“Bye,” she said sadly.
I watched them walk away, looking very much like father and daughter. A family. A really screwed-up family, but still two people who clearly cared about each other. I didn’t doubt her safety around him. I doubted just about everything else about him, but not that.
I stayed on the sidewalk in front of Blood Bath & Beyond watching tourists stroll past. Watching the whiz of cars move up and down the Strip. Feeling the hot air and scorching late-afternoon sun sink into my skin. I spotted Vampire Jesus handing out his apocalypse flyers across the street. The man was a firm believer in what he hoped was a better future. I, however, was losing hope by the minute.
Last night, after I’d left the airport, I’d been certain I’d be able to save Thierry. I failed. Duncan was dead and I’d nearly been staked trying to find out who hired him to kill Bernard.
I wanted to prove that Thierry had nothing to do with it, that he’d been set up, but I was no further ahead now than I was last night.
I can’t do it.
The realization hit me with the force of a Wayne Newton tour bus. There was no way I’d be able to prove Thierry’s innocence by the time Markus finished whatever murder investigation he was conducting. The death of someone from the Ring—which Bernard still was at the time of his death—likely wouldn’t be swept under the carpet. Thierry wouldn’t get off with a slap on his wrist. He was going to die.
I’d failed.
Was Victoria right? For whatever crimes Thierry might have committed in his long and difficult existence, did that justify his execution at the hands of the Ring’s enforcer now, whether or not he was guilty of this particular murder?
Some people might say yes.
I, however, was not some people.
“Time for plan B,” I murmured, and zipped open my purse to glance inside.
The dart gun I’d swiped from Shane, the unconscious vampire hunter, lay at the bottom, next to a discarded bubble gum wrapper.
It was quite simple, really. If I couldn’t free Thierry from that hotel suite by proving his innocence, then I was just going to have to break him out of it.
Chapter 14
Charlotte had been surprised I was fiercer than she’d expected—a fighter. Did I really look like that much of a pushover at first glance? There was a time when I was much more passive, lounging back in my boat without oars, content to let the current take me wherever it wanted while I simply enjoyed the view. I called those the first twenty-seven years of my life.
Since the view had recently changed to things that could kill me, I’d whittled an oar. Quickly. And I’d begun paddling as fast as I could to get away from the dangerous waterfall looming up ahead.
No waterfalls here. But there were fountains. The Bellagio fountains surged upward and waved happily to me as I passed them. They seemed to be in a much better mood than I was.
However, I was determined. I was focused. I was going to try first to talk my way past whoever was guarding Thierry’s door, but if that didn’t work, I was going to garlic dart him in the forehead.
All I could do right now was pray that I wasn’t too late.
Markus had said something about a “day or two” between Thierry being sequestered in the suite and the enforcer’s determination of his guilt or innocence.
It had been a day. A little less than one, actually. It was closing in on six o’clock, but the sun wouldn’t set for a couple more hours. This couldn’t wait until dark.
Apprehension, not exertion, made my heart thud hard and loud as I took the stairs—the elevators seemed too risky and confined at the moment. I pushed open the door to the hallway. Our room was just around the corner up ahead. I moved steadily toward it and sneaked a peek.
A bad sign would have been to see nobody in the hall. That would mean there was no one there who needed to be guarded. It would mean I was too late. The moment between not knowing and knowing nearly killed me.
But there was someone in the hallway outside the door to our suite. A big someone I recognized immediately—the thug with the cheesy seventies mustache.
Relief nearly buckled my knees. Thierry was still alive.
Problem was, this guy was going to easily recognize me, since he’d helped take me to the airport. I hitched my purse up higher on my shoulder. I kept it unzipped, my hand partially inside brushing against the cool metal of the dart gun. I’d already checked to see there were still three darts available.
I took a second to summon my courage.
“I can do this,” I whispered. “I’m a fighter. I’m a fierce warrior protecting the man I love. There is no other option here other than walking away, and I’m not doing that.”
As they say, fake it till you make it. If I wanted to be a fighter, I had to force myself to fight. Not flee.
This dude was going down.
I stepped out from behind the corner and put one foot in front of the other as I approached Markus’s thug, every step closer reminding me how big and muscular this vampire was, like some kind of Ultimate Fighter.
He frowned at me as I drew closer and he cocked his head to the side. “I know you.”
“Hey there,” I said with a big smile. “Yes, you sure do. Great to see you again.”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“I know.”
“Go away.” If anything, he looked annoyed that I would approach him boldly like this. I saw the tips of his sharp fangs just under his thick mustache.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
It took him a second to answer, as if he was surprised that his fearsome glare wasn’t enough to make me scamper away with my tail between my legs. “Jake.”
“Jake, I don’t think we were properly introduced before. I’m Sarah.”
“Why are you here, Sarah? Markus is going to be pissed you didn’t get on that plane. And he’s going to be pissed at me that I didn’t check to make sure you arrived back in Toronto.”
“How much is it going to cost for you to open that door for me and look the other way right now?” I asked sweetly, even putting a little flirtation into it. Shave off the mustache and this guy really wasn’t half-bad-looking in a large-thug-bodyguard kind of way. He was, however, in desperate need of a makeover.
“More than you got.”
He wasn’t reaching for a phone to call in backup, so I took that as an encouraging sign that he might be willing to negotiate. I pointed at the door. “I need in that suite.”
He crossed his arms and his bemused expression grew colder. “Not going to happen.”
“Pretty please?”
“Are you for real? No. Nobody gets in, nobody gets out. That’s how Markus wants it and that’s how it’s going to stay. Leave now and I won’t tell anybody you were here. No one has to get in trouble.”
I hissed out a breath as my confident exterior started to slip. I couldn’t stand here arguing all day. “I’m not leaving.”
“What? You think you’re going to fight your way past me?” he asked, now with a smart-ass grin. “I’d like to see you try.”
I pulled out the dart gun from my purse and aimed it at him. “This gun is filled with garlic darts. I shoot you and I get at least a twenty-minute free pass. Maybe more.”
He raised his eyebrow and looked down the barrel of the gun. “I actually didn’t expect that.”
Ha! Confidence surged through me. “Well, maybe I’m unpredictable.”
“You are. But so’s my friend David.”
“David?”
The gun was snatched right out of my sweaty hand so fast I barely saw it move. One moment it was there; the next it was gone. My heart sinking, I turned slowly to look at Markus’s other thug, who’d silently approached from behind me.
“Stealthy,” I said.
“I am,” he agreed.
Then he shot me in the chest.
I looked down at the dart with shock. Twice in one day. That had to be some kind of a record.
The next moment, darkness
crashed down around me.
It might have been minutes—it might have been hours—before my eyelashes fluttered open again.
Which, if nothing else, was a good sign that I was still alive.
My plan had gone horribly wrong. I’d been disarmed and tranquilized in two seconds flat. Some fighter I was.
For a second there, I knew I’d had that first guy at a disadvantage because he’d underestimated me. I saw it in his eyes.
Too bad about the other one.
Dark room. Curtains closed. I lay on a bed—but it was one I thought I recognized. I was in the hotel suite. Then again, I guess most rooms in this hotel had the same bed.
I groaned as I tried to sit up. My head felt like a herd of elephants had been merrily tap-dancing on it. I scanned the dim room until I finally saw a familiar outline leaning against the wall to my left, arms crossed over his chest.
My heart skipped a beat. “Please tell me you’re not just a dream this time.”
“I’m not a dream.”
As reserved as he usually was, sometimes it was extremely difficult to tell how Thierry felt. That wasn’t a problem right now. Currently, his voice was low, controlled, but there was something in the tone of it—like something dangerous he’d locked in a cage. It was enough to let on that he wasn’t a happy camper.
No, he was very angry. At me.
“I can explain,” I began.
“You were supposed to be on that plane last night, Sarah.” He continued to speak in that quiet way that made me very uneasy. “Do you think Markus does favors like that often? Don’t you think it would have been much easier for him to also blame you for Bernard’s murder, since you were with me? His job is to assess and to eliminate problems. The fact that he allowed you to leave was the only moment of relief I felt about any of this. At that moment, I knew you would be all right.”
“Thierry—”
“But you’re not all right. You never even left.” He exhaled slowly, evenly. He didn’t move from the shadows, but I could see the tension in his shoulders. “You have no idea how much trouble you’re in right now, do you? It’s one thing staying in Vegas, and another thing altogether to return to this hotel. It was irresponsible. Completely and utterly irresponsible. Those men could have killed you on sight. Frankly, I’m surprised they didn’t.”
I sat up in bed and watched Thierry with steadily narrowing eyes. I’d gone from relief that he was still alive to mad as hell that he was being this way with me. For some strange reason, I thought he might be happy to see me. Guess not.
“Does it help to scold me like a ten-year-old child who’s been naughty?” I asked thinly.
“If that’s what you insist on acting like, then, yes, it does.”
“I’m very sorry I didn’t want to just sit around passively and do nothing. Looks like you’ve got that covered.”
“Is that what you think I’ve been doing?” His words were frosty at the edges.
I shrugged. “You’re still here, aren’t you? It’s been a whole day and you haven’t budged from this hotel room. Maybe things didn’t turn out the way I expected, but at least I was out there trying to do something about it.” I pushed up out of the bed. It took a second before the dizziness faded.
“Passive,” he repeated the word with distaste. “Sometimes, Sarah, it’s important not to jump into a swamp until you’ve properly assessed how many alligators there are.”
“You can justify it all you like, Thierry. Point is, I took action to try to fix this mess and you didn’t.”
“And here you are. Recovering from being shot with a tranquilizer.”
“And here you are, waiting for a miracle to save your ass.”
“I don’t believe in miracles.”
“Maybe you should start.”
“Unlikely. What have you been doing around town, exactly?”
I crossed my arms now. “Maybe that’s none of your business.”
I felt his glare through the darkness before he glanced toward the door leading to the rest of the suite. “They’ve called Markus. He’ll be here in half an hour to deal with this situation.”
“How do you know that?”
“They made the call when they brought you in here unconscious.”
Something inside me went cold at the thought that the enforcer was on his way here, but I ignored it. “Good. We need to sit down and explain everything to him.”
“Explain what, exactly?”
“That you’re innocent. That someone else hired Duncan to kill Bernard and you had nothing to do with it.”
“Is that what you’ve been looking into today?”
“Maybe.”
“Find anything useful?”
“Afraid not.”
He was silent for a moment. “So that’s why you’re here. You planned to help me escape from this hotel because you’re certain of my innocence but can’t prove it.”
I hissed out a breath. “Maybe it’s because I want to play blackjack tonight and I really needed a little cash.”
Silence stretched between us for longer than was comfortable. “I despised Bernard and the feeling was mutual. To have him gone from the earth is not something I’m spending much time mourning. Maybe I did hire Duncan and have been lying to you.”
I let out a frustrated, muffled scream. “Sometimes I really want to punch you in the stomach.”
His brows shot up. “Is that so?”
“Are you thick or something? This is me, Thierry. I’m not your enemy. I stayed here in Vegas so I could prove your innocence. Sure, I failed, but at least I tried.”
“I know that.”
“Then what is your problem?” I crossed the room and was right in his face. Although, with our height difference and me currently without high heels, I was really more in his upper chest.
He grabbed my arms so tightly that I flinched.
This close, I noticed for the first time that his expression was not passive like I thought it was, not annoyed that I was causing yet another problem for him to have to deal with. No, it was tense and his gray eyes flashed with anger and something else…anguish.
“You were safe. I thought you were back in Toronto and away from all of this.”
“Well, you were wrong.” I glared up at his strained expression. “Get it through your thick head, will you? I love you, Thierry. I never left you. And I never will.”
He let out a growl of frustration from deep in his throat. I thought he was going to turn away and leave the room, but instead he took my face between his hands and crushed his mouth to mine in a hot, deep kiss that scorched a line right through the center of my body. I hadn’t realized how cold I was until his kiss warmed me up in seconds.
When the kiss ended, I looked up at him, stunned. The heavy weight on my heart finally lifted and I managed a smile. “See? That’s much better.”
“Damn it, Sarah, you shouldn’t be here right now,” he whispered against my lips.
“And yet, here I am. I’ll stay by your side as we talk to Markus. I still have hope.”
“That makes one of us.”
“Better than none.”
His jaw set. “Fine. This changes things, but there’s no other choice now.”
He kissed me again. And then took my hand in his and drew me out to the seating area with him.
Together we could figure this out. We could talk to Markus and explain our theories. He would listen because he didn’t strike me as a man without empathy—despite what Thierry might think. Markus had let me leave at Thierry’s request last night. He’d listen to what we had to say today.
Thierry moved toward the door and knocked softly on it.
“What?” Jake barked through the barrier.
“I need to talk to you about something important,” Thierry said. “Please open this door.”
Jake groaned. “Markus will be here soon. Can’t you wait?”
“I think I’ve proven by now that I’m in no rush to escape, since I know your employer
will only hunt me down.”
There was a long pause. “Fine. Back away from the door first. And don’t even think about trying anything. I have a stake and Markus has authorized me to kill you if you give me any problems.”
“Understood.”
Thierry returned to my side and I looked at him warily. “What do you want to talk to him about?”
“I need something from him and the other guard before Markus arrives.”
Was he going to try to buy them off? It hadn’t worked for me earlier, but maybe it was all in the delivery. The door opened slowly and Jake glared in at us. David stood next to him with his arms folded. I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to have shoulders that wide. He was like a tattooed mountain. They both came inside and David shut the door behind him with the heel of his boot.
Jake’s gaze flicked to me and he nodded. “Your girlfriend was determined to get in here and see you. You must be quite a stud.”
“Is that what you think?” Thierry asked.
“Why else?” He shrugged. “But I’m surprised. You master vamps are usually all the same—all talk. I’m surprised you have any action to give. She’s just a fledgling, right?”
“She is.”
Jake’s gaze leisurely moved over me. “Just like Bernard’s wife. You know she was screwing around behind Bernard’s back, right? Fledglings can’t take it for long. They need more passion in their lives than what an ice-cold master vamp can offer.”
“Is that so?”
Jake nodded. “I’ve only been a vamp for a little over twenty years. I’m still considered a fledgling, so I still like it hot.” He grinned under the mustache. “Sarah, sweetheart, you can call me anytime if you get sick of this guy. Not that he’ll be around much longer.”
David shot him a look. “Stop trying to provoke him.”
“Me, provoke? Nah. I wouldn’t do something like that after he’s been all nice and well behaved so far.” He grinned white teeth in a feral manner. “He’s way more pussycat than any lion I’ve ever seen.”
Thierry looked utterly unenthused about joining this particular conversation. “Sarah? Are you interested in seeing other men?”
I looked at him with shock. “Are you serious?”