“Are you quite finished?” he asked after a period of silence.

“No.”

“Will you allow me to say something?”

“Could I stop you if I wanted to?”

“No.”

“Then go ahead.” I sat on the end of my luxurious bed, the satin bedspread rustling under me. The faint aroma of night-blooming jasmine filled the room, but since I couldn’t see any flowers around me I assumed it must be coming from the foyer.

“What, precisely, is it that bothers you most about this? Is it that you were unprepared to meet your father, or is it discovering—through Sutherland—you and I have a deeper connection than you previously believed?”

His question had me stumped. I still didn’t fully grasp what Sig was to me through this new development, and that set my internal compass spinning.

“What are we?”

“Is that it, then? That’s what has you so upset?”

“Everything about this has me upset, Sig. You surprise attacked me with my father, knowing he was the one you were sending me to deal with. Some warning would have been great, but it’s more than that. I don’t know what this makes you and me.”

“What did you think we were before today?” He sounded so calm I wanted to strangle him through the phone. But none of this was news to him. He’d known everything.

“I don’t know.” Friends and colleagues didn’t seem right. We weren’t lovers, though sometimes he treated me in a way that suggested he’d considered it. But now I wondered if his affection towards me had been for another reason entirely.

That I hadn’t known the difference between attraction and a familial bond skeeved me out.

“If you don’t know what we were, why does it matter so much to you what we now are?”

“Don’t play games with me. You’ve known about this the entire time we’ve known each other.”

“Of course.”

“Is that why you allowed me to hunt for the council? Why you didn’t just kill me on sight when I showed up at your door?”

“Yes.” Blunt. I’d been expecting him to soften his honesty to make things easier on me, but that had been a foolish hope. I had threatened his servant mere minutes earlier, so perhaps he didn’t want to play nice either.

“Holden asked me once if I’d let you drink from me because he couldn’t understand why you were always able to find me. It’s because I carry your bloodline, isn’t it?”

“I think you answered your own question.”

I gnawed on my lip in an apparent attempt to take my frustration out on myself. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters,” I snapped.

“Very well, if it’s so important to you, ask your questions.”

“What am I to you?”

“In what sense?” I didn’t think he was being intentionally evasive, but the question rankled me all the same.

“In every sense.”

“According to vampire genealogy, you are of my line but not directly mine. So while it is my blood that ignites the vampire spark within you, we are not…related. Not in the way humans consider it, anyway.”

That made any past innuendo slightly less sketchy than it had felt a moment before. If I’d had to think of him as my great-grandfather, it made all those times he suggested getting me out of my clothes to be really creepy. Knowing his blood was in me, though, made it difficult for me to think of him as anything other than a parental figure now. As handsome as he was, I didn’t think I could ever get past that notion.

“So we’re connected but not related.”

“Yes.”

“If you don’t think of me as a relative, why the extra attention? Why were you so interested in me? You protect me from Juan Carlos and go out of your way to make things easy for me. You wouldn’t do that for just anyone.”

“You’re correct. I have taken a special interest in you. Imagine my surprise when you came through my door at sixteen, full of spite and angst, and you demanded to be given a job. Picture it from my side, knowing the instant I saw you I’d had a hand in creating you. The spark igniting you had—in part—begun with me. I loved the fire I saw in you, and wanted very badly to know how my line had ended up in this spunky hybrid girl who was more attitude than she was monster.”

His impression of me at sixteen still summarized me in the present, except now I had the power to back my attitude up with something.

“And what did you think when you got to know me?” I lay back on the bed, staring up at the gray ceiling. With the lavender accents in the room I was reminded of Desmond’s eyes, and my heart clenched with longing for him.

“I think you’re an amazing woman, Secret, and I’m proud to have you in my lineage. But you’re as much a pain in my ass today as you were the evening we first met.”

For some reason that made me smile.

“I still don’t understand why you never told me. I shouldn’t have found out this way. It blindsided me, and I was unprepared.”

“I didn’t realize it was that important. Until this week I never expected you and Sutherland would cross paths, so why complicate our relationship with unnecessary details?”

“But when you knew I was coming here, you also knew I’d be looking for my father. Don’t you think a heads up would have been nice?”

I couldn’t expect Sig to admit he was wrong because it wasn’t in his character to acknowledge any mistakes on his part. But throwing me in with an unfamiliar council and having a trio of strangers tell me I was here to hunt my father? Well…it wasn’t cool, and I was hoping Sig could at least understand why I was upset.

“I’m sorry you don’t approve of the way I handled things. Perhaps the knowledge might have been useful to you, and perhaps I was remiss in not sharing it. But what’s done is done.”

That was as close to an apology as I was going to get.

At my side the bed dipped under new weight. I turned my head to look at Holden, impressed he’d managed to open the door without me noticing. Absently he picked up a piece of my hair and twisted it around his finger. He often seemed fascinated by my curls, constantly playing with them and running his hands through them. To me they were an annoyance when I was in a hurry, and often better left in a ponytail.

I swatted his hand away, but he went right back to it when I started speaking to Sig again. “Before I left you said he’d been…problematic. What kind of man am I expecting to find?”

“I’ve never met him.”

“But you know he’s been difficult for the council.”

“Yes. From my understanding he didn’t adjust properly to the change. I gather his creator—a vampire named Theo—didn’t have Sutherland’s permission in the exchange. We later discovered Theo had gone on something of a campaign through the Southern states and made a great number of unsanctioned vampires. Most of them were integrated into various councils, and Theo was…handled. I believe Sutherland carries some guilt from events following his rebirth.”

Yeah, like how he almost killed his pregnant girlfriend and unborn child?

Something occurred to me I hadn’t thought to ask anyone in all my twenty-three years. “Does he know about me?”

I’d never been able to ask Mercy, and Grandmere didn’t like to discuss matters relating to my heritage. As far as I know she hadn’t told anyone outside the pack about my existence. So it was possible Sutherland didn’t even know I’d survived or that he had a daughter.

“How would I know the answer to that?”

Holden’s hand had gone still in my hair, and I couldn’t have felt his gaze more heavily if it were a physical thing. The more I let Sig’s words sink in, the less angry I became. He was two thousand years old. Maybe he didn’t understand how upsetting it would be for me to be confronted by my biological father. He probably didn’t even remember what his own parents looked like.

And who was Sutherland Halliston to him? The result of an ugly scandal. He didn’t care about my father, so why would it have crossed Sig’s mind I might be bothered if he wasn’t?

Vampires—ever coldhearted—sometimes forgot how to think like the people they once were.

Sighing, I rubbed the bridge of my nose, and Holden must have clued in to the tension radiating off me because he pressed his fingers against my temples and massaged them in slow, gentle circles. I wanted to shoo him off again, but it felt so damned good I let him do it.

“I just thought you might know.”

“What Sutherland does or does not know about you, I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Awesome. Thanks.” Obviously the Tribunal had known, likely because Sig had told them of our connection, but that could have been so they’d treat me better. Was it actually possible my father had no idea who I was? Maybe he thought I’d been born a normal human, or that I’d been raised by Mercy within the pack. Maybe he thought I’d died.

There were dozens of possibilities racing through my mind, and each new one made my headache get worse.

“Did you need anything else, or do you feel prepared to get back to your job now?”

Ah, that arrogant vampire attitude. And he had the gall to call me sassy? I sniffed, and Holden’s hands tensed. “Yeah. Are you having any luck finding Peyton? I mean…if we’re going to talk about doing our jobs, how’s the council coming along with hunting him down?”

A pause. That he didn’t have a reply on hand made me feel equal parts victorious and nervous. “We’re working on it,” he said finally. “You worry about your father. I’ll worry about Peyton.” Always choosing to have the final word, he hung up on me.

“What was that all about?” Holden moved his hands lower to rub my shoulders.

“Daddy issues.”

Chapter Fourteen