“If you’d given up, we’d all be dead. You didn’t give up, you just…let go.”

Calliope had told me once my fatal flaw was my need to be a normal person, to act in a way that I could pretend I was human and not a monster.

But Holden was right. I hadn’t given up.

I’d just kissed my humanity goodbye.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Four days later

Government assets were not supposed to make demands.

I’d learned that much from the exasperated expressions I continued to receive from Tyler and Emilio whenever I asked for something new.

That’s what they got for labeling me as property.

A Dell laptop might not ask for a lot from its government-assigned owner, but if these two thought I was going to politely do their bidding and not ask for anything in return, they needed to be set straight sooner rather than later.

My first request had been to see Desmond.

I’d been denied.

My second through twelfth requests had also been to see Desmond, and each in turn had been shot down. They tried to be polite about it at first, but in the end Emilio and a military doctor had told me to stop asking. Desmond was a civilian, and it turned out architects do not merit military clearance. And certainly not walk-on privileges at a top-secret military hospital.

From what I gathered he hadn’t liked the news any more than I had, but his reaction had been a bit…stronger. For the four days it took for the doctors to be satisfied with my recovery, Desmond had been kept in the stockade.

Now that they were sure I was fully mobile and healthy, instead of rewarding me with a visit, I was being debriefed. Again.

I’d been left in a small interrogation room in the hospital’s basement. From what I could tell the hospital itself was one part of a much larger complex, but since I hadn’t been taken outside during my stay, I couldn’t figure out how big. Chances were good I’d never be privy to that information. The less I knew the better as far as they were concerned.

The same theory extended to discovering the wellbeing of others. Aside from five-minute visits with Holden each night, I hadn’t been allowed to see my father. The doctor said he was in no condition to receive visitors, which suggested I’d been wise not to see him while we were in captivity. Anything that would take a vampire more than five days to heal couldn’t be good.

I’d been ready to get out of bed on my second day, but they’d wanted to be cautious.

I paced the ugly yellow interrogation room, none too pleased about being locked in a small space after what I’d been through. I’d never enjoyed tight quarters, but now even a twenty-by-twenty room felt cramped to me.

The door opened, and Tyler entered, along with a man in full military dress. Tyler settled into one of the vacant chairs across the table from me, and the officer removed his cap, tucking it under his arm.

He was a good-looking man, perhaps forty or a well-preserved fifty, with dark brown hair going gray at the temples and eyes the color of rich espresso. He had crinkly lines around his eyes and mouth suggesting a lifetime spent smiling. Across his left breast lapel were a number of service ribbons, telling me he was an officer of some important rank.

“Good evening, Ms. McQueen. My name is Major Logan van Buren.” He extended a hand to me, and I considered ignoring it but thought better of it. If I was going to curry any favor with these guys, I would have to play nice.

I shook his hand, maybe a bit too firmly, and said, “Tribunal Leader Secret McQueen. Queen of the Eastern werewolf pack.” If we wanted to play a game of ranks, I was willing to pull out the only big guns I had. I didn’t like using either of my titles when I was with my own kind, but I figured they might give me some weight to throw around here.

Van Buren sat next to Tyler and indicated I should take the seat across from them. I obliged him.

“That’s a mouthful of names you’ve got, Ms. McQueen.”

I considered requesting he address me by my appropriate titles, but decided if he was going to be casual, so would I. I might be a government pawn now, but I wasn’t under his command. “It certainly is, Mr. van Buren.”

“Let’s dispose with formalities, shall we?” He was on to my game and seemed willing to play. “You can call me Logan. Can I call you Secret?”

“You can call me the Whore of Babylon if you’ll let me see Desmond Alvarez.”

Tyler, who had a stack of folders in his hand, placed one in front of the major. Logan opened it, and I saw Desmond’s photo affixed to the top left corner.

“Mr. Alvarez…” Logan flipped through the documents quickly, but from what I could read upside down they had a pretty complete history of Desmond and his family in there. I wondered how thorough it was. If they knew what I was, did they also know what he was? “It seems Mr. Alvarez went to a great deal of trouble to find you.”

“He did?”

No one had told me anything about Desmond’s part in this whole thing, so I still didn’t know where or how he factored in.

“Very brave. Very foolish.” Logan closed the file and slid it back to Tyler. “We normally have a way of dealing with this kind of civilian interference, but with respect to you we’ve held off with Mr. Alvarez.”

“What, do you guys have a vampire on retainer who can come in and enthrall humans so they don’t remember anything?” I snorted. When the men exchanged a loaded glance, my mouth fell open. “You have got to be kidding me.”

“Our practices are not the concern here, Secret. Not at the moment. I understand you may find our methods questionable, but tell me this…would you prefer we employ a vampire to augment human memories, or would you rather we make those humans…disappear?” Logan folded his hands on the table and met my eyes boldly.

He had a point.

“I want to see Desmond.”

“In due time.”

“I’ve waited days. People keep dodging me. Can you just tell me if you have any intention whatsoever of letting me see my boyfriend?”

“I thought the vampire was your boyfriend,” Tyler said.

“I would assume the werewolf king would be your husband given your title of queen.”

Smarmy bastards.

“Well, the wolf king would agree with you, Logan, but if your file has any press clippings on me from the past year, I think you’ll understand why I don’t feel the same.”

“Lucas Rain is the werewolf king?” Logan lost any pretense of decorum in that moment, becoming more excited than a child on Christmas morning. “Well, isn’t that interesting?”

Oops.

“You guys sort of suck at researching this paranormal stuff, you know that, right?”

“That’s why we have you now,” Logan replied.

“Awesome. But you still haven’t answered my question.”

“Desmond Alvarez is in the room next door. If you are willing to sit and talk with me a few minutes longer, yes, I will give you a private audience with him.”

My heart flip-flopped, and I stared at the wall as if I might have newly acquired x-ray vision and could potentially get a glimpse of him. Sadly my powers remained limited, and sarcasm was not the same as being able to see through walls.

Tyler handed Logan another folder, and this one was passed along to me. I opened it, then immediately shoved it back at him. “Forget it.”

“Secret…” Tyler started.

“Why are you doing this to me? I’ve answered every question you’ve asked, and I just want to see Desmond. I don’t see why I need to go over all this again.”

Logan reopened the folder and pushed it back to me. “I understand this is difficult—”

“I don’t think you do. I think this is words on paper to you. I don’t think you have the faintest goddamn idea what I went through.”

“Then explain it to me. Because right now, Dr. Kesteral’s fate is up to me to decide. So you explain to me what he did, and maybe I’ll have a better handle on how to deal with him.”

I glanced down at the folder, and a glossy eight-by-ten photo of The Doctor stared back at me. Bruises under each eye made the blue of his irises even colder. He looked sick, making me think the photo was taken recently. I wanted to know if they had any pictures that showed what I’d done to his chest, but I thought better of asking.

The tab stuck to the side of the folder read Friedrich T. Kesteral. Friedrich. It wasn’t a name to strike fear, but I didn’t think I’d ever be able to think of someone named Fred the same way.

I turned the photo over so he would stop staring at me, and what came next almost made me throw the folder in Logan’s face. Apparently The Doctor had meticulously documented the things he’d done to me, because the file continued with more photos. Here was my chest opened up for the world to see, and next to it pictures of my split belly.

My hands shook violently as I flipped the photo over. Tears ran down my cheeks, but I tried to pretend they weren’t there as I paged through a half-dozen more photos showing things he must have done while I was unconscious.

The last photo of me was the most recent and had been taken after my arrival at the hospital. My eyes were closed, and they had been kind enough to give me some false modesty by covering my body from chest to thigh before photographing me. My arm hadn’t yet been set in the photo and bent sideways at an awkward angle. I’d likely rebroken it when I crammed my hand into The Doctor’s chest.

Pink faded scars still showed where he’d cut me open, though they’d mostly healed by that point from the extra blood I’d had before the FBI team arrived.

It was my face that upset me most. The deep blue bags under my eyes looked like bruises, and my skin was so pale I could have passed for dead. This photo more closely resembled autopsy pictures than evidence of a living woman.

The next photo was Holden when he’d arrived, looking like he’d just wandered out of Auschwitz. There were no photos of him during his stay with The Doctor, and I thanked my lucky stars for that.