“Coming for you.”
“Yeah,” I hissed. “You clearly accomplished that. Did you think it might be a good idea to figure out how you were going to leave with me, too?”
“Didn’t get that far,” he admitted.
“We’ll be back shortly,” Bennigan said. “There’s one small matter to tend to before I can have my fun with you two.”
I had a second to see Lucian’s pale, blood-streaked skin glimmer in the moonlight just before they closed the doors again and left us in darkness.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d come,” I admitted. It was probably stupid and definitely sentimental, but I felt like I could face whatever was coming for us now that we were together. I hated that I was selfish enough to be glad he was here with me, but I was.
“I shouldn’t have left in the first place,” Lucian said.
“Yeah. I had an entire angry speech planned to give you about that. But I’ll save it for when we get out of here.”
“You have a plan for that?”
“No,” I said. “I was hoping you did and just weren’t going to say it in front of them.”
He lowered his voice. “I did text Alaric, Vlad, and Seraphina. But the last time I saw them, they were in a gunfight on the rooftop outside Anya’s.”
“How would they even find us?”
“Vlad may not look it, but he’s immensely powerful. He could follow our scent if he was properly motivated.”
“Properly motivated? He needs more motivation than knowing we’re both going to get chopped up by maniacs?”
“I may have promised I’d let him re-open his torture room if he got us out of this. But I didn’t say for how long.”
I stared into the darkness. “He really tortures people?”
“He doesn’t usually kill them,” Lucian said with a touch of uncertainty.
“We’ll talk about that later. If there is a later.”
“Do I want to know why I’m sensing the bond again?” Lucian asked after a few seconds of silence.
“About that… I may have taken some drastic measures when you disappeared. Like injecting some of those little Lucios back into my blood.”
I could feel his disapproval radiating through the darkness. “That was reckless.”
“And you left me without even saying goodbye.”
Another pause. “That was a mistake I won’t repeat.”
“No,” I said. “You won’t. Also,” I added with a little less confidence. “Leah said I smelled like a vampire. What does that mean, exactly?”
I heard Lucian sniff deeply. He didn’t speak right away. “Did you alter the blood you injected into yourself?”
“Sort of. I mean, I spun it down and extracted pretty much just the little vampire balls. But they kept dying and I figured out the only way to keep them alive and reproducing was to inject new blood into the sample.”
“You mean you vampirized blood and then injected it into yourself.”
I narrowed my eyes, turning that concept over. “You know, when you phrase it like that, it makes it sound like the consequences would be super obvious. But it didn’t feel that way at the time.”
“Cara…”
My stomach was doing all sorts of summersaults. Little by little, the glowing neon signs that I had inadvertently turned myself into some sort of vampire were becoming impossible to ignore. “I thought you said it would have to be you feeding on my blood to seal the bond? I just used random samples of blood.”
“That shouldn’t have caused you to turn, no,” he said. “A bonded human could drink as much blood as they wanted with no consequence.”
“Maybe it’s different when it’s all done in test tubes? I also added a few random chemicals here and there to try to help keep the Lucios from dying so quickly.”
“You are a very determined woman, aren’t you?” he asked. I wasn’t sure if he was impressed, annoyed, scared, or all three.
“You didn’t even let me say goodbye.”
“And that was a grave mistake. So was underestimating your determination to make me regret it.”
I grinned in the darkness. “Well, at least if we die gruesome deaths, we learned a little about each other in the process. But seriously, what are we going to do? Those psychopaths want to torture us, and now you’re trapped in here with me.”
“I’m not trapped,” Lucian said. “I can get out of these chains.”
“With super strength?” I asked.
“No. Vlad isn’t the only one who can transform himself.”
I waited. “You were serious about the bat thing?”
“Yes. But if you speak of this, I will deny it to anyone.”
I smiled. “Why, is it like a taboo to be able to turn into a bat in the vampire world?”
“Because the less my enemies know about what I can do, the more likely I am to catch them by surprise. Also, because my bat form is very small, but that has no bearing on the size of my manhood, despite some silly sayings among my kind. Just a moment.”