The implications dug into her flesh like sharp dagger tips. She was still sorting through them when the camera moved and all she could see was the rear of the chapel.
Roksana shot forward in her chair, uselessly pressing buttons on the keyboard. “No.”
She needed to watch. She wanted to be there with them. For them.
Roksana started to call for Jonas to ask if readjusting the footage was possible, but Elias moved into the frame again, this time carrying her over his shoulder. His eyes were pinched shut, his nostrils flared. Starved for blood. At the time, she wouldn’t have recognized a vampire’s thirst, but she did now. Especially this man’s.
On the screen, Elias went so far as to press his fangs to her neck and inhale, his muscles flexing with the effort of restraining himself. But he didn’t give in. Instead, he pushed her into a room and slammed the door, dropping to his knees and holding it closed.
And that’s where he stayed, grinding his forehead into the doorjamb as if tortured.
Protecting Roksana from the same fate as her friends. Fighting his physical and mental upheaval in order to do it. Nothing had happened as she imagined. Reconciling the Elias she knew with a violent murderer had always been difficult. Still, she’d always assumed his involvement in their butchery of her friends ran much deeper.
She’d made a career out of hating him for it.
What if she’d been seeing everything in black and white, while ignoring shades of gray?
What if she’d been wrong to blame Elias?
She stared at the screen long after it went blank until finally Ginny and Jonas entered the room, guiding Roksana to her feet and down the stone hallway. “Come on, I’ve got a shower running for you and a change of clothes.”
“Who were those other vampires? Do you know the man with the white feather in his hat?” Roksana asked, her voice sounding distant to her own ears. “I always thought Elias led the vampires who Silenced him to the chapel. But I never stopped to ask why. Why would he have targeted me and my friends if all he wanted was to feed? And…he didn’t even do that.”
“They’re not familiar to me,” Jonas said quietly. “I’ve made inquiries since finding the video, but I’ve had no luck.”
Roksana nodded dazedly, replaying the scene over and over again in her head.
If the man with the white feather in his hat was in the bar with her and Elias…did he overhear the name of the chapel? It wouldn’t have been a stretch, considering the superhuman hearing of an immortal. Did the vampire, not Elias, target Roksana, perhaps recognizing her as the slayer queen’s daughter?
Elias’s behavior in the video was not that of a man embracing the vampire lifestyle, as if he’d been seeking it out. Quite the opposite, actually. He’d appeared devastated.
If Elias wasn’t a willing victim…had she led the vampires to him? Did his fateful association with Roksana lead to him being Silenced against his will, instead of the ritual being welcome, as she’d always believed?
Oh God. Oh no, please. It can’t be true.
A wave of pain rammed straight into her middle and she barely managed to hide her reaction from Ginny and Jonas. “I’ll take you up on that shower,” she managed.
Ginny watched her oddly, but nodded, stopping outside of a door at the end of the hallway. “Try and sleep afterward, okay? We’ll talk in the morning.”
Roksana nodded and left the pair, closing and locking the door behind her. Well aware of her friends’ keen sense of hearing, she forced herself to enter the bathroom and step under the running shower spray before she succumbed to the pain in her middle, curling beneath the stream of water in a fetal position. And she could no longer tell if the pain was due to Elias needing to feed…or proof that her own vengeance had made her blind.
It was impossible to know how long she stared at the water circling the shower drain, but the spray was ice cold by the time two strong, familiar arms slid beneath her limp form, lifting Roksana from the tub.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Breathe.
Do not set the goddamn place on fire.
He’d been repeating that same command to himself since boarding the private plane from Moscow, worried he’d inadvertently turn the aircraft into an inferno. Fear for his mate held him hostage and he’d yet to get his new abilities under control. They’d first begun to rear their head when he came across her bloody and beaten in that Moscow street. Blistering hot fire had streaked through his veins, traveling through the gutters like a match dropped on a trail of kerosene.
And he’d been trying to calm the furnace inside himself ever since.
Finding Roksana curled in a ball in the bathtub, her skin ghostly white, was doing nothing to keep the melting heat inside him from escalating, turning dangerous.