Sola stopped paddling with her hands and feet and lowered her butt to the tile. Her breath was still exploding from her lungs, her fear a roar in her chest…and yet he was…

Heartbroken.

As Assail stood there, shirtless and shaken, there was such a depth of pain in his eyes that, under any other circumstances, she would have wept for him—

“Hey, we good in here, folks? Need anything?”

Sola spun her body toward the male voice. That big blond man, Rhage, had poked his head in and was looking like he was prepared to intervene if necessary.

He is not a man, she thought.

He is a vampire—

She was surrounded by them. Dear God, her grandmother was in a hospital bed, and—

As Sola started to throw up, she caught sight of a stack of towels and crawled over to them, her palms and shoes squeaking on the damp tile, her stomach evacuating those eggs just as she grabbed something to catch them in.

From out of the corner of her eye, she saw the two men—vampires—talking. Rhage was shaking his head like he didn’t approve, but Assail had put his body in between her and the other man, as if he weren’t going to stand for any interference.

That cologne of Assail’s, that heady, dark spice, abruptly canceled out the chlorine in the air.

“You fix this,” Rhage said. “You need to fix this, my man. Or I will.”

Assail replied something and the man—vampire, fucking vampire—left.

“Are you going to kill me,” she croaked out.

“No. No harm will befall either of you here.” Assail nodded toward the exit. “And as soon as your grandmother is medically cleared, you can both go. You never have to…you do not ever have to see me or any of us again. You will not even remember—”

“I will remember everything,” she bit out. “I will—”

“No, you will not.”

That dizziness came back as she extrapolated what that meant. “What are you going to do to me?”

“I will make it so that you will not recall any of this. It will all be gone, this moment here and all that came before it as it pertains to me will not exist for you. You will be free of this as you return to your life.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true—”

“You’ve lied to me how many times now?”

“Marisol…” As his voice cracked, he cleared his throat. “Marisol, you have never been hurt around me and I will not permit anything to give you worry or pain.”

“That’s not true,” she said roughly. “You have betrayed me. I am in pain now.”

He closed his eyes and lowered his head. “I am so sorry—”

“Get away from me,” she demanded, “and I don’t want you anywhere near my grandmother. And know this. If any one of you does anything to her, I will fucking kill all of you. I don’t care what you are—and I want her off those drugs or whatever the hell you’re pumping into her this goddamn minute. She and I are leaving right fucking now. We are getting the fuck out of here.”

FIFTY

Phury left the Sanctuary first, and V had every intention of following in the brother’s shitkicker steps. Not surprisingly, however, the guy didn’t really want him around, considering the shade he’d just thrown on all the Chosen. So after they closed up the Treasury, V found himself giving the brother some space by going on a wonder.

Wander, he meant.

Although the former was probably more what this was, he thought as he closed in on the Scribe Virgin’s private quarters. With every step he took, he intended to stop and ghost out so he could make it to the Brotherhood meeting. With each increment of forward motion, he truly meant to reroute. With all the one step, two step, three step, four…he had another destination in mind.

Instead of going the peace-out route, though, he ended up entering his mother’s quarters through the retracting panel and standing in that courtyard. The songbirds silenced as his presence registered on them, and the longer he stayed there, the more those brightly colored wings fluttered and the little-grip feet shifted the wee things up and down on their branches—the aviary equivalent of nervous pacing, he decided.

V kept thinking about what Jane had said about her little sister. How the loss never went away.

Put in that kind of context, he felt like his mahmen had died at his birth. If he were honest with himself—and he hated to be when it came to shit like this—he had been missing what-had-never-been as if it were more like a something-that-was. And now that the Scribe Virgin was actually gone, he somehow had the space to realize he was mourning that which he’d never had.

And FFS, this struck him as a colossal waste of introspection: As much as he respected Mary and her whole talk-it-out deal, he’d never found any relief in dropping the proverbial trou on his weaknesses—whether it was in private or in front of somebody with anime eyes and a master’s in social work.

Way too many people cloaked themselves in the mantle of victimhood, creating a vacuum of identity that they expected the world to rush in and fill with compassion that was undeserved.

Although that being said, maybe he was just a defensive, judgmental piece of shit.

Probably. God, he didn’t know what the fuck to do with himself anymore. He’d been really all over the place lately.

As he crossed over the white marble, he stopped in front of the water fountain. Then sat on its hard stone outer rim. The water came out of its spigot and fell in crystal droplets that were always in exactly the same place, the spray like a pattern in cloth, fixed within its arching descent and utterly symmetrical—as opposed to how it would have been down below, all random twinkles and somehow more beautiful because of that.

He thought of the Scribe Virgin’s regimentation of the race: her mandates that covered the way her Chosen had to live and worship…her breeding program…the rules and regulations of the classes.

She had even forbidden questions being asked of her. Like, literally, no one, not even Wrath, had been allowed to ask her anything.

Okay, fine, she had kind of let Butch get away with it. But that was it.

As memories of her tangled him up, he reached down to the water for no particular reason, trailing the fingertips of his curse in the depths—

A strange flushing warmth hit his upper arm and he looked down.

The wound that the shadow had made in his flesh shriveled and disappeared, as if chased away, no remnant of its red flush remaining.

“What the fuck,” V breathed.

And then it dawned on him.

“My bullets,” he announced to the songbirds. “That’s why my fucking bullets worked.”

* * *

—

Back down at the Brotherhood’s training center, Sola burst into her grandmother’s hospital room.

“We have to go,” she said as she went to the shallow closet. “We need to go. We’re leaving right now—”

Her vovó sat up in the bed. “What you speaking of?”

“We’re leaving.” She got her grandmother’s clothes and wheeled around. “We need to get you dressed. I’ll help you—”

“I am not leaving—”

“Yes, you are.” Sola pulled the covers back. “We’re—”

“Marisol! What is wrong!”

The sharp tone was exactly what had always worked on her as a child, and her inner ten-year-old overrode her adult impulses, freezing her in place.

But she was not about to vampire the poor old woman. For godsakes.

“They are bad people,” Sola choked out. “They are…not good people, Vovó. We need to escape—”

“What do you say.” Her grandmother made a dismissive sound in the back of her throat. “They treat us good. They treat us—”

“I’m not arguing with you about this.”

“Good. Then we are no going!”

Sola closed her eyes. “Yes, we are. You have always trusted me when it comes to our safety. Always. That is the way it works with us. And I’m telling you right now, we have to get out of here.”

Her grandmother crossed her arms over her bosom and glared. “Not good people? The night of your abduction, who freed you?”