Oh. Shit.
One moment Tommie was above me, the next moment he was gone, and there was the sound of something very solid hitting the utility van outside. I blinked, and looked down at myself. My shirt was gone and my jeans were halfway off.
There was another metallic thunk, and muffled shouting.
I shoved my jeans back on, threw my shirt over my head and ran to the doorway. Just as I stepped outside, a hand—not Adrian’s, because I could see Adrian picking himself off the ground ten feet in front of me—clamped over my mouth and I screamed. Before I could figure out what the hell was going on, Tommie threw me over his shoulder and dragged me into the trees, his shoulder biting into my stomach with each step. Moments later, we were in a clearing and I was thrown to the ground, my knees crunching in the snow, and then jerked back with a fist wrapped in my hair. Adrian was two seconds behind us and stopped abruptly. We all stood very still.
“You can’t kill her,” I heard Adrian call from the edge of the clearing, still hidden in the shadows of the trees. “It’s forbidden.”
“True,” Tommie said in a friendly sort of way. “But killing her isn’t what I had in mind.”
He was pulling so tightly on my hair I was afraid it would rip right out of my head while my mind was still trying to figure out what the fuck was going on.
“I will kill you if you hurt her.”
“You need to work on your technique, son—couldn’t even seduce one little human girl. I show up and give her everything she wants—an older, tragic man. She couldn’t keep her hands off me.”
I let a hard breath escape as it finally dawned on me just exactly who Tommie was.
“You didn’t try very hard to make her fall in love with you—” he said, then paused, considering Adrian. A slow smile spread over his face. “Which makes me think you don’t know who she is, yet.”
Adrian didn’t respond for a long moment. “Whatever plans you have for Caitlin, they are done. She is under my protection.”
“Before you go all white knight, let’s talk.”
“I’m not interested in talking. Let her go.”
Tommie suddenly lifted my arms into the air behind my back, pushing my face into my knees and I screamed because if he pulled another fraction of an inch, things in my shoulders would start tearing.
“Don’t make me rip her arm off,” he said pleasantly. “She’ll be fine without an arm, for my purposes. And I know how thirsty you are.”
“Caitlin, stay calm,” I heard Adrian call to me. “He’s feeding off your fear. Don’t give him more than you have to.”
Great, not only was I scared shitless, I was feeding the enemy. And if Tommie—or whatever his real name was—tore my arm off, I would, y’know, bleed profusely. And Adrian was thirsty.
Which meant if the injury didn’t kill me, Adrian probably would.
“Son,” Tommie tried again. “Let’s talk.”
“I’m not your son,” Adrian replied quietly, but I could hear the rage underneath his self-control.
“No?” Tommie asked, wrenching my arms until I screamed.
“Stop!” Adrian yelled, panicked. “Just—what do you want?”
Immediately, Tommie lowered my arms to a bearable height and I sucked in huge gulps of air.
“So you do have manners; I’m so glad your sister was able to teach you something.”
Even though my view was limited to my knees, I could just make out Adrian’s shoes moving closer in my peripheral vision. “You’re not worried the Council will destroy you for this?”
“Not really.” He sounded almost amused. “The Council has failed repeatedly at stopping me.”
The Council.
Mariana, Dominic, Julian—where was Julian? New York, where he always was. Where was Adrian’s sister? Couldn’t they feel what was happening? Why was Adrian alone?
“There’s a lot you don’t know, son. There’s so much that they’ve kept from you.”
“I am the product of your psychological rape, but I will never be your son,” Adrian replied calmly. “You are incapable of love—you can’t even feed off it.”
The way he said it was strange, slow and deliberate, like he trying to tell me something. But he took a step toward us and I couldn’t think about it because Adrian’s dad dug his fingers into my arm like a vise and I screamed.
Tommie was silent a moment. “Then tell me why they haven’t told you who she is. Tell me why she wasn’t better guarded.”
Adrian didn’t reply.
“Tell me,” he murmured, “why they assigned a boy to guard this girl’s life. They were hoping you would fail. They were hoping I would kill her—because they know what she is.”
“You’re lying.”