Secret Unleashed: Secret McQueen, Book 6 (28 page)

The dress he’d made me wear was pretty, and under normal circumstances I’d have been thrilled to receive it. It was knee-length chiffon with a swishy hem and a sweetheart neck. My collarbones stuck out, showing how much weight I’d lost while being here.

The blood-red material made me seem paler than I did normally, but without a mirror I couldn’t tell if it made me look sick. I couldn’t imagine I was very attractive.

Thankfully the dress fit tight in the waist, meaning I didn’t have to worry about it slipping down without straps. He’d even provided me with shoes, a nice pair of flats so I couldn’t contemplate using the heel as a weapon.

I played with the dress’s hem and stared down at the empty plate in front of me, wondering what kind of experiment this might be.

“Can you eat?” he asked.

Ah.
So this was going to be the old “see if a rat will eat a cupcake” scenario. He knew I needed blood to live, but now he’d see how I responded to human food, was that it?

“I can.”

“What can you eat?”

I lifted my gaze from the plate and met his. I hated that he could meet my eyes fearlessly, yet I got squeamish from his attention after mere minutes.

“What can
you
eat?” I wasn’t necessarily trying to be defiant, but I wanted him to know who I was. I was
not
a meek and cowering puppy. But I would flinch if he came at me.

“
Touché.
” He took a sip of his wine, and I watched his throat as his Adam’s apple bobbed with each swallow. I could almost see the quivering pulse in his artery, could practically taste the flavor of his blood laced with the wine.

“What do you
prefer
to eat?” he asked, maintaining a polite tone.

My stomach growled, a comically timed response that made him chuckle. “Steak,” I admitted. If I was going to pretend to be a willing participant in his fact-finding mission, I might as well play along for a while. “My werewolf half can get sustenance from meat, but the closer to raw it is the better. Wolves don’t eat their kill off a barbeque, and I guess our internal wolves are no different. I can eat anything a normal human can, but I don’t gain anything nutritionally from it. Blood and meat, that’s it.”

I half-expected him to start taking notes, but he set his wineglass down on the table and regarded me with quiet contemplation for a moment. “Internal wolf?”

Mine growled at him, but thankfully the sound was something only I could interpret.

“You’ve never asked a werewolf about it? How it works?”

“I’ve observed the mechanics of it a number of times, but most of those subjects were not as forthcoming as you.”

“Shocking.”

“Please, go on.”

“I can’t speak for others, only myself, and for obvious reasons my experience may be different from theirs. I…
coexist
with my wolf. She is her own entity, has her own thoughts and her own personality. I can feel her as if she is a part of me, but she is independent as well. If that makes sense.”

“And why do you believe this to be different from the experience of others?” He seemed utterly fascinated. I don’t think Jane Goodall would have been this thrilled if her gorillas walked up and started talking to her one day.

“I was born with active lycanthropy.” I wasn’t going to get into the finer details of how werewolves turned one another. He didn’t need to know about the Awakening ceremony, or the hierarchy of the werewolf pack. But any idiot who had seen a creature feature would know it’s not normal to be born a werewolf.

“Born?”

“Yes.”

“Is such a thing even possible?”

I held my hands up in front of myself as if to say,
Well?

“Remarkable.”

“It’s rare but not unheard of. It…” I stopped, not sure I wanted to tell him any more details. If I told him babies were only born with active lycanthropy when the mothers experienced physical trauma, what would he do with that information? To me it was just a known fact, but in this man’s hands I could picture a dozen pregnant werewolf mothers being abused in God knows how many ways, trying to turn their babies into wolves. “It’s rare,” I concluded.

Now that my mind had gone down this new track I didn’t want to tell him
anything
. If he knew how I’d been created, what was to stop him from bringing in those pregnant werewolf mothers and force-feeding them vampire blood?

I was suddenly dizzy.

What if
that
was his ultimate goal? Not research or scientific understanding, but reproduction? Did he want to study me so he could learn how to make more of me? I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea of a mass-produced army of vampire/werewolf hybrids.

For one thing, they’d be a pretty ridiculous army. Couldn’t go out in sunlight, couldn’t shift without the presence of a pack, basically…strong but not stronger than vampires. All of the weaknesses, only half of the perks. Story of my life.

Why would anyone
want
more of me?

Maybe if I could make him understand the negatives outweighed the positives, he wouldn’t want to do it. But if he hadn’t yet conceived of the idea, would I be giving it to him?

Or worse yet—for me anyway—would I be handing him a list of all the best ways to hurt me?

My plate became the most fascinating thing in the room again.

“I can’t give you more blood today, I hope you can understand why.” Why did he have to sound like Mr. Nice Guy all the time? It made it difficult for me to think of him as a villain. And he
was
a villain.

There weren’t a lot of heroes in my life, but I’d met more than enough bad guys to recognize one when I saw them.

“Where did you study?” I asked.

“University of Vienna for my undergraduate. Stalingrad for my Master’s.” Stalingrad. He’d been in Russia when it was still the Soviet Union. That made me feel very, very young. “My PhD was received in Berlin.” So he really
was
a doctor.

“What was your specialty?”

“I started with research on the mutations caused by nuclear fallout, spent a great deal of time investigating the Chernobyl meltdown. People said the children born from radiation poisoning were monsters, but they were not. Just…different.”

My wine was teasing me, coaxing me to drink it. I needed
something
to keep me from going stark raving mad in here, but I knew alcohol would only hinder me. I had to stay sharp.

“How did you make the leap from deformed babies to vampires and werewolves?”

“Is it not a natural progression to look at what humanity deems monstrous and wonder what is a real monster? I wondered what it was about ugliness or cruelty that would make someone call another human a monster. So I began to search for the
real
monsters. It wasn’t difficult, not when you really look. Especially in cities like Moscow or Berlin. Big cities always have what you need, as long as you know which rocks to turn over.”

“What about Paris?”

He went still, his smile shriveling up faster than a deflated balloon. “I didn’t mention Paris.”

“No, but you lived there, didn’t you?”

His silence was all the answer I needed.

“You had someone there to help you find your monsters.
Didn’t you?
” I’d been thinking a lot about Peyton while I’d been locked up, playing out the ways he’d have known The Doctor and how he would have been able to convince a man like this to take me. My capture had been a risky one, not just picking up a single wolf or vampire in the night. I’d had protection.

“That’s enough.”

“I know. You’re not the only one who can see other people’s secrets, Doctor.”

He got to his feet slowly and came around the table so he was standing behind me. I knew I’d made a mistake the moment his hands rested on my shoulders. I shouldn’t have played the Peyton card, shouldn’t have let him know what I knew.

His fingers grazed the sharp points of my collarbones, pressing into the skin, making me aware of how little protection there was between the surface and the bone.

“Put your hands on the table, please.”

I didn’t want to. I held them in my lap, fingers trembling, wondering if an apology would work.

“
Put your hands on the table,
” he repeated, and this time he didn’t say please, stripping away any illusion it had been a request rather than a command.

I did as I was told, putting my hands palm down on the smooth linen tablecloth.

“Let me tell you some things I have learned over the thirty years I have been studying. Would you like that?”

No.
“Okay.”

“I have learned a werewolf confined to a small space during the full moon will not survive a shift. I kept one in a very tiny box once, and she became irreversibly deformed. Perhaps she and her wolf fought for supremacy over her body. Neither of them won.”

He kneaded my shoulders, his deft fingers avoiding interaction with the collar yet somehow reminding me it was there.

“I’ve learned what happens to a vampire if you lace their blood supply with silver. They quite literally melt from in the inside out. It’s quite grotesque.”

Sliding his hands lower on my arm, he stooped closer, pressing his lips against my ear. His breath was warm, but the words chilled me when he whispered, “Do you know what I’ve done with
your
vampires?”

“You said you’d take me to Holden.”

“All in good time.”

He stood straight again, his chest solid against the back of my head. “I want to tell you one other thing I’ve learned first. For the average vampire, it takes about forty minutes to an hour. The typical werewolf…a little over a day.”

“What?”

He lifted my right arm off the table with such delicacy for a moment I thought he was going to kiss my hand. Then he squeezed my wrist and braced his other hand against my shoulder. When he bent my arm backwards at the elbow, I still didn’t believe what he was doing.

The bone snapped, and I screamed, falling out of my chair, trying to wrench my arm free of his grasp, but he held firm, giving my elbow an extra twist to drive home the pain.

I saw nothing but white spots, my hearing went hollow, just buzzing noise to blot out the sound of my own screaming, but through the haze I heard him say, “I wonder how long it will take for
you
to heal a broken bone.”

Chapter Thirty-One

After he dragged me to my feet and I finally caught my breath, The Doctor outfitted me with a makeshift sling he constructed from a torn dinner napkin. He tied it around my neck with such tenderness I was agog.

He was careful not to touch my elbow, but he’d had to bend it back the right direction—which hurt as much as the initial break—and when he was done, he patted my cheek. “There we go. You’ll be good as new.”

Using the napkin from his place setting, he blotted my cheeks, inspecting the white cloth when it came away pink.

“Interesting.”

Vampires cried blood. Werewolves cried tears. Mine met somewhere in the middle.

“Are you ready to see your friends now?”

I was ready to die. Ready to sit down in the middle of the floor and tell him to get it over with. Instead of yielding, though, I nodded. Even the tension of such a small movement sent sparks through my broken arm, making me feel like the whole limb was on fire.

Something nagged at me. If I was going to see Holden, was that the last piece in Calliope’s prediction for my death? I’d believed I couldn’t die here because I was meant to die next to someone I loved. But wherever The Doctor was taking me, I’d be with a man I loved.

I was going to die.

I was going to die.

The stark, chilling reality of that slammed into me, and I was torn between needing to see Holden and wanting to avoid him so I could live a little longer.

But live how? This wasn’t living. I was nine days into my captivity and wondered what else this man could conceive of doing to me if I stayed longer. How many more tests were there? How long did his average subject last?

I didn’t think I could manage another day, let alone another week. Or a month. He would cut me just to watch me bleed, break me just to watch me heal. There was nothing outside the realm of possibility, but my imagination could only take me so far before my brain stopped it. There were things he could do I couldn’t think of because my brain considered them too horrible.

If I couldn’t
imagine
them, how was I going to
survive
them?

“I want to see him.” Fuck it. If I was going to die, I wanted to see Holden again. I’d rather die next to a lover than die alone with this psycho.

“Very good. And you let me know how that arm is healing, won’t you? I’m interested to see how you do.”

So many doors.

It was what struck me first as we walked down a nondescript hallway with dim lighting, not unlike that from Sutherland’s dream. With the exception of how plain these doors were, it was startlingly close to what he’d shown me in his mind.

Was he in one of these rooms?