to Alex as a result of your actions, there will be nowhere on this earth you can hide from me.
Tasha believed if anyone could make good on a threat, it was Varik Baudelaire. She’d been checking into his past, and the little information she was able to unearth frightened her. Born in 1833, the only son of an aristocratic Parisian family, Varik had turned his back on his family’s wealth at the age of twenty-three. She found no mention of him after he walked away from the Baudelaire fortune until he surfaced in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1968, immediately following Bernard Sabian’s murder. She could only imagine what he may have been doing in that missing century.
Her gaze fell to Caleb’s letter and then shifted to the half-empty bourbon bottle. Hate and anger, fear and self-loathing warred for control of her emotions. She picked up the bottle and tossed it in the trash.
“I will not be intimidated,” she said to the last vestiges of night outside her window. “I will not succumb to my fears.”
Spinning on her heel, Tasha grabbed her cell phone and headed for her bedroom to dress for the long day of work ahead of her.
A nagging little voice in her mind laughed at her and made her pause in the threshold between the kitchen and hallway. Caleb’s right. They own you, the voice whispered. You fucked up. The vamps covered it up.
After confessing to Varik that she’d broken the chain of evidence, he and Alex had omitted Tasha’s violation from their official reports. If she was discovered tampering with evidence again, she felt certain neither vampire would be so forgiving.
Now they own you, her inner tormentor teased. They’re never going to let you go.
Fear overwhelmed Tasha and rooted her to the floor.
If Caleb finds out what you’re doing, you’ll never see Maya again.
She couldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t lose her daughter. Not again.
You’re weak. You know you can’t fight the vamps and Caleb. Not without me.
Tasha groaned and crossed the room. Her hands shook as she extracted the bourbon from the trash while her inner voice cackled in triumph.
Emily Sabian had always been an early riser, greeting the sun with a cup of coffee and usually one or two hours of work already behind her. Today was no different. She’d already cleaned the living and dining rooms, scrubbed the guest’s bathroom, and straightened her bedroom. The clothes dryer quietly spun in the laundry room off the kitchen.
Sitting at the island breakfast bar, she waited for the other two occupants of the house to rise while she looked around at the purple walls, white cabinets, and tan-colored granite countertops. It wasn’t her style, but then again, she was simply a guest.
Emily sipped her black coffee and pretended she didn’t hear the whispers filtering from beneath the closed door down the hallway. She pretended she didn’t hear the steady rhythmic creaking of a headboard or the low moans of pleasure. What her son and his human girlfriend did in their own home was none of her business.
She checked the clock display on the microwave and set her coffee aside. Emily moved to the refrigerator and took out a small test tube filled with thick crimson liquid. Unlike her children, Stephen and Alex, she no longer had her fangs and therefore couldn’t bite a donor. Like many vampires over the age of two hundred, Emily’s fangs had been filed down and capped in order to achieve a more human appearance. Blood was obtained through needles and stored in test tubes. At least she no longer had to hide the tubes.
In the time before vampires revealed themselves to humanity, blood was hidden in a variety of ways, wine bottles being the most popular. When Stephen and Alex were children, one of the more clever methods Emily had devised was mixing the blood with cherry Jell-O. The kids had loved it.
She placed the cold tube in a shallow bowl and reached for the teakettle warming on the stove. The water would gently warm the blood to the perfect temperature for consumption. She poured a stream of steaming water into the bowl, being careful not to spill.
A joyful shout from the master bedroom startled her. Hot water splashed on her hand. Crying out in pain, Emily dropped the kettle. It hit the stone counter and clanged to the tile floor.
“Mom!” Stephen called from down the hall. Rapid footsteps announced his approach a moment before he entered the kitchen, naked with blood dripping