Chapter 24

Chapter24

Ezra didn’t bother to change or cover his bloodstained clothing. Deliberate choice or time constraint? Likely a bit of both.

I had to piggyback him while he sped us down sixteen flights from his penthouse hotel suite, but I made him put me down a couple blocks away in a parking garage. “I’ve ridden you enough.” Ezra’s lips twitched, and I rolled my eyes. “You know what I mean.”

It was around nine on a weeknight. There were plenty of cars parked, but no one was around. I bashed in the window of an older sedan.

“Careful of my jacket,” Ezra said, on the alert for anyone approaching.

I checked the elbow. “It’s fine.” I brushed glass off the driver’s seat, then popped the lock for Ezra to climb in.

“I assumed your new car would be purchased, not hotwired,” he said. “That it might come with sensible options like heated seats and functioning glass in all its windows.”

“Consider this a rental.” I couldn’t loosen the screws in the kick panel of the steering column using the stake as a makeshift screwdriver, so I tapped the plastic cover. “Tear this off so I can get at the wires.”

“I’m not sure I appreciate being used like this,” he grumbled, but did as I asked.

“No one is as good a tool as you.”

He snorted, but despite his amusement, there remained a distance between us that I couldn’t quite explain. We hadn’t blood bonded, but that healing session was insanely intimate. I’d expected to feel closer to him for a while, and it was strange that there was a wall between us.

I found the battery voltage wires and identified the three I needed: the one for the electronic control module for the engine, the one for the body control module, and the signal starter wire. I tore the plastic connector off the wires and attached the ones necessary to make the lights appear on the dash. It had been a while, and it took me a couple of reconfigures to get it right, but once I did, it was a simple process to add in the starter wire.

The engine purred to life.

“Heh.” I patted the steering wheel. “I haven’t lost my touch.”

Ezra placed his hand on his chest with a gasp. “Aviva Jacqueline Fleischer, did you break the law?”

I released the parking brake and threw the car into drive. “I like to think of it as situational ethics in pursuit of a higher good. But if you don’t want to be an accessory, feel free to run.”

Ezra stretched his legs out as much as possible and propped his hands behind his head. “Feel free to ride me through town.” He snickered.

“That’s not—shut up.” I tore out of the lot, my face flushed.

“So,” Ezra said conversationally, as I careened along back streets to the address, “when did you hone this criminal skill set?”

“There was this boy,” I said.

“Please don’t tell me you learned to impress some horny sixteen-year-old that you thought was a bad boy.”

“First of all.” We flew over railroad tracks, the car bouncing hard as we landed. “I was fourteen.”

“That makes it worse.”

“And he wasn’t a bad boy. Give me some credit for not being a total cliché.”

“My apologies.” Ezra’s voice went tight as I careened around a corner and down a stretch of industrial road like I was drag racing.

“Winston was the smartest kid in school. He’d beaten me to become president of the debate team and always edged me out for the top spot on the honor roll. He was insufferable, always lording it over me.”

“So, you hotwired a car and stuffed his body in the trunk to take out the competition.” Ezra nodded sagely.

“How’d you know?” He did a double take and I laughed. “My plan was to show Winston that he could keep his book smarts because I had street smarts. Sachie got one of her cousins, a mechanic who was amenable to cash bribes, to show us how to hotwire a car.”

“I should have known she’d be involved.”

“She didn’t want to be left out of the fun,” I said loyally.

“Did you show Winston smarty-pants up?”

“Kind of.” I shook my head with a rueful smile. “I hotwired the car, but Winston didn’t bow down and cede that hotwiring beat running club meetings, so I decided to drive him around until he professed my superior coolness.”

“You held him hostage.”

“Hey. We were fourteen. Anyone who could drive was cool, and he was supposed to acknowledge that.” I screwed up my face. “It didn’t go as planned.”

“You killed him?”

“As far as I know, Winston remains alive and well.”

Ezra smirked. “You didn’t know how to drive, did you?”

“Nope. Sadly, all my Mario Kart wins didn’t translate to real life. I hit reverse instead of drive, shot backward into a stop sign, denting the bumper, and fled the scene of the crime.”

“A positively Shakespearean tale of hubris.”

“Luckily, I was never caught, and I put the fear into Winston about how being an accessory to grand theft auto would kill any university applications.”

“Ah. The real lesson was in intimidating one’s opponent.”

“More like knowing which information was most relevant to a person.” I cut across a main street that was littered with speed cameras.

“And you never committed another illegal act until tonight.”

“What do you think?” I said sweetly.

“That you’ve been such a good girl all your life, even with Cherry Bomb.”

I pulled up to the curb at the address Constantine had given us—a neat Craftsman bungalow popular in Vancouver in the early twentieth century. “Not everything is as it appears.” I was reaching for the wires to turn off the engine when a massive realization hit me. “Son of a bitch!”

I gunned it around the back of the house. The home wasn’t simply close to the café, it shared the back lane with the business, and in fact, the car port was directly across from the parking stalls.

I turned into the covered car port.

Ezra was out of the car before I’d turned the engine off.

I jogged into the backyard. A broad magnolia tree planted by the high fence cut off any line of sight from the neighbor to the east, and with the house situated on a corner lot, there was no neighbor to the west. Clocking the motion sensors, I followed Ezra’s trail through the shadows and down the back stairs to the basement door.

He waited for me to catch up, then broke the knob off. The door swung open.

It was dark, musty, and eerily silent.

Be very, very qwuiet, Cherry enthused. We’re going Prime hunting. She added a deranged Elmer Fudd laugh for good measure.

Ezra listened for other sounds in the house. He pointed upward and shook his head, but some noise beyond my hearing range caught his attention, and he strode directly to a door at the far end of the basement corridor.

Heavy blackout curtains covered the window, and the light switch didn’t work. Ezra didn’t need it to see, but I turned my phone on and whistled.

The room was empty save for a single showpiece: Calista in a dirty shapeless brown dress, gagged and bound with fat iron chains to a freakishly thick wooden chair. A regular chair wouldn’t hold her, I got that, but this was like something a zealous child had built using oversize beams instead of blocks.

The Prime’s strawberry-blond hair was lank and tangled, and her eyes were propped open with eye clamps straight out of A Clockwork Orange. Wires ran from the clamps to a slick computer tower, with a monitor displaying 3D scans of her eyeballs.

Add in a heavy metal lever whose entire purpose was to keep the stake jammed in Calista’s heart and the utter stillness of the vampire, frozen in this torture yet still possessing a barely leashed sense of power that punched into me, and I had to hand it to Maud. She’d really gotten one over on a Prime.

I glanced at Ezra.

“Don’t think of this as a how-to guide,” he said.

“I mean, I do love adding to my skill set, and it’s so nicely laid out.”

He shook his head and turned to the captive vampire. “It’s so good to see you again, Calista.” Ezra practically hummed the greeting. I’m amazed he didn’t skip over to her. “No, that’s okay. Don’t get up.”

I rolled my eyes but didn’t say anything. It couldn’t be easy for Ezra having his tormentor gift wrapped in front of him and not being allowed to kill her. I moved closer, shining my phone’s flashlight slowly over Calista.

Her fingertips had been burned off. A needle was taped into the top of her hand, the tube leading to an IV stand mostly hidden by the chair. The empty bag on the stand had a smear of blood inside it.

“How do we keep her subdued but able to answer questions?” I pointed to the monitor. “The scan confirms our theory about Maud using Calista to take control of the magic portal settings at the Copper Hell, but we need to know when she’s going in.”

“What do you say, Calista? Ready to play nice in exchange for your life?” Ezra twisted the metal lever away and pulled the stake halfway out.

She sagged forward and would have fallen off the chair had the chains not been holding her.

He freed her eyes from the clamps, dropping them to the ground with a clang, and laughed. “It must grate having me be your rescuer. Seeing you debased and powerless like this.”

She growled at him, blinking rapidly like she was trying to get moisture back into her eyes, but she still didn’t possess the strength to keep herself upright on her own, so she was a long way from recovered.

“That’s enough,” I said mildly. “We don’t need her riled up more than she already is.” The thing is, there was no way a Prime was going to meekly comply and answer questions. I wouldn’t hold my breath for a tearful thank-you either.

“Calista isn’t close to riled up. She’s infamous for keeping her cool. She can flay a person raw without batting a lash.” Ezra tipped her chin up. “Can’t you?”

The female Prime flinched in slow motion and her eyes spat hate.

“Ezra, stop.” I didn’t care that he was taunting her, I just couldn’t bear learning anything else about what he’d suffered at her hands, or I’d be tempted to kill her myself.

He didn’t even glance at me. “I believed all your pretty lies. How I’d consigned myself to live in the shadows once I formally accepted my father’s offer of enforcer. How, as the only other Prime, you understood that life better than anyone and you’d be there for me.” He laughed harshly. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Cali. Your physical torture never held a candle to the pain of realizing that was all a story to make me lower my guard. I never saw you coming.”

I closed my eyes, wishing he’d go back to details of being flayed, because this was killing me. If Ezra had never met me, never rushed from the smoking embers of our relationship into assassinating people for Natán, totally at odds with who he was and his dreams for himself, he would never have been alone and an easy mark for Calista’s physical and psychological torture.

Ezra didn’t create the Prime Playboy out of a desire to connect—or not entirely. He did it for the same reason he publicly flaunted his role as Crimson Prince: it was the ultimate offensive play. If you were always in the spotlight, someone would notice if you went missing.

They might even care enough to help.

I swept an assessing gaze over my ex. That’s why he wanted me to go public with Cherry. Except we weren’t in the same boat. I kept her a secret precisely because the people I trusted to keep me safe weren’t ready to deal with her. I frowned. Did Ezra really not believe he had anyone in his corner when he was growing up? What about now? He had to know Silas was there for him. Was one person not enough? Did everyone he charmed into his orbit act as another brick keeping him from being swallowed by the dark and his fears?

“There was no other Prime to mentor me. I wanted to gift you my loyalty.” Ezra’s voice startled me out of my thoughts. “But all you wanted was my blood.”

I flinched.

“That’s all in the past though,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice.

Relief surged through me and I stepped forward to catch his attention. “How long will the stake hold her now that you’ve pulled it partway out?” I said.

“At least a day.”

“Good. I’ll stand guard in case Maud shows up. You go to the Copper Hell and tell Delacroix to get his ass here now.”

Calista narrowed her eyes at Ezra.

“No,” he said, “I’m not going to torture you. I made a promise recently, and I intend to honor it.”

I pressed a hand to the warmth spreading through my chest. Ezra was putting the vow he’d made to the team over his need for revenge. I’d hoped he would, but it could have gone either way in the last few minutes. After all, Calista had wreaked vengeance on Quentin for far less.

Calista scoffed dismissively behind her gag.

Ezra swung his gaze to me for a split second, and in it, I read profound regret. “I’m disappointed about it too,” he said to her. “I really did want to break you.” His fangs dropped, and he slammed his hands to either side of her head.

“Ezra! No! Don’t.” I lunged for him.

He broke her neck with a loud snap, then with a snarl, he tore her head clean off.

The shock on Calista’s disembodied face would have been funny if it weren’t so dire. Her life didn’t ebb away all at once. It took seconds or millennia, a haunting sight that unfolded in stages. The first involved a profound stillness, not like when the stake was fully jammed in, but as if time itself had calmed. The fire in her eyes receded, and the hazel color darkened, shadows creeping over the vibrant hue. Her eyes turned glassy, taking on an almost metallic sheen, which was finally replaced by an emptiness that looked like it stretched into eternity.

Look at that. Primes do leave a body.

She deserved it, Cherry said in a smug voice.

I mentally hissed at her to shut up because that so was not the point. Gaping at Ezra, I shook my head like that would reattach Calista’s head to her throat. Or turn back time to the glory days of when Delacroix wasn’t going to destroy me.

Ezra held Calista’s skull aloft in a gruesome parody of the statue of Perseus with Medusa’s head. Her blood dripped down his arm and onto the floor in fat plops.

“You promised,” I said in a shaky voice.

“I did.” His voice was oddly flat.

“I’m fucked.” I spun away, shaking. “Delacroix is going to come for me and⁠—”

“Aviva.”

I whipped around. He’d flung Calista’s head into the corner like a discarded soccer ball. “What?”

“I did what I had to.” His features were cloaked in shadow, but apparently that explanation was sufficient, because he turned his back on me and methodically broke Calista’s chains apart one by one.

“You did what you wanted to.”

“This was never what I wanted.”

Right. Because he’d planned to torture her first. Was I supposed to be grateful that he’d spared me seeing that?

I’d stupidly taken Ezra at his word that he’d do what was best for the investigation. We all had. This betrayal would have been bad enough yesterday or this morning, but for Ezra to so cavalierly put me in Delacroix’s sights now?

I removed his jacket and flung it at him. “You let me drink from you. You healed me. How could you turn around and doom me now?” Ezra wasn’t that good of an actor; the intimacy we’d shared in that moment had gone both ways, yet he’d irrevocably destroyed it.“Make this make sense.” My voice cracked. I wasn’t that stupid. I couldn’t be. Not again. “Was this payback for what I said to Constantine about him being an idiot about Maud letting him bite her? You know I was talking about them and not us, right?”

“It was ‘deluded idiot’ actually,” Ezra said, “but no. Not everything is about you.”

I stomped my foot in frustration, my fists clenched at my sides. “This isn’t you breaking my heart, Ezra, and it’s more than you screwing me over. Delacroix is going to kill me. You don’t want that, I know you don’t, so why?”

He put on his hunter’s jacket. “Stop being so melodramatic.” His tone was so harsh it physically knocked me back a couple of steps.

Had Ezra’s nervousness and reluctance to have me drink from him been nothing more than a fake out so I’d lower my guard and he could wreak his revenge? I stepped back from Calista’s headless body slumped at our feet. He’d learned from the best, right?

My face crumpled, and with a half sob, half laugh, I fled.

I could escape the house, but it was only a matter of time before Delacroix learned what had happened and then? There’d be nowhere to run.