She cast a leery glance over her shoulder at the empty cells. “Do you have any idea where we are in the tunnel system?”
“Nowhere I recognize.” He angled his face up toward the chains overhead and braced his body to pull on them again. “If I had ever seen these cells or heard of them, I would have had them filled in with cement a long time ago.”
As he strained to break free of his bindings, her gaze pulled back to him.
She didn’t want to look. She didn’t. But she also couldn’t help herself.
Nothing about Julian was smooth or civilized. His powerful, heavily muscled body still retained a deep, burnished tan from when he had been human, and he still carried all the scars he had acquired throughout his years of waging war. The rough life he had lived showed on his hard face — while he had been turned in his midthirties, he looked more like a man who was in his midforties.
His looks might be rugged, but he didn’t carry an ounce of extra fat anywhere on him. While certain parts of Roman society had been famous for its excesses, it was clear that Julian had not taken any part of it. His tastes ran to the simple, even Spartan.
That had been another thing that had attracted her to him. Given the many opportunities to indulge in excess that he must have encountered throughout the centuries, he still maintained an aura of mature, settled discipline.
She had tried before to imagine him as a young Gladiator in the arena. Back then he must have been as dangerous as a lean, half-starved alley cat. Now, the alley cat had long since vanished. What stood in his stead was a scarred and even more deadly lion who carried the weight of having lived for many years in his prime.
The muscles in his biceps, chest and flat abdomen bulged as he heaved again at the chains. He was an old Vampyre, on a par with Justine in terms of sheer age, and given the years of the blood oaths he had taken, Melly thought she had some kind of inkling just how Powerful he really was. Yet there wasn’t an inch of give in his restraints.
Disquieted, she swallowed hard. “Justine built this place too well.”
Spearing her with a sidelong glance, he said, “Yes, and none of it is new construction. She must have been using these cells for years.”
Rubbing her arms against the chill, she looked around. “You never could fully eradicate the feral Vampyre problem.”
“No, I couldn’t. No matter how many times I burned out the tunnels, eventually they always came back. Whether it was fair or not for them to judge me on that, it’s always been a black mark against me in the Nightkind council.” He wiped his face on one bare arm. “This has got to be a completely separate tunnel system, or I would have found it before now.”
Her body wasn’t doing very well at warding off the deep underground chill any longer. Shivers ran through her muscles, and she felt too hollow, almost lightheaded. She forced herself to concentrate. “What happened to turn Justine rogue? Do you know?”
His attention focused on her. “That’s right, you don’t know any of the events from the last two days. She tried to have Xavier assassinated.”
“What?!” She hadn’t thought she had any room in her to be shocked at anything else, but she was wrong. “Please tell me he’s all right.”
He gave her a grim smile. “Luckily, Xavier is one tough son of a bitch to kill. He needs some recovery time, but he’ll be fine.” Telling the story in a few concise sentences, he filled her in on what had happened in the Nightkind demesne over the last forty-eight hours.
She grew more dazed as she listened. When he reached the part of exploring Justine’s property, tears sprang into her eyes. “All of them,” she echoed. “She murdered all ninety-two of them.”
“Yes.”
Some crimes were unfathomable. Dashing a hand over her eyes, she fought to steady her voice. “I knew some of those people. Not well, but still, I knew them. Sofia. Her majordomo, Peter. He was always so charming.”
Julian’s hard expression, normally so cold whenever he looked at her, seemed to soften. “I know.” After a few moments, he said quietly, “Melly, I think you might be going in shock.”
“I’m all right.” Her voice sounded flat and dull, and she couldn’t muster the energy to put any strength into the words.
“I don’t think you are.” He spoke the words carefully. The thin beam of the flashlight caught in his eyes and made them glow.
Ha. If Julian was taking care with her, then she really must be looking rough.
Her shivering had grown more pronounced. Much as she didn’t want to, she was going to have to eat the last of her stash. She couldn’t afford to be shaky and uncertain when Anthony returned.
“I need to get back to my cell while I still can,” she muttered.
Keeping her head down, she left his cell. She had to fumble three times before she could get the door locked again, and then she had to do it all over again with her own cell door.
The beam of light that had been her lifeline flickered and was growing dim. The batteries in the flashlight were running low. She should probably turn it off to conserve the energy. After all, she didn’t know for sure that Anthony was coming back.
At that thought, a flicker of rebellion stirred. There was thriftiness and being smart, and then there was needless paranoia. Justine had ordered him to come back with supplies, which meant he had to return. Leaving the light on, she wrapped herself in her rough blanket and sat in the corner, in the triangle of her little nest.
After that, her mind shut down, and she focused only on immediate necessities. While she tried not to eat her remaining supplies too quickly, once she had made the decision, she couldn’t stop herself and practically inhaled the last of the nuts and the chocolate.
Afterward, she drank the last of her water, sparing only a little at the end to wash away the dried trickle of blood from the cut on her neck and the bite on her forearm. As she checked her wrist, she saw that the tiny puncture wounds had already scabbed over.
The food and water weren’t enough. Her hollowed-out body clamored for more hydration and nutrition. In an effort to stop the discomfort, she pressed a fist into her abdomen, just under her rib cage, and huddled into a ball, but the pressure didn’t help much.
The light had dimmed so that it only illuminated the area of her nest. She could sense Julian in the darkness, silently watching her, but instead of it bothering her, she almost found comfort in his regard.
She didn’t care what he thought of her, and she was glad he remained silent, since usually when he opened his mouth it meant that sooner or later she would get infuriated with him, and she didn’t have the energy for it right now. As long as he could watch her, it meant she wasn’t alone in this horrible place.
Her gaze ran along the edge of the blanket, across the floor and followed the lines of the upended cot. Down, along and over. When she completed a circuit, she began all over again.
Julian’s news had shaken her more than she liked to acknowledge. While she had known, of course, that Justine had jumped the rails, she hadn’t realized just how far the Vampyre had gone.
There was no way that the details of such a significant massacre could be suppressed for long. How many people already knew about it?
Julian, of course, and the team he had taken to Justine’s property, which must have been around ten or fifteen people. Then there was the human forensics team that Julian had sent in to investigate at daybreak. Xavier knew, along with whoever worked for him that he might have told. And probably a few more key people in Evenfall, like Dominic, knew what had happened.