Suffocate In Spirit - Shadows of the Night 4

Chapter 54

Hi!

Hot kiss, master vamp hood-winking Vincenzo and/or Anna? So what next? Find out in this one! PS: I put an "after reading question" at the end of this chapter. Would like to know what you're thinking...

Thank you all for reading! :-)

Lara

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Chapter 54

We'd travelled through the day, and for once I had enough room to breathe. Unless you counted the head vampire's human flunkies, of course. I slept through most of the journey. Now I wished I'd kept myself awake, just so that I could spare myself this moment. Maybe knocking myself into unconsciousness would have worked.

Now that night had fallen Alexander was back at my side, sitting right beside me. His presence alone was enough to keep me wide awake.

The silence in the car was destructive, the tension surrounding us just a little short of explosive. I stared out of the window. Not talking turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. From the instant he dragged me through the woods and back to a waiting car – yet another déjà vu in my ever growing pile of things I didn't want to recur – to the point where we exited a private jet in New York, for the whole length of the trip I kept silent.

I refused to give him answers, and did successfully so up until this moment. I wasn't going to start now. Alexander hadn't even begun to explain why and how he got us out of this jam, didn't even once hint at what exactly the terms of the agreement between him and Vincenzo were. As if it was beneath him to explain himself to me, i.e. his human servant. If he wasn't talking, I wasn't either. Period.

The darkness calmed me enough to put up the cool exterior I needed. A mask I could draw up to hide behind, pretending I wasn't confused out of my mind after what happened in Italy. The closer we came to the heart of the city, however, the more the fake-façade of calmness cracked at the edges. I blinked against the carousel of city lights, signboards, and neon-lamps, forced myself to not ask one of the more pressing questions I'd been preoccupied with for the last hour. Where were we going?

Alexander spoke as if he'd picked the thought out of my head. His voice was soft, slipped into my skin with an ease and a smoothness that frightened me beyond reason.

"It is time to rearrange and change your housing situation. You will walk into your apartment and take everything you believe you need. You have twenty minutes to pack. You will come down, and you will come with me."

My head whipped to him.

"You will stay and live in my mansion. Permanently. Whenever you are not with me, you will be accompanied by two members of my security staff. At all times."

"What do you think you're-"

"I am keeping you alive. There will be no discussion and no questions, little witch. Not about this. This is non-negotiable. You will not mention a word of what transpired in Italy. To anybody. It will be your one and only life line. I am offering it once. Only once. Now as to your escape from New York: The official version I will give to Gustav and the Circle will be the same you will repeat to your friends and acquaintances alike – all of them. You will tell them that the Raven took you to an abandoned building in the south of the city and that I managed to save you. After that you went into hiding. Should anyone ask about my whereabouts you will tell them that I went abroad to settle certain business matters you had no closer knowledge of."