Blood Shadows (40 page)

Caitlin hobbled behind both of them, pursuing them through the garage and down into the wine cellar. Her pulse raced as she struggled to keep up, Max finally pulling Rob back just before he reached the iron door.

‘Don’t be stupid!’ Max warned.

‘I’m not having him control us like this.’

Caitlin stepped equidistant between Rob and the door, braced for his onslaught as he pulled free of Max.

‘Move out of the way, Caitlin,’ Rob warned, marching up to her.

Caitlin pushed him back. ‘You stay away from him!’

‘Look at you defending him!’ he said, frustration and despair emanating from his eyes.

‘I need him.’

Max dragged him aside. ‘Rob, you kill him now and you might kill the only chance we’ve got of helping her.’

Rob yanked free, squaring up to Caitlin again. ‘How can you choose him over me?’

Caitlin held his gaze but didn’t flinch.

Rob grabbed her by her upper arm and yanked her towards him, causing her to nearly lose her footing. ‘I asked you a question.’

‘Get off me,’ she warned, glaring back at him.

‘Let her go!’ Max demanded, prising them apart, shoving Rob back.

Rob strode to the other side of the room. Head lowered, he thrust his hands on his hips, his back to them.

‘This has to stop,’ Max said. ‘This whole thing. It has to end. And I can’t see any other way that’s going to happen.’ He looked across at Rob. ‘We’re going to give her a chance.’

Rob spun to face him. ‘No.’

‘Why? Because you’re scared of the consequences? Because your ego can’t take it? Or is this just a personal vengeance against Kane now? Because that’s the way it just looked to me.’ He paused. ‘This was never supposed to be personal. Any of it. We’ve lost control. One of us has to get it back. And it seems to me Caitlin’s the only one who can do it.’

‘Then don’t expect me to be a part of it.’

‘You don’t have a choice. If I confess to this, I’m confessing to all of it.’

‘You’d implicate me?’

‘How much do you care about her, Rob? Really care about her?’

‘I’m not doing time for Kane Malloy. I was doing my job, that’s all.’

‘A job we should have said no to.’

‘A job we were doing for the right reasons.’

‘In the wrong way. I know it and so do you. We’ve always known it. And if Caitlin has even the slightest chance of surviving this, she deserves for us to give it to her.’ Max looked back at Caitlin. ‘This plan had better be good.’

‘I’ll make it good.’

Despite the anxiety in his eyes, for the first time in years she saw an element of relief. ‘And what’s Kane got planned for Xavier? I assume he’s the one he really wants.’

Caitlin nodded. ‘Just do your part and I’ll take care of the rest.’

Rob stepped back over to them. ‘You against the world – right, Caitlin?’

‘I have no choice,’ she reminded him.

‘We’ll take Rob’s car,’ Max said. ‘So you use mine. You should get across the border easily in it. If there are any questions, tell them to call me. The key code for Kane’s restraints is your parents’ birth dates combined.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I worked that one out.’

Rob’s eyes flared. ‘He’s already out, isn’t he?’

Max stared at her aghast. ‘You released him already?’

‘I couldn’t let you kill him.’

Max shook his head. ‘Always that one step ahead.’

She shrugged. ‘You know me.’

He looked down at the floor, contemplating for a moment, then looked back up at her. ‘Half-past one?’

She nodded. ‘And if Xavier gets even an inkling of this, it’s over.’

‘I have no intentions of telling him anything,’ Max said.

As silence rebounded off the walls, Caitlin stepped up to Max, taking him by the hand and squeezing. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘For believing I can do this.’

He held her gaze and squeezed back. ‘You just get through this, okay?’

She gave him a fleeting, closed-lip smile and nodded again.

He wavered for a moment and she was sure she saw tears accumulating in his eyes, but he turned away and walked back over to the stairs.

Rob remained fixed to the spot. ‘You’re making a mistake, Caitlin. He’s going to let you down. Just when you need him. I want you to know that.’

‘Maybe he will,’ she said. ‘We’ll see. But it seems I need to start getting used to that.’

He looked away, wiped his tongue over the top of his teeth before looking back at her. ‘I shouldn’t have hit you. I’m sorry.’

‘No, you shouldn’t have. But there’s a lot of worse things you shouldn’t have done and you need to face that. This will rot you on the inside, Rob. However much you try to convince yourself to the contrary, you know what happened was wrong. Xavier has destroyed enough already. Don’t let him destroy you too. This is your way out too, even if you don’t see it yet.’

He held her gaze for a few moments longer. He needed time to think, she knew that. He always needed time to think. But he’d do the right thing. She had to pin her hopes on that.

He joined Max at the steps and led the way up. He didn’t look over his shoulder once before leaving her alone in the silence.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

C
aitlin stepped back into the airtight room, her ears taking a moment to adjust to the pressure again.

Kane was sitting behind the door, head and back resting against the wall, legs bent, arms braced either side of him on the floor. He looked exhausted, the journey across the room from where he’d been manacled seemingly all he could manage. She remembered how he’d fallen to the floor when she’d unlocked the binds, her heart wrenching to see him falter. He’d demanded she leave him there and then, his pride clearly as wounded as his body.

But now some of his more superficial wounds had already started to heal, even if the great majority remained in a bad way. Still, she had no doubt he would have put up a fight if the plan had gone wrong – if Rob and Max had gone back in there for him – but she wouldn’t have rated his chances.

His hooded eyes locked on hers as she sat on the floor next to him, facing him.

‘They’re going,’ she said. ‘Max has agreed to the broadcast.’

He kept his head against the wall. ‘And Rob?’

‘Rob won’t have any choice if Max is going to implicate him anyway.’

‘And will he?’

‘Max wants this over. He knows he has to do it if I’m to pull through.’

‘What did you tell them I wanted from you?’

‘Just that you were using me to get them to confess. I said you’d planned to kill me if they didn’t. I said I’d bargained with you to kill the soul ripper for your release.’

‘And they believed you?’

‘They had no choice.’

Kane nodded towards the blemish that must have appeared on her jaw line. ‘What happened?’

‘A minor altercation.’

‘Rob?’

She shrugged. ‘I hit him first.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘That justifies it, does it?’

She broke from his gaze momentarily, touched that he had noticed and, more so, by the displeasure in his eyes. ‘We probably need to get out of here,’ she said. ‘Max has left his car. We can use that. So what happens from here?’

‘I suggest we remove your soul before we run into any more complications. We’ll need to go back to where we were for me to get a few things, but then we’ll go somewhere where we won’t have any more interruptions.’

She knew the question was worthless, but she felt the need to ask it anyway. ‘You’re not going to double-cross me, are you, Kane? You are going to kill it?’

‘We have a deal, Caitlin.’

‘One you could easily back out of.’

‘I’m not going to.’

‘So what about Xavier?’

‘I guess I’ll being making other plans for him.’

‘And you need my soul out before you kill it?’

‘It’s the only way I’ll control it. Then it’ll be enough to distract it when I put it back in.’

Unease stirred inside her. ‘That’s a hell of a leap of faith you’re asking from me, Kane.’

‘And you could have let me die tonight. You could have taken Xavier’s option. So some of that faith must already be there.’

Caitlin studied those sullen, exhausted eyes. ‘You don’t look in any fit state to adhere to any deal at the moment. How long will it take for you to heal?’

‘A couple of hours. Maybe more.’

‘Do we have a couple of hours?’

‘It depends if your loved ones have a change of heart and rally reinforcements. Or if the soul ripper decides to turn up early.’

The risk of the former was all too real with Rob. She hadn’t even considered the latter. It was going to be dark in a couple of hours and there was only one way Kane was going to be fit and strong enough by then. ‘Will a feed help you?’

He raked her swiftly with his gaze. ‘When doesn’t it?’

‘Then do it. We need to get this over and done with.’

He frowned a little. ‘I feed and it won’t be pleasant,’ he warned. ‘It’s going to hurt.’

‘I coped last time. It wasn’t so bad.’

‘I didn’t need to feed last time: I chose to.’

The solemnity in his eyes made her chest tighten. ‘Well, I’m not going to be able to carry you out of here in that state. And we can’t sit around for the next few hours while you recover on your own, so I don’t have a choice, do I?’

‘I’ll likely dual feed.’

Her stomach vaulted. ‘Why?’

‘Because this has weakened me. Because my instincts will take over. Because with me in this state, you’re going to taste too good for me to fight it this time.’

‘You could kill me.

‘I won’t.’

She glanced over at the bench. ‘There are sedatives over there. I could get a syringe full just in case you lose control.’

‘I lose control and a syringe isn’t going to do you any good. Nothing will.’

Visions of him biting into her viciously, thrusting into her savagely, flooded her mind. But she had to suppress them. She had made a decision and she had to stick with it. Her life was guaranteed to be over if she didn’t.

‘Are you sure you can do this?’ he asked. ‘You need to give me your consent now because it’ll mean nothing once I start.’

She eased up onto her haunches and nodded.

He winced as he straightened his legs out flat to the floor. ‘Sit astride me.’

She took a steady and resolute breath then closed the gap between them as she tentatively eased across his thighs.

He brushed the hair back from her neck, assessing her swiftly before holding her gaze again. ‘You need to go with it. Don’t fight me, it’ll only incite me further.’

‘That’s reassuring.’

He flashed a hint of a smile, going someway to appease her tension. But she could see even that caused him pain. Pain that she had inadvertently caused. The urge to lean forward and kiss him tenderly on the lips was overwhelming, but it was unthinkable. This was a business deal – that was all. He was only going to help her because she’d finally forced him into it. And she couldn’t have done that had she not got him into an impossible situation with Max and Rob’s help. She couldn’t feel guilt for fighting for her own survival, and that was exactly what she had done – she had fought back. And she needed to keep fighting. He may have been on the cusp of getting access to her soul, but she needed to keep her head clear even if her heart was less controllable.

She coiled her hair up from her neck and tilted her head to the side to expose it to him. With his one hand at the small of her back, the other firm around her nape, she braced herself and closed her eyes.

As he bit, she gasped, the absence of his anaesthetic this time meaning she felt every millimetre of the puncturing. She slammed her hand to his upper arm, the other gripped the waistband of his jeans.

The taste of her blood or the carnality of the act, maybe both, seemed to instantly incite him, making his feed both feral and fast. She wasn’t sure if the strength and tension in his arms, as well as in his feed, was escalating or whether it was a reflection of her own weakening, light-headedness overcoming her quickly in the passing minutes.

His grip on her neck tightened, his other hand clawing at the fabric at the small of her back, clenching it as he tugged her tight onto his groin. Feeling his erection, she tensed. This feed was raw and unrestrained. And she knew if he wanted sex next, it would be the same.

She wanted to be afraid. Every ounce of decency and common sense told her she should be, but the clench deep in her abdomen was nothing to do with fear.

Her pulse raced, not just with her heart fighting the pressure of the withdrawal of its essence, but from the pressure of his hard body pressed against her. A body that, even within just a few minutes, was already fast recovering. A body that, from his unfamiliar low growls, still wanted more. Much more.