Corinne didn't try to deny it. "I haven't seen my son since he was an infant. He was taken away from me soon after he was born. I don't even know where he is."
"Oh, child," Amelie gasped. "I'm so sorry for you. I'm sorry for him too, because I can feel the love you have for him in your heart. You need to find him. You must not give up hope."
"He's all that matters to me," Corinne replied quietly.
But even as she said it, she knew that wasn't entirely true. Someone else was coming to matter to her as well. Someone she wanted to trust with the truth. Someone she felt sick at having pushed away and lied to, when he'd shown her nothing but tenderness. She hated the wall he was erecting between them. She wanted to tear it down before it got any higher, and that meant opening herself up to him completely. She wanted to trust him, and that meant giving him the power to prove her right ... or wrong, if she turned out to be the fool. All she knew was she had to give him that chance.
"Will you excuse me for just a moment, Amelie? I want to see what's keeping Hunter."
At the old woman's nod of agreement, Corinne got up from the table and walked back through the front of the house. Before she even got out to the porch, she saw that Hunter and the purple car were gone.
He had left for his mission without even saying a word.
Murdock came back to consciousness on a choked scream.
Chase watched the vampire flail and struggle on the chain that held him suspended by his ankles from the central beam of an old, empty grain silo somewhere deep in podunk. Blood ran from the hours-old lacerations and contusions that riddled the Agent's na**d body. The air inside the silo was bitter cold, added torture for the son of a bitch who'd stubbornly refused to tell Chase what he needed to know.
For most of the daylight hours they'd spent within the rat-infested shelter, Chase had tried beating the intel out of Murdock. When that didn't work, and when Chase's thin patience had started to snap with the setting of the sun outside and the pricking of his thirst, he'd picked up Murdock's own blade and tried slicing the truth from him.
At some point, the vampire had passed out. Chase hadn't noticed until his own hand was bathed in the other male's blood, the big body drooping limply, unresponsive to any amount of inflicted pain.
And so Chase had put down the blade and waited.
He watched Murdock struggle back to alertness, chains jangling in the enclosed shelter. The male coughed and spit blood onto the floor some six feet beneath his head. A large stain already lay on the filthy concrete, the congealing pool of blood and piss soaking into the moldy remnants of long-forgotten livestock feed and scattered, ice-encrusted vermin droppings. The glossy puddle of fresh red cells drew his eye like a beacon, making him yearn to forget this business that needed to get done and instead head out to hunt.
Murdock bucked and thrashed, hissing when his bleary eyes met Chase's unblinking stare from across the floor of the silo. "Bastard!" he roared. "You don't know who you're f**king with!"
Chase wrapped his fist a bit tighter into the end of another long chain - this one slipknotted around Murdock's neck - and gave it a good, hard yank. "Does that mean you're ready to tell me?" He stood up, slowly looping the chain's slack around and around his fist as he approached. When there was only a couple of feet of space remaining, he paused. "What's your connection to Dragos? And fair warning - if you continue to tell me the name means nothing to you, I'm going to pound your f**king face into a mashy pulp until you figure it out."
Murdock let out a growl, his narrowed, blood-crusted eyes flaring with amber rage. "He'll kill me if I talk to you."
Chase shrugged. "And I'm going to kill you if you don't. This here is what you'd call your classic rock and a hard place. Since I'm the one holding the chain and the blade that's going to start cutting you up into bite-size pieces, I suggest you try not to piss me off any more than you already have."
Murdock glared. His jaw was held tight, but there was a note of fear in his coal-bright eyes. "There are others who are closer to Dragos's operation than me. Whatever it is you're looking for, I'm not the one you want to talk to."
"Unfortunately, you're the only one I've got hanging around at the moment. So stop testing my patience and start talking." To drive home his point, Chase wound another bit of chain around his fist.
Christ, he hated being so close to the male. Not only because of the strong urge to smash his brains out for his participation in the blood club, among his other repulsive sins, but also because of all the goddamned blood. Although Breed blood offered no nourishment to their own kind, the sight and scent of so much fresh, spilling hemoglobin made the feral part of Chase coil like a viper in the pit of his stomach.
Murdock would hardly be able to miss the fact that Chase's fangs were filling his mouth. His own gaze mirrored the same amber fire that seared him from between the battered slits of Murdock's eyes, though not from pain or fear or fury, but from the taloned grip of the hunger that had somehow begun to ride him nearly every waking moment.
That savage part of him snarled as he forced himself to get right up in Murdock's face.
"Tell me where to find Dragos."
When the answer didn't come fast enough, Chase hauled his arm back and swung the chain-wrapped hammer of his fist into the side of Murdock's skull. The vampire howled, a tooth shooting out of his mouth in a stream of dark red blood.
Chase's gut clenched, a hideous, wild thrill soaring through his veins as he watched Murdock spew a scarlet river onto the concrete below. A sick, rabid glee urged him to throw another punch, to tear the wailing piece of shit apart like he so richly deserved. It took him aback, how powerful the darkness inside him was becoming. How demanding the savagery, how deep-seated the madness felt now that it had him in its grasp. In truth, it terrified him.