“In that case, I’ve another tidbit for you.”

“I’m listening.”

“You know that item I returned to you before?”

Travis lifted his gaze to meet Aden’s. “Yeah?”

“Not everyone was happy with Lord Aden’s interference in their business.”

“Is that what the cool kids are calling slaves these days?”

“Don’t fuck with me, Trav. You know—” Elias didn’t get any further, because Aden yanked the phone from Travis.

“Enough bullshit,” he demanded. “Where is she?”

“My lord,” Elias breathed, and Aden could hear both shock and fear in those two words. This was what it was like to be a vampire lord. Only a day ago, he’d been Aden, just another powerful vampire. Now he was Lord Aden, with the power to reach out and stop a vampire’s heart from beating.

“Talk,” Aden ordered.

“Carl Pinto, my lord. He was Klemens’s man at the head of the slave ring. Drugs, too, but he really liked the idea of owning those women.”

“Where?” Aden’s jaw was clenched so tightly, he had trouble forcing out the single word. If Pinto had touched Sidonie, he was going to die. Actually, he was going to die either way, but if he’d dared to harm her, his death was going to be slow and excruciating.

“I can give you the address, my lord, but it would be easier to show you.”

“Fine.” Aden handed the phone over to Travis. “Set up a meet. We leave in five minutes.”

SID REGAINED awareness slowly, feeling sluggish and tired, fighting her brain’s insistence that she wake up. She wanted to go back to sleep, and there was no reason she couldn’t. She was a freelance reporter. It wasn’t as if she had a set schedule, and if she’d had an appointment, her phone would have dinged by now. Smiling, she rolled over, jerking in pain when something dug into her hip bone, something hard and… Her eyes popped open as she remembered where she was. What the thing digging into her hip was.

She sat up too fast, making her head spin dizzily as she eyed the other women in the room, her fellow captives. Except that they obviously didn’t view her as a fellow anything. There was very little light, only a bare, yellowed bulb overhead, but enough for her to count seven other women huddled as far away from her as the small room and their chains would permit. Distrust of her was plain on their faces, layered on top of a weary sort of horror at their predicament.

Pushing her hair away from her face, Sid scooted back until she could lean against the wall, easing her muscles after what felt like several hours spent lying twisted on the gritty wooden floor. She closed her eyes and tried to remember, to piece together the events that had led to her waking in this filthy room. She didn’t remember falling asleep, but her body told her that hours had passed. The window was barred on the inside and boarded over outside, but she could see enough to know it was nighttime, and she doubted it was the same night as when she’d been kidnapped.

She remembered talking to the vampire, Carl Pinto, remembered his human henchman shoving her into this room and cutting her hands free. She’d felt excitement, because finally she’d be able to reach her gun. And then . . . nothing until she’d woken up just now. But something was wrong, something more than the obvious, because she shouldn’t have been able to sleep at all. She should have been wide awake and terrified. Those bastards must have drugged her again, but how? She hadn’t eaten or drunk anything. In fact, she was as thirsty as if she’d just run a few miles on a hot day without water. The thought had her looking around idly for water and not finding any. Not a surprise.

She pressed her back against the wall, then reached down and began to work the muscles of her legs, which were sore and aching from being crammed into the trunk for so long, then sleeping on the floor. Bending first one leg, then the other, she brought each knee to her chest and back down several times, massaging her calves, her thighs . . . She frowned, running her fingers over her right thigh. It was more than sore. It was tender, with a hard knot that was so feverish she could feel it through the heavy denim of her jeans. Under other circumstances, she wouldn’t have thought much about it. She bruised easily and badly, and she frequently had no memory of what caused any particular mark. But this was more than a bruise. This was more like when she’d gotten vaccinations before going to South America that time, and she’d had a negative reaction to…

Shit. The guard hadn’t been pinching her thigh last night. Or, rather he had, but he hadn’t been sizing her up for rape, he’d given her a shot of some drug. She’d been so relieved when he’d cut her hands free, but he’d only done it because he knew she’d be out. Jesus, what had he given her? What if it was something addictive? What if the needle hadn’t been clean?

She forestalled a full-blown panic attack by reminding herself that she had a much bigger and more immediate problem. She was being held prisoner by a vampire who wanted her dead, whose most optimistic plan called for her to be sold into slavery. A drug addiction she could deal with, a disease she could fight. Later. When she was free.

What she needed to focus on now was getting out of here and taking all of these women with her.

“Por favor,” Sid said, speaking to the oldest of the women, who was still several years younger than Sid herself. Sid’s Spanish was good. Her mother’s cook, who had been Sid’s nanny when she was younger, was Puerto Rican and had used nothing but Spanish when speaking to Sid.

“How long have I been here?” she asked, continuing in Spanish. “How long was I asleep?”

“Many hours,” the woman replied. “They brought you here last night, and you slept all through the day.”

“But only one,” Sid clarified. “One day.”

The woman nodded. “They will come soon,” she warned. “But at least they will bring food and water.”

Sid nodded. That made sense. They wouldn’t spend any more than necessary keeping the women healthy, but they did need them alive. You couldn’t sell a dead slave.

“How many men, when they bring the food?” Sid asked.

“Two.” The woman shrugged. “Sometimes only one.”

“How long have you been here?” Sid asked curiously. With Aden wiping out the other house, she would have expected Pinto to move the women in and out as quickly as possible.

“Six days, I think,” the woman said. “They chained us together after one night, and they told us we are leaving, but then . . .” She shrugged again. “They went away and didn’t come back. I thought they would leave us to die. But then he came, and now we wait again.”

“You mean the vampire.”

One of the younger women, a girl really, chimed in, nodding. “The pretty one,” she said, “with the cruel eyes.”

Carl Pinto had meant to move these women with the others, Sid realized, the ones Aden had freed with his raid on the house Sid had discovered. But Pinto had been forced to change his plans. And now he sat here in this house with his few captives, probably afraid to move them for fear of getting caught, but not willing to lose the profit by freeing them either. Maybe he thought whoever won the challenge would let him return to his slave running. It was definitely profitable, if one didn’t mind where the profit came from.

Sid, on the other hand, was convinced that Aden would be the ultimate victor. And that meant Carl Pinto’s days were numbered.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t wait that long. She stood and continued stretching, running through various escape scenarios in her head as she did so. On the one hand, she felt confident that Aden would look for her. He wouldn’t believe that she’d left him. She hadn’t been thinking straight before. There had to have been some evidence of her capture. Earl Hamilton and his entire security team had been on duty only one floor below. She frowned, wondering what had happened to Hamilton and his men. Were they all dead? God, she hoped not.

She shook away the thought. There was nothing she could do about it, and she didn’t need the negative energy draining her resolve. She needed to focus on one thing and one thing only, and that was getting the fuck out of here. So, points in her favor . . . first, Aden would be looking for her, and second, she still had her gun. She’d learned from Dresner, that traitorous bitch, that you didn’t need an actual stake to kill a vamp. That was the traditional method, but the key was not the stake itself, but the damage it caused. Do enough damage to a vamp’s heart, no matter how you did it, and you could kill him. If she could somehow get close enough to Carl Pinto to shoot the gun point blank at his heart, that should do the trick.

Or rather, the trick would be getting the gun close enough and then pulling the trigger. She’d never killed anyone before, never even shot a gun at anything living, much less a person. But Pinto had not only killed Janey, he’d enslaved uncounted numbers of women, sending them to a horrible fate and sometimes death. Could she kill him, if it came down to it? She thought she could.

But what she knew was that she couldn’t sit around and wait for Aden to show up. This wasn’t a fairy tale, and she was no princess. She couldn’t count on her hero riding in on a white horse, or in this case rolling up in a black SUV. Even if he showed up, he might be too late.

The heavy tread of booted feet pounded down the hallway and stopped outside the bedroom door. Some of the women cried out, hugging each other and eyeing the door as if expecting a monster to enter, which wasn’t far from the truth. Sid didn’t join the terrified huddle—she wasn’t sure they’d have accepted her if she tried—but she played it safe, dropping into the corner and tucking her knees up against her chest, not wanting to take the slightest chance that her gun would be discovered.

There was a scrape of metal, and then what sounded like a heavy padlock falling against the doorjamb, before the door swung open. Sid had expected it to be the guards bringing food and water, but instead it was Pinto himself who stood there, his eyes gleaming red fire as he stared at her in the dim light.