She leaned forward. It opened up her cleavage even more. I tried not to look, but my God! They were so bouncy.
“Hennessey knows very well that I hate him, but I’ve managed to hide things from him before.” She paused to give Bones a knowing smile, and I almost lost it again. “He enjoys keeping me, knowing how much I despise being his. Vampires can only leave their sire’s domination if they win in a duel against them, get ransomed by another Master, or are released as a gesture of goodwill. Hennessey is too strong for me to beat, there is no goodwill in him, and he will never let another vampire ransom me. Yet not for a moment does he believe I’ll betray him. He thinks I fear too much what he would do to me if I were caught.”
The purr of her voice made it all the more chilling. She knew firsthand what he was capable of, and despite that, she hated him enough to risk it anyway. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to disparage her. You had to admire that kind of determination. Whether or not it came with under-pants.
“Then you and I have something in common,” I said, before glancing at Bones and letting out a bark of ironic laughter. “Well, something else. I want Hennessey dead, too. That’s all we really need to know about each other, isn’t it?”
She gave me a rake of her cognac eyes and then her shoulder lifted in a shrug. “Sí. I suppose it is.”
Bones and Spade exchanged a glance. I thought I saw the spiky-haired vampire smile.
“Aside from the obvious, Francesca, what do you want in return for supplying information?” Bones asked, getting back to the subject.
“You to take me,” she replied at once.
“Not gonna happen!” I spat, squeezing him possessively.
Three sets of widened eyes fixed on me. That’s when I realized that what I had a firm grip on was no longer his hand.
Spade started to laugh even as I turned beet red again, yanking my hand back and fighting the urge to sit on it for my own good. Dear God! What had gotten into me?
Bones’s lips twitched, but he didn’t join in the growing chuckles that had Spade dabbing at his eyes.
“That’s not what she means, luv,” he said in a carefully neutral tone. “Francesca means that with the head of her line deceased, she wants to be under another vampire’s protection. I could claim her as one of mine, thereby ‘taking’ her. Although I’m still under Ian’s yoke, he hasn’t exercised any of his authority over me in a very long time, which is why I haven’t bothered to challenge him to be on my own. I’ve had more freedom this way, and because of our understanding, I wouldn’t need his consent to take Francesca on. Though under normal circumstances, getting his consent would be the proper way.”
Thankfully, this was complicated enough to distract me from groping him further. “Why wouldn’t you want to be on your own?” I wondered out loud to her.
“Masterless vampires are open game, ni?a. There’s no accountability for any cruelty done to them. Like with your nations. If you are a man or a woman with no country, who do you appeal to when you’re in need? Who defends you?”
“That’s a damn brutal system you people operate under,” I said, glad to have a heartbeat.
“Don’t be so na?ve,” she said sharply. “It’s a far kinder structure than the one you’re in. How many humans starve to death each day because your nations refuse to care for their own? Even still, how many Americans die from illnesses when treatment is readily available but withheld if they can’t afford it? Vampires would never allow any of their people to go about hungry or in poverty. Even Hennessey, who is a beast, would consider it a personal insult to have anyone belonging to him in such a condition. Consider that. The worst of our kind treats his people better than your countries treat their citizens.”
“Francesca…” Spade had stopped laughing.
She waved at him. “I’m finished.”
I wasn’t.
“If you bloodsuckers are such paragons of virtue, then why haven’t any of you stood up to stop Hennessey from plowing through my kind? I mean, Bones tells me about how five percent of everyone walking isn’t alive, so there’s a lot of you! Or is it that the kidnapping, rape, murder, and consumption of humans doesn’t rank as important?”
Bones smoothed his hand on my arm. “Kitten, perhaps—”
Francesca bolted out of her chair. “Wake up! What Hennessey’s doing is nothing compared to what humans do! Each year, over fifty thousand teenage Colombians are sold into slavery across Europe and Asia, and that isn’t by vampires! In the Congo, over a hundred thousand women have been brutalized—by the rebels, and the soldiers in their own military! Pakistan still has areas where ‘honor’ rapes and killings of women are ordered by the courts, and yet your country and the rest of the world do nothing about it! Vampires may tend to their own business first, but if we were to truly start policing this planet, we’d get rid of the humans, who are the greatest evildoers—”