Unchained (Men in Chains Book 3) (35 page)

“He might, but I’ll make sure that you have a security detail on you for as long as needed.”

Holding her notes in her hand, she held his gaze. “And what do you plan to do about Daniel?”

“I intend to take him down.”

She put her hand on his arm suddenly. “Marius, you should tell your brothers how you wronged them.”

He appeared shocked. “I can’t do that.” He shoved a hand through his hair, and she felt his remorse flow through him yet again.

“Tell them. It might help. It might even surprise you. I think you’ve carried this damn thing long enough.”

“You don’t understand. My brothers are all I have. They’d never forgive me.”

“Well, I would.”

He laughed harshly. “Only because you don’t know the truth.”

She grew very still. “You’re right. I don’t know, but isn’t four hundred years of service a proper length of time for atonement? Because I’d bet my life that you never betrayed them in all that time.”

“No, I never did.”

“So as I recall, you were a child when this thing happened.”

“My age doesn’t change what I did.”

“Well, there’s no point arguing, and once again I’m intruding way too much. But would you mind if I had a little time just to be here, before we left? It’s a way of saying good-bye, because I’m pretty sure I’ll never be back.”

He nodded. “Whatever you want to do.”

She could hear his phone ringing as he suddenly slid his hand into his pocket. He glanced at the screen. “It’s Gabriel. I’ll need to take this.”

He moved quickly away from her into the adjacent room.

Shayna watched him for a moment, then sat back down in her chair in front of the computer screen. She almost went right back to work as she clicked the mouse and the Frenchman’s dictionary popped back up on the monitor. She was a worker bee by long and enjoyable habit, so it took her some doing to close the search engine for good.

Knowing she’d fall into a funk, she rose from the chair and pulled on her gloves. She decided to use her last moments examining the tablets as her way of saying farewell.

She brought a new tablet from the stack, placing it beneath the magnifying glass, getting lost in the imagery within her mind, trying to picture the vampire so long ago who had made these indentations in the soft clay.

She often made up scenarios in her head. Would the scribe have kept a beverage in a cup nearby? Did he smoke hemp rope beneath a canvas with some of fellow scribes during his breaks? Did he have an exercise program to keep fit while spending most of his life hunched over slabs of clay?

“What do you see?” Marius settled a hand on her shoulder.

“Just looking at the level of detail, the precision of the length of each indentation.” She glanced at him. “Everything okay?”

“Actually, yes. My brothers are coming here, to Gabriel’s conference room, to discuss the possibility that Daniel is up to something. We’ll be talking new strategies as well.”

“Good. That’s good.” She wanted to ask a few questions, but held back. Her job here was done. Still, she smiled. “I don’t suppose you could let me stay here while you have your meeting.”

She felt the tension drain suddenly from Marius. “I’d like that. I really would.”

She turned and put her hand on his shoulder, caressing him. He responded by taking a step toward her and sliding his arm around her waist. She moved closer still, pressing up against him.

A soft moan escaped his lips as he tilted his head and kissed her.

Shayna slung her arms around his neck. She hadn’t meant for this to happen, but her need for him rose like a tsunami. Desire flowed through her until she writhed against what had become firm really fast.

But this wouldn’t do at all. She was leaving.

She drew back. “Marius, what is it with us?”

“I don’t know.” He chuckled and leaned his forehead against hers. “But I have a meeting I need to get to and now I’ll have to calm down before I can show my face.”

She smiled, loving this between them, wishing like hell it didn’t have to end.

She said nothing more, but waited with him. She took care not to fondle his arms, one of her favorite things to do. She didn’t even speak, but let her breathing settle down.

After a couple of minutes, he released her completely. “I’ll probably be gone for at least two hours. But when I return, I should probably fly you home.”

She nodded. He stepped away and shifted to altered flight. A moment later, he was gone.

Shayna stood staring at the empty space, grateful to have this respite before facing her empty apartment and her miles-away life.

But just as she turned back to the magnifying glass and the ancient tablet beneath, a man’s voice forced her to grow very still. “I think my son has fallen in love with you, which means that my current plan has worked out perfectly.”

She turned, and Daniel was just there, stroking his goatee and standing ten feet away. He’d broken through Gabriel’s layered cavern disguise that even Marius hadn’t been able to penetrate, and now he smiled at her in the middle of the room full of ancient tablets.

She squared her shoulders. “I’m guessing you’re not here to share a cup of coffee, maybe have a little chat. I have so many questions—”

“None of which I intend to answer.”

Instinctively, she picked up one of the tablets and threw it at him, but they were large and heavy. He laughed as it dropped to the floor several feet in front of him and broke into pieces.

Before she even blinked or saw him move, she was trapped in Daniel’s arms, flying through rock then into the air above North Africa.

How did you find me? I can’t believe you actually got through Gabriel’s disguise.

She felt him laugh again.
Remember that sharp little pain in your arm, the one you might have thought was a pinch? Let us just say that I embrace technology in all its forms.

A tracking device?

Shayna, you certainly don’t lack for intelligence.
And he laughed again.

CHAPTER 15

Marius sat down at an ebony conference table thinking he’d never been so glad to see all these men gathered in one place. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been with both of his brothers, as well as Gabriel and Rumy, at the same time.

He sat across from Adrien and Lucian, while Rumy sat on his right. Each of his brothers bore a resemblance to Daniel, just as he did, their parentage impossible to refute.

Adrien had thick dark hair to his shoulders and muddy teal eyes with brown flecks, while Lucian had gray eyes and kept his black hair cut short. Both were handsome men, six-five to six-six, and muscular like thoroughbreds.

He loved them and loved being with them, though he always felt separate because of what he’d done. In the past, he’d used a lot of humor to mask what he really felt.

Gabriel sat at the head of the table and had provided coffee. Marius sipped from a heavy red mug, his thoughts disjointed. He didn’t want Shayna to leave. He needed to find a way to end Daniel’s reign. He also wondered if Shayna was right. Maybe he should finally confess his sins to his brothers.

But would they ever forgive him?

“So what’s your plan? With Shayna, I mean,” Gabriel asked.

“I’ll be taking her home, of course. We’ve already discussed it. She has her life well planned.” He went on to speak about her fieldwork in Malaysia, her intention of earning her doctorate, her love of anthropology. The words flowed and he couldn’t seem to stop them. He then launched into all the ways she’d helped him and saved his ass over the past two very short days.

He ended with, “Shit, I’m going to miss her so much.”

No one said a word, maybe because they were stunned by his admission. But both Lucian and Adrien were fully bound to human women whom they now lived with.

He glanced at each in turn and saw eyes full of compassion. But all that did was fill him with his usual remorse.

Clearing his throat, he shifted the subject to the critical matter at hand. “So, I take it we’re all here for the same reason.”

“Yep,” Adrien said. “To go after Daniel and bring him down for good.”

Marius related Shayna’s most recent discovery, of a hawk emblem on Daniel’s shirt and those of his security team, as well as the symbols above the hawk’s head.

Once he was done, everyone at the table fell silent as the tension in the room rose a notch.

“Is there anything else?” Gabriel asked, a tight frown between his brows. He scrubbed the side of his head, just below the spikes.

Rumy jumped in. “Marius, remember what Shayna learned at the refugee center. Tell them what she said about the IQ tests.”

“IQ tests? What the fuck?” Adrien had never looked more surprised.

Marius shared what Shayna had learned from the most recent group of refugees out of the Dark Cave system. He especially emphasized the amount of time the women believed that Daniel and his other sons spent away from their massive sex-slave operation.

A new heavy silence fell on the room as all eyes turned to Gabriel. Marius’s surrogate father had always been the unacknowledged leader of the vampire world, at least the portion who wanted better things for their world, like civil law and the ability to enforce that law through a decent court system.

But Gabriel turned to Marius. “You’re the one he’s after, the one he’s wanted more than any of his sons.”

Marius wasn’t sure he’d heard right, even though Shayna had once said something similar. “That makes no sense to me, none at all.”

“Then tell me this, where’s Shayna right now?”

“You know where she is. I left her in the guest room with the tablets.”

Gabriel angled his head and narrowed his eyes. “And how far away is that in terms of yards or even miles?”

Most vampires could tell distance by an innate homing ability. “The guest room is two point three miles from here.”

“And is that a single blood-chain around your neck or a double?”

He felt agitated by the question, especially since the answer was so obvious. “You know it’s a single.” He touched the links anyway.

“I rest my case.”

Marius held his gaze. At the edges of his mind, he knew where Gabriel was headed, but Marius couldn’t bring himself to say it. “What’s your point?”

Gabriel’s gaze lowered to the single-chain around Marius’s neck. “That you’re wearing a single blood-chain and you haven’t risen to Ancestral status, but your woman is two point three miles distant. How is that possible?”

“Shit,” Adrien murmured.

“Holy fuck.” Lucian leaned forward. “Even after I rose to Ancestral status, Claire and I couldn’t be more than sixty yards apart.” He gestured with a swing of his hand toward Gabriel. “I needed a lot of practice to broaden that distance to encompass a couple of miles.”

“Same here.”

Lucian pushed his hand through his short black hair. “How much fucking power do you have?”

Both of Marius’s brothers wore the double blood-chains that had helped each to achieve Ancestral status.

Marius rose to his feet and addressed Gabriel. “There has to be some mistake or some bizarre explanation. I mean, both Adrien and Lucian outperform me in every possible way.”

Gabriel lowered his chin, his eyes holding Marius’s gaze fast. “Because you’ve kept it that way. For reasons I’ve never understood, you’ve held back. You always have.”

Marius recalled Shayna saying something similar, if not about holding back, then about insisting he might be special, might have something more to offer—and that Daniel was after him.

Gabriel continued. “You told me about what happened at the Dark Cave system. But the bottom line is that Daniel had intended to kill Lucian, and he would have but Claire helped him escape. He’s never made a serious attempt on your life that I know of. And he could have taken you out any number of times over the past two days. Admit it.”

Marius left the table but he began to pace. He rubbed his forehead. He felt dizzy and sick at heart. Maybe he had held back, but he knew why.

Was Shayna right? Did he need to confess the truth even though he felt ill just thinking about it? Was it possible he had the kind of power Gabriel believed he had, that he might be special?

Lucian rose as well. “Marius, if what Gabriel is saying is true about you and your abilities, you have to try to embrace who you are. We need you because it sounds like you’d be able to battle Daniel and defeat him.”

Marius felt panicky. “Maybe there’s something off with the blood-chains. That has to be it.”

Gabriel was on his feet and Adrien as well. They began moving in his direction and a terrible nausea came over him. His mind flew back to being on Daniel’s table, his skin and muscles split open to the spine. Daniel had forced him more than once, through the terrible pain he inflicted, to betray the plans that his brothers had made to get the three of them out of Daniel’s compound.

As the men converged, he had to speak the words. His family needed to know what kind of man he really was. When they stood in an arc in front of him, he said, “I betrayed you more than once. Adrien. Lucian. I betrayed you.” He felt like his heart was on fire, like it would incinerate and burn up his entire body because the words had left his throat.

“What do you mean?” Adrien asked. “When?”

“Yeah, what kind of betrayal are you talking about? When exactly did you do this?”

He rubbed the back of his neck. He could feel the top of the scar, the one that Daniel had created through repeated incisions down the length of his spine. “Three times we were going to escape and each time I told Daniel about it. I couldn’t help it. I betrayed you. I was in so much pain and I told Daniel all about the plans. There, you see how special I am?” He shouted his rage at having betrayed his brothers, who had protected him countless times by taking Daniel’s punishment in his stead.

“Three times?” Adrien asked.

Marius knew with every cell in his body that today he’d be separated forever from the family he loved, from his brothers and Gabriel. They’d have every reason to cast him out for good.

And he’d deserve that. “I’ve tried with every ounce of my strength all these centuries to make up for what I did, hoping somehow that I’d be able to atone for my betrayals. But I know now that nothing can make up for it. Daniel would make me listen to your screams in the hallway. He’d chain me there so I’d have to hear what my betrayals cost each of you.”