A Vigil in the Mourning (Soulbound #4) - Hailey Turner Page 0,33
He swallowed, tasting bitterness in the back of his throat.
“Do you have proof?” Sage asked flatly. “Because if not, you can take the body with you when you leave.”
Jono got a hold of his temper, letting Sage take the lead for the moment. Part of him hoped Carmen didn’t have proof because that would mean he’d get to sleep and not deal with this mess right now.
Except he was turning out to have Patrick’s form of luck this week, because Carmen pulled out her mobile, held it up so they could see the screen, and played a video for them. The scream that poured out of the speaker made Jono clench his teeth.
“He’s the one in the crate,” Leon said quietly.
The man in question was bloodied and terrified, with one eye gouged out and dangling from his left eye socket by thin threads of muscle and nerve endings. Both lips were split, as if someone had taken a knife and ran it vertically up his face.
He seemed young.
“Answer me,” a calm voice asked from off-screen. Jono recognized the voice belonging to Einar, Lucien’s right-hand vampire, as the speaker even if he didn’t recognize the hand gripping the man’s short hair to hold him up. “Who hired you?”
The hunter opened his mouth, blood trickling past damaged lips. “God pack alphas.”
“I want names.”
The syllables that slipped off his tongue were wrapped in a whimper. “Estelle.”
The video cut out, and Carmen dropped her arm back down to her side. “There’s your proof.”
“Vampires can coerce anything out of humans. All I saw was a forced confession brought about by torture,” Sage said.
“Which was fun.” Carmen turned on her heels, the glamour her kind could wield wrapping around her body once more, making her seem human when she never would be. “Believe what was in the video or not, but the body is not our problem anymore. We’ll see you tomorrow night.”
Carmen and the human servants left. Jono watched her go, aware of his friends staring at him and waiting for him to argue or call her back.
He didn’t.
“I’m borrowing your bathroom,” Marek said into the strained silence, awkwardly walking away to deal with the problem in his pants. “Everyone keep your ears to yourself.”
“What the hell are we going to do with the body in the kitchen?” Leon asked, sounding aggravated. “It’s in pieces.”
Jono stared at the door, fingers flexing, the bones in his hands feeling bruised as he tried to shift but couldn’t. There was still too much silver and aconite in his body, and he was mindful of Victoria’s warning.
“We’re returning it to its sender,” Jono said.
Sage rounded on him, a furious look on her face. “You can’t shift and you want to go poke the damn hornet’s nest? Here I thought Patrick took all the stupid ideas with him when he left for Chicago.”
“The body can’t stay here.”
“Then you should’ve had Carmen take it with her. You know this could be a trap, right?”
“To what? Make me accuse Estelle and Youssef of something we all know they’d do? They sold werecreatures to Tremaine for money and territory. You think they wouldn’t hire a hunter to try to murder me?”
“I know they would. But if you bring that body to their doorstep with your fingerprints all over the crate, the first call they’ll make will be to the police.”
Jono smiled grimly. “Then we better find the cleaning gloves.”
“Jono—”
“You all wanted me to form my own god pack,” Jono cut in harshly, his gaze snapping around the room. “You wanted me to take this city back from them. I’m doing that, Sage. That’s what this is. I’m bloody well sick to the back of my teeth with their bullshit. If they want a fight, then we’ll give them one, but I’m not letting them chase me down into a corner. Not anymore.”
“Not all the packs under our protection can afford to fight.”
“Then we’ll rely on other people. That’s what alliances are for.”
Sage made a cutting gesture with her hand. “We don’t have one with the Night Courts.”
Jono thought about the promise Lucien owed Patrick and wondered what it would cost to make the master vampire acknowledge it outside the angry conversations it existed in.
“Then we’ll make one.”
Lucien made bargains with no one. That was an historical fact, but Jono rather thought he could make the master vampire agree to an alliance if he offered up a war.
Jono realized, with a bleakness that left him swallowing back bile, they had no choice but to