Heart Of Protectors {#2}

Part 10

[Part 10]

Jean-Jacques could easily think up of a hundred different places that were warmer and generally more appropriate for a woman who had just barely escaped a prolonged kidnapping from Russians. In these moments, he wondered exactly what his friends would say –what Dante would say of him.

He had been accused of being heartless before, had been accused of being ruthless and uncaring of the sacrifices he had to make to reach his ultimate goal of safety for his friends. Jean-Jacques was never a man who could accept exceptions without a very good reason, never could accept sacrificing the greater good for personal gain. He believed in community-over-self; believed that if his death could mean the safety of his friends, he would gladly walk out into the sun.

Because of that, he was often seen as a man with a singular goal, a man who didn’t bother with the well-being of his individual friends, and rather looked at the well-being of the larger community. This was a special moment that Jean-Jacques hated this trait of his, as he watched Renee shiver despite the heating in the hotel room. Holding back his softness for the woman in favor of his duty to his friends and family, he picked up his coat from the bed and handed it to her.

“Put it on, you’ll feel warmer. If you want, you can hide under the covers until you’re warm.” He suggested, watching the grateful smile spread across her face again. It amazed Jean-Jacques at how the woman was able to smile so brightly at him –especially when she first accepted his hand to teleport the both of them here to Russia.

Hiding his brief emotions beneath the weight of his duty, he turned his back on the poor woman and went to attend to the row of laptops waiting for him on the table. The audio file had been downloaded, and the feed from his bugs were still recording nicely. The brief silence of the room was punctuated with the sounds of Russian as well as his scared French from the recording while Jean-Jacques vetted the entire audio file, making sure that none of the information had been corrupted. If Renee thought something about his frightened tone of voice in the recording as opposed to his usual tone, she didn’t say a word.

Jean-Jacques took a seat at the table, back facing the woman he’d invited to his hotel room. The fact would make for something significant –if not for the fact that he was here purely for work.

“We are vampires.” He said suddenly, not very sure how to start to conversation –hence his decision to simply jump into the crux of what was no-doubt the confusion in Renee’s mind.

The silence that followed his pronunciation made him wonder if she’d heard him at all, but he refused to look around as he began to set up protection and crypts on the audio file, making sure that even if anyone were to try to hack into the Leconte Securities, none of his war against the Russian vampires could be found. Amongst his Council, Jean-Jacques had been the only one inclined to tamper with IT, and given his duty of protecting his friends, it was understandable that he eventually learnt to protect sensitive information too.

“Vampires?” Renee asked finally, sounding very uncertain. Jean-Jacques took it as a good sign that she wasn’t laughing at him. She was taking him seriously, and Jean-Jacques felt a brief sense of relief. “Blood-sucking supernatural creatures of the night?”

“It is a slightly ruder way to say of us,” Jean-Jacques commented, “but essentially true.”

“Do you… still suck blood?” Renee asked unsurely, and Jean-Jacques forced himself to remain purely informative as he encoded the audio file. When Lexi and Alvron first came to know the existence of their kind, it had been Sky who had updated them of every little nugget of information when it came to his species. Jean-Jacques wasn’t sure how informative he could be of his own kind, but if the woman continued asking questions, he figured he could cover everything she needed to know. Besides, she was purely on a ‘Need-to-know’ basis. The fact that she had been caught up in this mess accidentally along with Lexi and Dante didn’t necessarily mean that she had to join them in their cause.