Reckless

Chapter 10 Part 2

Present Day

Character POV: Ariadne

Apparently, the place where I saved Roxanne has been turned into a warehouse district. The forest is now a concrete jungle. I pick the warehouse that, from the position of the hills, looks to be as close as I can get to the exact spot where I saved her from burning to death on the pyre. Progress is a bitch, isn't it? It ruins all poignant gestures.

Zebulun drags the limp form of Roxanne's new boy toy out of the black car that was waiting for us at the airport when my private jet landed. In this part of the warehouse district, no one is going to ask any questions. An unconscious man is the least nefarious thing being smuggled in the early hours of the morning. The sky is stained a light shade of pink on the edges of the horizon as the sun begins to climb in the sky. I think about where she is right now. I glance down at the watch on my arm, doing the math. Drusilla has to have passed on my message to her by now. The only question is if she's going to come or cut her losses. The Aoibhe I knew would have come out of a sense of duty to a man who she had spent so much time around and who believed he loved her. Maybe the centuries have hardened her. If they have, then there's no way that I'm going to get through to her and my entire plan is shot to hell.

I walk towards the grey metal door in the side of the warehouse, sticking the key in the padlock on the side of the door and feeling it pop open as I turn the key. I unhook the padlock from the door and shove it into my pocket, turning the handle and pushing the door open. I reach inside the warehouse and flip the switch, and the lights flare to life, the buzz of electricity being the only sound that can be heard at this time of night.

Zebulun shoulders past me, David hanging limply from his arms. He walks towards the middle of the empty warehouse, chains with clasps hanging from the ceiling where it's fastened into metal loops high above. This is our interrogation chamber, where we used to bring any enemies to learn if there were any other plots against us. Not a single one of the witches who thought that they could single-handedly take us down gave "Analize" up, but they all admitted that they had been following orders. It isn't much of a leap to think that the orders came from as high up as they could possibly come from.

I'm not an idiot. I know that people change with time, and that multiple centuries of time could make someone familiar into a completely foreign person. That's why I asked Sita to relocate to North America when Aoibhe moved here, to keep an eye on things and let me know if "the witch in question" started acting suspiciously. Sita had no idea that she was bonding with the second-in-command of the witches. She was so lost in her grief for her dead husband that she wanted a distraction. Now, my first impulse upon learning about their relationship was to go and tear her heart from her chest. But then I realized that Sita was actually a good person, and her being so close with Aoibhe meant that I would know more about what Analize was planning, or at least what Aoibhe knew. The other thing that her involvement with Sita meant was that she hadn't changed that much where she wanted to go after the vampires and was blinded by the witch agenda. She was willing to get involved with another vampire-- another female vampire-- right under the nose of Analize, willing to jeopardize the peace treaty all over again. But as time went on, either Analize didn't realize what was happening, or she realized enough that she was involved but knew that it had no emotional attachment. And that was the reason the peace was shattered, the caveat to the peace agreement that Aoibhe readily agreed to-- the one tie that mattered had to be severed because it threatened Analize's hold over Aoibhe. She sacrificed what we had so that she could continue to live a lie and please her handler. When Sita didn't hurt Aoibhe but instead had an amicable split and continued to stay in the states to help Zebulun set up the club as a base to keep tabs, there was no way that I could be mad at her.