Keeping his eyes on Viola, Nico bent and picked up the envelope. Viola nodded toward the package in Nico’s hand. “I think the contents of that envelope will help you make your decision. Give us what we want. The blood of Edemas, or see what happens. I’ll be taking my leave now.” She turned and strode toward the car. Once she was there, the man opened the back door for her, but Viola turned back to us. “One last thing. It’s not a drop of blood we need from you, Miss Sutton. We need you on the brink of death. We need enough blood that would kill a normal human. Hopefully, your mate claims you soon. That may be all that saves your life.”
“Who the fuck said we were giving you what you want?” Nico barked.
Viola smirked. “Look in the envelope, Mr. Lorenzo, and tell me you’ll say no.”
Without another word, Viola slid gracefully into the back seat. We stood there, waiting until the car pulled off the tarmac and disappeared down the road. Nico held the envelope so hard his fingertips turned white.
“We have to open it.” I said, fear screaming through my mind. I had no idea what was in there, but I knew I wasn’t going to like it.
Nico nodded. “Yeah. I guess we do.” He ripped the envelope open with a finger.
NICO
Two days. It had been two days, but it felt like so much longer. The moment I’d opened that envelope, everything changed. All my plans had gone out the window. I’d thought we were ready for everything. I was so completely wrong. In fact, I’d never been this wrong in my entire life. Now we were paying for my missteps.
Maddy was upstairs in her room. She’d locked herself in there as soon as we got back. Nothing I said could get her out. She refused to speak to anyone. All we could do was leave food outside her door.
Thankfully, Dad came over. I needed his advice. The house felt too quiet without anyone to talk to.
We were sitting in my office, the contents of the envelope scattered across my desk. Dad was leaning forward, staring down at the pictures. One set showed Abi, bound and gagged, tied to a chair. The picture caught her mid-scream, tears streaming down her face. The second set of pictures were of Maddy’s parents. They were also tied up, but looked worse than Abi. Her father’s left eye was swollen almost completely shut, there was blood running from his nostrils, and a thick purple bruise on his right cheek. Her mother’s hair was filled with leaves and dirt, and she had a blood-swollen lip and a gash on her forehead. The royals had discovered Maddy’s weakness.
As soon as the pictures slid out into my hand on the tarmac, Maddy lost it. She screamed and ran after Viola’s car, even though it was already out of sight. I had to grab her and keep her from sprinting off the runway and onto the highway. The scariest thing was that she wasn’t screaming at Viola in rage. No, she was calling for Viola to come and take her. It only took Maddy an instant to make the decision to sacrifice herself to save the people she loved.
Would I have made the same decision? Probably. Would I have been able to make it that fast? I don’t know. I’d had to fight her to get her into the car. She screamed at me to call the royals, to have them come and take her.
“We have to save them,” she sobbed into my face as I tried to buckle her in.
“I can’t let them take you. They’ll kill you, Maddy.”
She lashed out and slapped me across the face. “You don’t get to tell me what I get to do with my life.”
“Yes, I do!” I yelled at her. “I love you, and you love me. That means we do have a say when one of us wants to do something stupid.” I took her face in my hands before starting the truck. “I promise you, I will do everything I can to get them back safe.”
Tears streamed down her face, and I watched her face crumple. “You can’t promise that. You don’t know that you can. You’ve made a lot of promises you couldn’t keep.” She’d turned her face from me, pressed her forehead to the window and cried silently.
Those words had been like a punch in the face. I couldn’t even be mad about it. Because she was right. She was devastated and had no way of getting her frustrations and heartache out, so she sat in her room in silence.
I looked across the table at Dad. “Well?”
Dad shook his head and ran a hand through his beard. “I’m sorry, son. I never even thought about her friend Abi. That’s on me. I should have had someone on her friend. This is my fault.”
In the corner, Sebastian sat with Felipe and Luis, who’d finally gotten back home the night before. Since finding out about Abi, he’d been fuming. He slapped his thigh and put his face in his hands. “I should have thought about it. I was too busy being a dickhead. Fuck,” he hissed and slammed a fist into the armrest of his chair.
“Did you find out what happened with Maddy’s parents?” Dad asked.
I gritted my teeth and nodded. “Yeah. The guys I hired to watch them were found floating in a lake about a mile from their house. Throats were slit. They were professionals. Whoever they sent after Maddy’s parents knew exactly what they were doing.”
“Did you read the file I sent you about this Viola chick?” Felipe asked.
“Yeah, she’s a real sweetheart,” I said.
Viola Monroe was well-known in certain circles. Pretty famous actually, but not in the way celebrities were famous. The general public would have no idea who she was, but she was famous in rich and powerful circles. If billionaires had their own celebrities, she’d be right at the top. Everything Felipe had dug up showed that she and her family gave millions of dollars every year to causes for the needy and downtrodden. They even funded orphanages all over the world. That last little tidbit pissed me off. The only reason they funded those was to find the descendants of Edemas and then kill them in their fucking beds. They were like saints. We couldn’t find any dirt on them, not even a whiff of scandal. I was sure there had been something over the years, but the type of money they had could buy away their troubles.
“We’ve got the fight of our lives on our hands,” Dad said.
His words hung in the room like an omen. He was right. Our pack was strong, but against this? Against a centuries-old family with more money than God, and decades of practice at killing and covering it up? It sent shivers of anxiety through me just thinking about it. I looked around the room and wondered if any of the people here were going to get out of this alive.
“We’re running out of time,” Luis said.
That was also true. Inside the envelope, along with the pictures, had been a note saying we had until the next full moon to hand Maddy over. There was an address and nothing else. We all assumed the royals had already opened the tomb and brought whatever vessel the vial of blood was in. They’d get Maddy there and bleed her dry trying to open it. I’d be damned if I let that happen.
I nodded at Luis. “Yeah. Less than four weeks. One thing I still don’t get…why are they so desperate to get into this vault or whatever? They’re already more powerful than almost anyone on earth. Is this vial of blood really that big of a deal?”
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