here. The best of the best.”

More murmurs, these containing elevated tones of pride and accompanied by some good-natured backslapping.

Jesus, I’d walked into a vampire frat house. At least they stopped short of high-fiving each other.

“But this woman is different. Many of you have lived in Europe your whole life, so her face will not be familiar to you, but I’m sure you know her name. Tell the group your name, dear.”

Goodie, we were playing show-and-tell. Fine. “My name is Secret McQueen.”

There’d been a time when I got a lot of joy out of telling vamps my name and seeing their reactions to it. The name carried more weight than my frame seemed to imply I warranted.

Everyone in the room had gone silent, and they were now staring at me instead of Peyton.

Apparently I was big in France too.

“She is the rogue-slayer,” a man in the front row said. “Shouldn’t we kill her?”

“Eventually.” Peyton lifted a hand to silence any further questions. “Secret and I, we’re old friends.” He tongued the gap where his fang had once been, and the whole room understood his meaning.

Peyton fell in beside me, placing a hand on my shoulder. I think he’d meant to put his arm around me but thought better of it when he remembered the sword.

“Before Secret gets her chance to kill me, and you will get the chance, dear, I think we should test her mettle. See if she deserves the fair shot.”

A few joyous hoots went up from the crowd. Why did I get the feeling things were about to go very, very badly for me?

Oh, right. Because they always did.

A grinding noise drew my attention back to the center of the floor where a huge metal disc was being pulled from over a hole. The pit being revealed inch by inch was deep enough I couldn’t see the bottom. I wasn’t a big fan of being tossed into dark holes. That rarely panned out well.