“I was interested to know how you came to be here in the daytime, my little dhampyr. But Marcus’s queen was able to provide me some enlightening insights.” His gaze was crawling over my body. “It seems the queen knows quite a lot about you, Miss McQueen.” When he looked at me, the malice in his eyes glittered like the joy of a child. Then he glanced to the side and fixated on someone else. “Isn’t that right, Ms. McQueen?”

While he spoke I had begun to drift, the fog of unconsciousness settling over me again, trying to protect me from the impossible hurt of being awake. I barely had time to be confused by his change of titles before someone jabbed a thumb deep inside the bullet wound on my side. I wailed, much to Peyton’s obvious delight, but the sound was dismantled by my ravaged throat and lungs and came out as a stuttering whistle. When I looked at the queen to whom he’d addressed with my own name, I couldn’t have hidden my shock if I’d been totally uninjured.

Kneeling next to me, as naked as her mate Marcus, was a beautiful woman about forty years old, with hair as curly as my own. Only hers was the dark brown color inherited from my grandfather. Her father.

“Mom?” She looked older than she had in the pictures I’d seen, and far less jovial. I looked from her cold face to the finger she had pressed knuckle-deep into my flesh, her nail scraping against my rib bone. “Mom.” Then I began to scream again.

Chapter Thirty-Four

“Mercy, perhaps you could live up to your name a little, non? I thought perhaps we’d lost her that time.”

“A little pain won’t kill her. She’s a monster.”

“We’re all monsters here, Mercy,” Peyton said, laughing still.

When I came to, my breathing was so ragged and uneven that if I were not awake to hear it, I would have thought it had stopped altogether.

It dawned on me why they kept sticking their hands in my wound. It wasn’t only to inflict pain or for the pleasure it granted them. It kept my natural healing abilities from closing the hole, which was why only one gash remained open while the others had vanished. Continually jamming the bullet back in kept me from healing myself.

My mother’s finger was no longer inside me, and I was grateful for small kindnesses.

Peyton was still on top of me, tapping my face to lure me back to consciousness.

“They will s-st-stop you,” I said, but the threat lost any weight when a full-body tremor rattled my teeth.

“Who? The Tribunal? Yes, I can see they tried very hard to get me. Sending you alone.” He touched my cheek. “This was not about my death. This was about your death. If they wanted me dead, I’d be dead.”

I closed my eyes, unable to continue looking at his smug, victorious smile. He was wrong. He had to be wrong. I was here because Sig believed I could do this, however misguided he’d been. They didn’t want me dead.

Well, Juan Carlos wanted me dead, but he was hardly a majority vote.

No, this isn’t how Sig would have wanted me to go out. I couldn’t believe that, not after everything I’d done for him and the council. The Tribunal owed me something better than a death at the hands of Alexandre Peyton.

“Wrong,” I insisted.

He patted my cheek again, but this time it was more of a slap. “You are a foolish believer in the Tribunal even as they leave you to die. You are not one of them. They do not care if you live or die. You are meaningless to them. No one will miss you.”

From somewhere in the room I heard my mother laugh. “I should have killed you when you were born. I don’t know why I gave you to my idiot mother.”

Hearing her use such contemptuousness for the woman who had raised her and taken in her unwanted baby, the woman who had been the only light of kindness in my childhood, stirred something hot and angry in me. Rage proved to be a temporary distraction from the pain.

“Not dead yet.” My vision swam and the threat of blacking out was almost realized before I resisted the urge to slip back into the dark tides of inertia. If I didn’t find something in me that could fight back, I would die here and become nothing more than a fading afterthought to those I loved.

I didn’t know if I loved Lucas or if I loved Desmond. I didn’t know what Calliope meant when she told me I would be the center of more than one love triangle, or if I loved anyone at all. What I did know was if I bled to death beneath the Orpheum, I would never get a chance to figure out who I loved. I would never see Keaty again or stand next to Holden in my tiny kitchen.

I would never run through the woods of my grandmere’s property or feel the sweet, tingly allure of the full moon in my blood.

If I didn’t fight back now and find some part of me willing to live, I would never do anything at all ever again.

With my mother across the room and Peyton occupying himself by telling me how little I mattered, my body had started fighting the injury. With a sensational amount of suffering on my part, muscles pulled themselves together, blood clotted where it once ran free and inch by inch the bullet was forced out, until it fell silently into a pool of my congealing blood. The surface wound was slower to heal, but I could feel it knitting itself, pore by pore, back into a smooth whole. I was, for once, glad to be so covered in blood. They wouldn’t notice right away that I was no longer leaking.

Fate had smiled on me. If I hadn’t taken Brigit to Calliope’s, I might have avoided this mess, but I also wouldn’t have fed. The blood I had taken at Calliope’s was probably the only thing that had kept me from dying, and now it was singing through my body, burning a path of energy and strength as it went.

Every part of me was attuned and hyper aware. I felt whole again, more awake, and I could appreciate my situation more completely.

Once I could feel things other than the gaping hole in my side, I was able to register something hard digging into the small of my back right where Lucas had touched me in my dream. It took me a fraction of a second to realize that it was my second gun.

They must have dragged me into the bedchamber after Marcus shot me, because if they’d lifted me they wouldn’t have missed it. They had removed the blade and bullets from my boots, but they hadn’t turned me over and looked for a second weapon. All I needed to do now was wait for the right moment. Soon Peyton would stop belittling me, grow weary of the games, and want to feed, and that would be easier if I was sitting up.

That’s when I’d make my move.

Until then I needed to focus on what he was saying and act like my pain kept me teetering on the edge of delusion.

“Not dead yet,” I repeated, this time a little louder.

“She’s got a lot of you in her.” Marcus laughed. Mercy didn’t seem to think it was so funny.

“She is nothing like me.”

“You’ve got that right,” I said under my breath, but loud enough they all heard it. “Thank God.”

“God? You think God had anything to do with an abomination like you?” Her anger was palpable. I could only imagine what she felt, but from what I knew of her history, I could piece some of it together. I was a living, breathing reminder of her first love, of a more innocent time, and of his death. I reminded her of him with the color of my hair and the infection in my blood. Everything about me assaulted Mercy McQueen with memories she didn’t want, and it made her blind and weak with fury.

Apparently my mother’s greatest weakness was me, but not in the way of most mothers. It wasn’t her love for me that made her weak; it was her hatred.

“I think…” I faked a gasp for air, “…that God tested you and you failed.” I laughed, short and merciless.

No one else seemed to see the humor.

“If you don’t finish her soon, I’ll do the job for you,” Mercy said to Peyton.

“That won’t be necessary.” His words were polite, but his tone was full of loaded threats. Mercy’s face, the beautiful face genetics had seen fit to pass on to me, understood what was unspoken, and she sat next to Marcus.

“Good dog,” I said. It almost sent her barreling across the room at me, but Marcus grabbed hold of her and kept her in a sitting position.

“Ah…” Peyton shifted his focus back to me. “There is still a little of the Secret I know and love in there.”

“Secret,” Mercy huffed, her tone incredulous. “What kind of name is Secret? Who names someone that?”

“You. You told Grandmere, in your letter.”

“I did not tell her to name you Secret.”

“You said keep her secret. Grandmere couldn’t think of anything else so she took it literally.” The sentence was rather full, so I coughed at the end for several seconds, then moaned.

“That batty old witch.”

“Like you could have done better.”

“I was going to name you Harmony.”

I laughed so loud it took them all aback. Even Peyton’s expression was quizzical. “I think Secret suits me a little better when you really think about it.”

“I don’t think about it. I don’t think about you. He’s right. No one will miss you when you die, not even your mother.”

“I have no mother.”

“I wish that was true.”

“As touching as this familial bonding session is,” Peyton interrupted, rolling his eyes, “the junior Miss McQueen and I have some unfinished business to attend to, and I’d rather like to get it underway while she’s still plucky enough to really enjoy it.”

“You bit me once.” I fixed my eyes on his. “I hope you remember it well, because it won’t happen again.” A note of challenge hardened my words, and I counted on him rising to the dare.

“You seem very sure of that.”

“Doesn’t really matter what I think, does it?”

I was no longer faking my pain, but no one seemed to notice. Tension was simmering to a boil between me and the redheaded vampire. To an outside viewer I looked profoundly outmatched, and my death should have seemed certain.

But I had learned a long time ago at the hands of this same vampire, no death is one hundred percent certain. Not until it’s all over and someone’s a pile of ash, or someone else no longer has a pulse.