Darker After Midnight (18 page)

Chase rolled the slim cylinder in his palm, seeing it for what it truly was: his suicide pill.

He was halfway gone, all on his own. How much worse would he have to get before Crimson looked like his best option?

A stirring in the other room pulled his thoughts back to more immediate problems. Tavia was waking. She’d finally fallen asleep just before sundown, exhausted, slumped in the chair where he’d left her. Now it was deep night, and Chase had already been out for supplies and back while she’d slept. He set the Crimson down on the bathroom counter and walked out to the study.

She was sitting up now, the hotel robe wrapped around her like a blanket, her hands still restrained behind her. Her head lifted slowly as he entered the room, her movements heavy and listless. She groaned with the effort. Her tongue came out to wet her dry lips. “What time is it?”

Chase shrugged as he approached her. “Around ten, I guess.”

She groaned again, gave a miserable shake of her head. “Too long. I’ve never gone this long without my medicines.”

“You’ll feel better after you eat.” Chase gestured to the end table beside her, where a paper deli bag and bottle of water sat. “I brought you a sandwich.”

She winced as if the mere idea repulsed her. “I’m not hungry. I feel light-headed. I need to get out of here. My body aches everywhere and my skin … it feels too tight all over.”

Chase grunted. She was practically describing how he felt right now, his body barely out of the racking wave of blood thirst that had ridden him most of the day and into the night. The suffering had been intense. The temptation to hunt and feed while he was out earlier tonight had nearly beaten him.

“Lean forward,” he told Tavia as he hunkered down in front of her at the chair. Despite the look of mistrust in her eyes, she drooped against him as he reached around her to untie the drapery cord that bound her wrists at her back.

He didn’t want to notice how good she smelled this close to his face, how her skin and hair still carried the faint fragrance of hotel soap and shampoo and the more intriguing scent that was hers alone. He tried to ignore the weight of her forehead on his bare shoulder and the fact that everywhere her body touched him, his senses smoldered with instant awareness. Her soft exhalation scorched him like fire as the restraints fell away from her hands and she sagged further into his arms.

Chase cupped his palm around her nape and drew back to look at her face. He searched for signs of illness in her flushed cheeks and glittering green eyes. Although he could see she was tired, taxed physically and emotionally, there was still a strength about her, a quiet defiance that seemed more instinct than conscious
power. She was lovely, beauty and intelligence in her delicate but proud features.

And she was studying him now too.

Her gaze roamed his face, lingering on his mouth before lifting to meet and hold his eyes. “You look normal now,” she murmured. “Different from before. Right now, you look human … but you’re not, are you?”

“No,” he said simply, deciding it was pointless to deny it when she’d already seen him at his worst.

She swallowed but didn’t shrink away or dissolve into hysterics. She was calm and cool-headed, processing his admission in a cautious silence. “Did your family know? Is that why they left you?”

He scowled, confused now. “My family. What are you talking about?”

“This house,” she said. “And the photos … I found them in the desk in the other room. There was a silver tray inside the drawer. It has a name engraved on it. Your name, right? Your name is Sterling Chase.”

“The less you know about me, the better, Tavia.”

“But Sterling is your name,” she insisted, refusing to let it go.

“Chase,” he muttered. “Nobody calls me Sterling. Not anymore.”

She watched him now, studying him too closely for his liking. “What happened to your family, Chase? I saw the picture of you with a young woman and a boy. I just wondered if your wife—”

Chase cut her off with a curse hissed under his breath. “She was my brother’s mate. Not mine.”

“Oh.” Tavia’s eyes left him then, a quick downward glance that made him feel more awkward than he should have. “From the way you were looking at her in the picture, I thought—”

“You thought wrong,” he replied, knowingly curt. He wasn’t about to dredge up his past sins, let alone bare them for her judgment. Bad enough he had the burden of his own conscience when it came to this Darkhaven and the memories it held. “This was my home once,” he told her. “But I was the one who left. I never wanted to see this place again.”

“How long have you been gone?”

Her question caught him off guard, such a simple thing to ask. Although he didn’t want to relive it, he found the answer slipping easily off his tongue. “It was a year ago this past fall. Just after Halloween.”

He could still hear the percussion of the gunshot ringing in his ears. The devastated scream of his brother’s mate, Elise, echoing into the night as her son—her only child—dropped lifeless to the ground. A beautiful teenage boy, turned Rogue on Crimson and shot dead by titanium rounds fired from Chase’s pistol.

“Were you in love with her?”

Chase jolted out of his bleak recollections, a scowl bunching between his eyes. “I told you, she belonged to my brother.”

“I heard you,” Tavia said evenly. “But that’s not what I asked.”

“I’m not sure I’ve ever loved anyone,” he murmured. “Christ, I’m not even sure I’m capable.”

It wasn’t a sullen remark but the plain truth. He’d never thought about it before. Never said the words out loud until now.

He held Tavia’s gaze, realizing just then that his palm was still wrapped around the back of her neck. Her pulse kicked against his fingertips, the fine tendons of her throat going taut as he held her in a loose but unrelenting grasp. He watched her lips part with her indrawn breath and felt a sudden, fierce urge to kiss her. A crazy impulse, but then he wasn’t exactly operating on full sanity lately. He swallowed past the unwanted desire, his throat as dry as ash. “You should eat now,” he said, releasing her to rise abruptly to his feet. “I brought you some clothes too. You can change into them after you’ve had some food.”

“I told you, I’m not hungry,” she said, pushing the sandwich away.

Chase shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

He put as much distance between them as he could, moving to the far side of the study to pace an agitated track near the tall windows. The electronic shutters were closed and had been since the Darkhaven’s residents moved away last year. But Chase’s body knew it was night on the other side of the steel and glass. His veins
throbbed with the knowledge, each hard beat of his pulse a reminder of the thirst he was trying so hard to deny.

“You’re not well either,” Tavia said, watching him pace and prowl from across the room. “Even if you’re not … no matter what you truly are, I can see that you need medical attention. So do I.”

He scoffed, a raw-sounding snarl low in his throat. “You don’t need to worry about me. As for yourself, you don’t seem as sick as you want me to believe.”

“But I am,” she insisted. “Whether or not you believe me, you’re playing with my life by keeping me here like this. You’ve already killed several innocent people. Do you really want another life staining your hands?”

“None of them was innocent,” he replied harshly. “They were Dragos’s Minions, all of them. Soulless. Mindless. They were as good as dead long before I got to any of them.”

“Minions,” she said, watching him cautiously. “What do you mean, they were Dragos’s Minions? At the police station, you tried to warn me that the senator was in danger. But then when you saw him, you said it was too late, that Dragos already owned him. What did you mean by that?”

She was genuinely confused, which only made his suspicion of her deepen. Either she truly was oblivious to Dragos and his machinations, or she was a stellar actor. Chase dismissed her with a curt flick of his hand. “Never mind. I’ve said too much as it is.”

But she wouldn’t let it go. “Tell me what this is really about. I’m just trying to understand—”

“It might be better for you if you don’t.”

“Maybe you should have thought of that before you put me in the middle of it.”

Her tone held no venom, just a bold frankness he had to respect. Chase looked at her, realizing she had a point. She was in deep now, all thanks to him. And while he couldn’t be certain she would still be alive if he hadn’t intervened with the senator and the Minion cop who’d been with her at the hotel, he had to admit he’d all but ensured her life would never return to its status quo of before.

Even if that status quo had been a lie.

There was still a part of him convinced she wasn’t who she claimed to be, whether or not she knew it herself. He couldn’t dismiss the feeling that she was something more than human. Something
other
. But what?

Could Dragos have that answer?

The thought had crossed his mind before, but now it nagged at him. It chilled him to think she might somehow be connected to Dragos, unwitting or otherwise. And deep down, in the part of him that was still committed to the Order’s cause—still determined to see Dragos annihilated—Chase wondered if Tavia Fairchild might be useful in helping him get close to the enemy he meant to destroy.

His own life was already forfeit. He was fully prepared to go down in flames along with Dragos, if that’s what it took to defeat him once and for all. After all, he had nothing left to lose.

Had he stooped so low that he would be willing to gamble this woman’s life as well? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer to that question.

On the other side of the study, Tavia moaned quietly and took her head in her hands. “Oh, God … it’s getting worse. I really need to have my medicines. I need to get out of here …” She glanced at him then, and it was impossible to ignore the true suffering in her eyes. “Please,” she said. “Won’t you please … just let me go?”

Chase stared, trying to see through her game. But there was no guile in play here, only misery and fear and confusion. He knew the right thing would be to do as she asked and release her.

And if he were a better man, he might have.

T
AVIA WOKE UP
screaming in the dark.

Her skin felt shredded and raw, on fire one second, the next chilled to the bone. She thrashed and bucked—only to realize she was flat on her back in a large bed, restrained at her wrists and ankles by the thick, braided ropes of the drapery cords from the other room. She dimly recalled being brought back into the bedroom after she’d refused the food and drink, too ill to stomach either one. She’d tried to tell her captor that she wouldn’t attempt escape—that she couldn’t attempt it, the worse her body began to rebel.

She’d begged him to let her go, pleaded for his mercy. He’d shown her none.

Tavia tried to fight the ties that held her down on the mattress now, but she had no strength. Her limbs were heavy, her head woozy, stomach pitching and roiling.

Oh, God … what was happening to her?

She was so sick now, sicker than she’d ever been before. She ached all over, racked with a full-body tremble that seemed to originate deep down in her marrow. Her senses seemed at war with themselves, swinging from drained and weak to hyperalert. She felt her pulse drumming in her temples and in the sides of her
neck. Her heart banged against her rib cage, beating so fast and hard it was a wonder the organ didn’t explode.

Eyes squeezed shut, she made another futile attempt to wrest her hands free of the cord that secured them to the headboard. She yanked and pulled, moaning sharply as the tender skin at her wrists began to chafe.

“Easy now.” Warm, strong fingers clamped around both her wrists. Her captor, Chase. She hadn’t even heard him come into the room, but there he was, enveloped in the gloomy shadows. His touch was firm but gentle, his voice a rough whisper that skated over her brow. “Be still, Tavia. You’re okay.”

His eyes searched hers, flecks of amber fire smoldering in his scowling gaze. She didn’t want his deep voice to soothe her, any more than she wanted his large palm to ease some of the burn from the restraints he had placed on her.

Yet she did find some comfort in his low-murmured words. His thumb idly stroking her wrists calmed her jagged pulse. Against her will, she stilled, her senses responding to him like the tide stretching to meet the moon.

“Let me go,” she said, still wanting to deny what she was feeling. Her body wasn’t her own right now, but she hadn’t completely lost hold of her mind. Not yet, anyway.

At least she was dressed now. Before he’d returned her to the bedroom that had apparently become her prison, Chase had given her a shopping bag from a Back Bay clothing store and allowed her to use the bathroom to freshen up and change out of the hotel bathrobe into a black track suit. He’d bought her a bra and panties as well, and she didn’t want to know how closely he’d had to look at her while she’d slept earlier that day in order to size her up so perfectly.