“You’re a complete asshole,” I call to his back, glaring at the dead body. “Torture is only fun when they’re still alive.”

The bastard laughs under his breath.

I glance back down at the newest video Emit has sent of Violet. This one is different. This one is just her smiling, as some of the Simpleton women gather around her, while she turns on a movie.

Dracula scrolls across the screen, and I groan aloud, pocketing my phone, as I roll my bloody eyes and head toward the exit.

I pause on my way out, smelling something so muted I almost miss it. A small, ticking, barely recognizable heartbeat hits my ears, followed by another, slightly more subtle one. The now dead shifter’s heart was racing and pounding so loudly it must have masked these two.

With stealth and quickness, I move to the wall, hearing one heart beating faster, as the other stays a steady, quiet pace.

The stone wall bleeds into a wooden paneled one off to the side, and I finger the edges of it, before ripping it back. A woman’s scream dies when the tip of the rusty blade touches her throat.

Her eyes are wide, as her heartbeat only drives up, not slowing down. “I knew better than to trust my nose. Too much shifter blood on the ground to spot one so close by,” I tell her, checking the little hidden cubby, but only seeing her.

“P-p-p-p-please don’t. I s-s-wear I didn’t hear anything.”

“Of course you heard something, or you wouldn’t say that,” I tell her dismissively. “If you’d wanted to live, you’d have come out when we were sifting through victims and offenders. Only offenders hide. How quickly you die depends on how fast you tell me who the other heartbeat belongs to and where I might find them. Save me some time, and I’ll save you some pain—”

My words get lost in my throat when my eyes drop to where her hands are cradling a barely-there bump that is bare to see, since her top is merely a scrap of dirty fabric that stretches across her breasts.

“They were g-going to take my baby. I just want to keep my baby safe, and shifters are hated by vampires and Van Helsings alike—so I hid out of natural instinct. P-please. I swear I won’t say anything. I have no reason to. I’m not a loyalist to the cause, and until I was stolen from my house, I’ve never once interacted with any other shifters.”

My eyes stay on her belly, as the small heartbeat ticks again.

“Bloody hell,” I groan in frustration, as I run a hand through my hair.

“Arion, are you fucking coming or—”

Vance stops, eyes widening when he comes back in. Her heartbeat is louder now, and so is the child’s.

“You’re quite the thorn in our sides now, aren’t you?” I ask her as she stays tucked in the cubby, while I back my blade up a few healthy inches.

“She’s of no consequence. Only offenders hide when a Van Helsing sifts through victims and offenders,” Vance states dismissively.

“Told ya,” I quip, staring at the trembling woman, who reeks of fear.

“Kill her and the other, and be done with this,” Vance states, already distracted by his phone.

“And he thinks he’s less of a monster than I am,” I tell her with a broad grin, even as the pit of my stomach sours.

We really don’t need this fucking problem on our hands right now, of all times.

The woman whimpers, but tries to hold it back, since she likely remembers the threat I made to the last person who whimpered in the room.

“Quit drawing it out, Arion. We have shit to do.”

“If Violet would be upset with me for some tedious oversights in the past, she’s going to hate you for that call,” I decide to inform him.

I drop the blade and drag the woman out, as she cries out in surprise—not pain. Vance’s eyes immediately widen on her stomach.

“The other heartbeat is coming from inside her, Van Helsing.”

I don’t kill babies. He knows I have rules against that.

“If you’ll just let me live long enough to have the baby…that’s all I ask,” she goes on, eyes filling up with tears.

“Completely new paradigm we find ourselves in, eh?” I ask Vance tightly.

“Fuck my night,” Vance says as he scrubs a hand over his face.

“Demetria would crack her skull like an egg,” I remind him. “We’ve said an awful lot that beta could easily pry out of this one’s mind.”

He starts to say something, but his phone rings.

“It can’t be more important than this, Van Helsing, so don’t—”

“Yes?” he says into the phone, turning his back on me.

I glance over at the shifter, who is avoiding my eyes as she trembles.

“He never listens to a thing I say and wonders why I make his life harder than it has to be,” I tell her with a tired sigh.

“Are you busy right now, or in a life-and-death situation?” comes Violet’s voice over the line.

“Ah,” I say to the shifter, nodding in understanding now. “I would have answered too.”

Vance darts an annoyed look in my direction, and heaves out a breath, as he glances over at the pregnant shifter we can’t kill.

“Do you need something?” he asks Violet in a non-answering sort of way.

“I actually need to know about that really old hotel in the middle of town. It’s the rundown building you bought a long time ago and never did anything with. Leiza was telling me about it.”