Bound Guardian Angel (30 page)

What if she had wrapped her arms around him
instead of pushed him away? What if she’d allowed herself to feel
him . . . hold him . . . God forbid,
kiss him? What would have happened? Where would their dream-induced
interlude have led?

She closed her eyes, letting herself float
among the possibilities. These moments were precious. So incredibly
rare. If only she didn’t need Trace to be near for her to actually
feel.

Her phone chimed on her nightstand, and her
eyes popped open. She swiped the phone into her palm and checked
the screen.

She had one new e-mail.

We’re pleased to invite you to audition for
membership to Grudge Match. Auditions are performed by running the
gauntlet, where you will face some of our toughest members. If you
pass, you’re in. If you don’t, membership will be denied.

You’re scheduled to run the gauntlet tonight at 9:00
p.m. If you are unable to audition at this time, please reply to
this text and request another audition. We’ll do our best to
accommodate you. Attached are the rules for the gauntlet, as well
as the address where your audition will take place. We hope to see
you this evening.

Cordray raised her eyebrows. This wasn’t the kind of
message she’d expected from an underground fight club. She’d
assumed her correspondence with the coordinators of Grudge Match
would consist of monosyllabic words and a lot of Neanderthal
grunting. This message was polite and spoke to a level of
refinement more appropriate for royalty than someone in charge of
an army of UFC fighters.

She scanned the attachment and plotted the
location on her map app. Hopefully, this meant she was one step
closer to gathering much-needed evidence against Premier Royce.
Bain needed proof that the drecks’ leader was, in fact, conspiring
against him and violating the truce that had existed between their
two races for centuries. Once they had proof, Bain’s monthly
meetings with Royce could take a decidedly different course,
because until now, Bain had been required to play nice with that
bastard. And she knew playing nice with Royce had just about tapped
out Bain’s patience, especially when Royce was obviously hiding
incriminating evidence.

Standing, she tucked her phone into her
pocket and made her way into the hall. Nine o’clock was still hours
away, but if she was going to have the energy to fight, she needed
to pack in a good dinner.

Downstairs, she stopped at her office and
checked the backtrace she’d run on Skeletor. Just as she’d
suspected, it had come up empty. She still had nothing to go on to
discover his identity or where he was hiding. He wouldn’t remain
hidden for long. In her experience as a bounty hunter, the bad guys
always turned up. Maybe it would take a while, and maybe he’d run
her in circles, but eventually, Skeletor would fall into her path.
When he did, she would be ready for him.

She shut off her computer and headed toward
the chatter coming from the dining room. Trace was already seated
at the table between Aiden and Null. Now that the school day was
over, the other kids seemed as fascinated with him as the twins. He
was the center of attention.

“Where are you from?”

“All over, but I live in Chicago now.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m an AKM enforcer.”

“Do you have a gun?”

“A couple.”

“Cordray has a gun.”

“Oh?”

“Are you Cordray’s boyfriend?”

“Um…”

Cordray stepped in. “Okay kids, that’s
enough of the twenty questions. Let’s let Trace out of the hot seat
and get ready to eat. Books off the table.” She pointed at the
random textbooks beside the plates, and then called into the living
room to Leon and Riley, who were too busy crushing on one another
to pay Trace much attention. “Leon? Riley? Come on, you two. Time
for dinner.”

Leon and Riley thought she wasn’t aware of
just how strong their puppy love was, but they didn’t know she saw
all, knew all. Neither had developed the awareness to sense when
she was digging through their minds.

Their infatuation with one another was
endearing, but also troubling. They were in young love. For humans,
young love could easily turn into something more permanent, but for
vampires, young love often ended badly. Very, very badly. And
didn’t Cordray know how true that was?

Sighing inwardly, she turned her attention
back to the table as the others settled into their seats. There was
no need to think about her past right now—or the pain that went
with it. She tried not to dwell on those old memories, but they
still filtered through on occasion. And now that Trace was around,
those memories seemed to be filtering in more and more, as if he
were an antenna tugging at her brain waves to pull her most painful
memories to the forefront.

As Mya and Brenna carried platters and bowls
of food to the table, she took an accounting of the kids. “Where’s
Gavin?”

Gavin, the resident loner. The resident
firebug. He’d grown unusually fascinated with fire in the last
year, and she was struggling to figure out how to put a stop to his
pyromaniac tendencies. She, Mya, and Brenna had to keep a close eye
on him at all times to ensure he didn’t burn the whole place
down.

Brenna set down a large serving dish of
green beans and looked around then glanced in the direction of the
back door. “He was just here.”

“I’d better go look for him.” As she stepped
out on the deck, she was thankful to have something to do to keep
her away from Trace a little bit longer.

Lifting her nose, she inhaled, locating
Gavin’s scent, as well as the telltale sulfuric odor of matches and
smoke, coming from behind the dorm.

“Gavin!” She leaped off the deck and
sprinted toward the smell.

She’d told him countless times not to play
with fire, and yet, there he was, doing it anyway. Again. For about
the tenth time in four weeks.

How the hell was he getting to the matches?
Hadn’t they all been put up where he couldn’t reach them? They must
have missed a stash somewhere.

She rushed around the corner in time to see
him lift a lit match to the corner of a piece of paper.

“GAVIN!”

He jumped and dropped the burning paper in
the grass.

Cordray darted forward and stamped her boot
on it, putting out the flames. “I’ve told you a thousand times to
stop playing with fire, Gavin.” She snatched the box of wooden
matches from his hand. “Where did you get these?”

Tears welled in his eyes as he lowered his
head, his bottom lip trembling. He didn’t answer her.

“Where, Gavin? Where did you find these?”
She shook the box of matches.

Then it dawned on her. These were Trace’s
matches.

She took a deep breath and calmed herself as
she tucked the box into the cup of her bra. Then she gave Gavin’s
hand a light tug. “Never mind, it’s time for dinner. We’ll talk
about this later.” But first, she and Trace needed to have a little
chat about leaving his matches where Gavin could find them and feed
his fire addiction. “Come on.”

Gavin sniffled, stood, and fell in step
beside her as she led him back to the house.

He was so quiet, hardly ever speaking,
hardly looking anyone in the eye. But the poor kid had watched both
his parents fall into cobalt’s grip and die tragic deaths when he’d
only been five years old. The trauma had been enough to shut him
inside himself.

But you could only shutter the pain from the
past for so long before it seeped through, making itself known. And
the longer you bottled up the past, the more destructive it became
when it broke free from its bonds.

She looked toward the back of the house,
thinking about Trace. She’d seen his fear. She’d seen what had
happened to his mom and that he’d never talked to anyone about it.
He’d held that shit inside him for two hundred years. Sooner or
later, it was going to come out. Maybe it already was. Perhaps
that’s what caused his seizure at Micah’s house.

Like Gavin, maybe Trace’s pain was beginning
to ooze out and take on a mind of its own, too. For Gavin, it meant
addiction to fire. For Trace, who knew? Given how powerful he was,
it was hard telling how explosive the snap would be once his rubber
band broke.

Back inside, she waited in the hall while
Gavin washed up in the downstairs bathroom, and then the two of
them returned to the dining room.

She had barely sat down when
sixteen-year-old Panya shoved a bowl of mashed potatoes into her
hands.

“Thank you.” She took the bowl and spooned
some potatoes onto her plate then passed the bowl along to Leon on
her right.

Silverware clinked on ceramic as everyone
loaded up their plates and dug in.

The din was comforting. Seven kids and four
adults made a lot of noise around the trough, which was so much
better than the clinical silence that greeted her at the table at
her city mansion. That place was more of a giant closet for her
shoes than anything, but Bain had insisted on buying it for her, so
she occasionally used it. Specifically when she sought
companionship. She never brought her few-and-far-between sexual
partners—which were mostly one-night stands meant more for feeding
than sex—around Asylum.

Not that she got much out of her liaisons,
but when she fed, she enjoyed giving pleasure to another even
though she could no longer take pleasure for herself.

In that respect, the mansion came in
handy.

But Asylum and its noisy familiarity always
comforted her. Giving a home to those who were unwanted was her
life’s mission. She knew what it was like to be discarded. Left
with a broken heart because the life she thought she would have was
no longer attainable.

If only Trace knew how similar they were to
one another. He’d been abandoned. So had she. They both carried
such heavy burdens from their pasts.

He sat three seats away, bookended by Aiden
and Null. His attention was split between them as he helped fill
their plates. They giggled as he spilled corn on the tablecloth and
tried to hide it under his plate. That’s when he looked up and
found her watching him. His cheeks briefly shaded deep pink.

“And here you said you didn’t need a drop
cloth,” she said.

He grinned sheepishly and held the dish
toward her. “Corn?” His eyes pinched uncomfortably as he met her
gaze. Clearly, he was remembering their rendezvous from
earlier.

She reached past Panya and Aiden and took
the bowl as she gave him a warning glare. “Sure.”

His eyes held hers for a lingering moment
then broke away as Aiden giggled and shoved a buttered roll in his
hand. He smiled at the mangled handful of bread. Giant, pale-yellow
globs of butter clung unevenly to what barely even resembled a
dinner roll and looked more like something a baby had torn apart
and slapped around in its high chair. But Trace accepted it with a
gracious thank you before tearing off one of the doughy appendages
and stuffing it in his mouth.

Cordray had to admit that Trace behaved
himself better than she’d expected around the kids, even if he
couldn’t control himself anywhere else. But the children were what
counted. Nothing was more important than the children.

Of course, later, when the kids were
dismissed to the dormitory and she and Trace were alone in the main
house, she was certain the insults would fly again and the charade
of politeness would be forgotten. Especially after the day’s
events.

As they ate, Cordray scouted the minds of
the kids around the table. Leon and Riley were thinking about
taking their courtship to the next level.
Sigh
. It had been
destined to happen sooner or later. The combination of young love
and young hormones were second only to a true mating when it came
to the power of attraction and the need to copulate.

At twenty and nineteen, Leon and Riley were
long past the age of cooties and were entering the earliest stage
of their transition into adult vampires. She’d had “the talk” with
them years ago, and they knew what to expect as adults, but despite
all her warnings to the contrary, both were certain they would mate
one another when they came of age. Nothing Cordray said to warn
them otherwise got through. They were already naming their
children, for God’s sake.

Even now, Leon struggled not to stare at
Riley, who blushed as she ate like a proper young lady, which was
an improvement over the ill-mannered child who had eaten with her
hands and flung food at the other kids when she’d been brought to
Asylum eight years ago.

Cordray continued around the table, checking
the minds of the others. Panya already had a crush on Trace. Great.
Not even a full day there, and Trace was already stirring up the
young females. As well as the older ones, if she counted
herself.

Eight-year-old Faith was too busy writing
poetry and short stories in her head to think of anything else. To
her, Trace was inspiration for her writing and nothing more. She
planned on becoming a world-famous author or songwriter someday and
had already declared that she would never get married. Little Faith
was too young to understand what she was, yet, or that if a male
mated her, she wouldn’t have much choice but to mate him back. The
laws were very explicit about protecting mated male vampires that
way.

But it wasn’t as if Faith would abstain, or
that she would always feel this way about “boys,” as she called
them. Maturity and hormones had a way of changing a person’s
mind—vampire, human, or other—into being more receptive to the
opposite sex.

Riley and Leon were the perfect example of
how powerful hormones were in that respect. Not even three years
ago, Leon had been dead set on staying single his entire life, and
then . . . snap! Something changed. Maybe it was
that Riley’s body had finally developed. Or maybe it was simply his
adult hormones kicking in, and Riley was the only female at Asylum
close enough to his age to catch his eye. Whatever the reason,
seemingly overnight, Leon had fallen head over heels for Riley.
They’d been together ever since.