King Bain sat across from his two top liaisons inside the headquarters of AKM, growing more impatient by the moment. When he arrived there, for personal reasons having nothing to do with ruling the race, he hadn’t expected to find Ulrich and Gregos huddled in discussion in one of the corridors. And he certainly hadn’t expected to be corralled into a private audience once they saw him.
Then he learned that Ulrich’s daughter, Persephone, had been brought in from a cobalt overdose, which explained Ulrich’s presence, but not Gregos’s.
And now he was in an increasingly heated back and forth with Ulrich in the AKM conference room regarding what he was doing about the accelerating cobalt problem.
As emotions boiled over into impropriety, Ulrich pounded his fist on the oval table between them as he shot forward in his seat. “Not enough is being done about cobalt, Bain! You’re not doing anything to put an end to this crisis! I want action! I want justice! For my daughter and my family!”
Gregos Savakis cautiously placed his hand over Ulrich’s forearm. “He is just upset about his daughter, Your Highness. He means no disrespect.” Gregos sent a cutting glare toward Ulrich. One that seemed more personal than professional.
King Bain glanced from Gregos to Ulrich and back, a niggle of unease prickling the hairs on the back of his neck. He couldn’t put his finger on what was wrong, but something wasn’t right between these two. They’d been exchanging private glances throughout this entire conversation, and the secret language they seemed fluent in made Bain increasingly suspicious.
He definitely needed to get to the bottom of whatever was going on between them, but for now, he would let it stand. He had other more important issues to attend to in the foreseeable future. Issues that, if things went the way he hoped, would get around to uncovering whatever might be going on behind the scenes with Gregos and Ulrich, anyway, so why rush?
For now, he would address the greater threat. That of a werewolf bite that was more potent to a vampire than any werewolf bite he had ever seen. Because if some new race of werewolf had evolved to threaten them, that was a more imminent threat than cobalt.
Micah’s half brother, Ronan, was at this very moment fighting for his life, and Bain wanted desperately to end this tiresome discussion so he could get an update from the doctor overseeing the efforts to keep Ronan alive.
He turned his attention back to Ulrich. “I will overlook your tone under the circumstances, Ulrich, but it would behoove you to remember who you’re talking to.”
Yes, Ulrich’s emotions were high. Persephone had overdosed. Bain remembered his own emotional upheaval during Miriam’s cobalt addiction. An addiction she still fought every day. Thank God she had Io to help her through the cravings and phantom withdrawal. And thank God he’d woken his ass up to his part in sending her to those death dealers in the first place. Otherwise, it might have been Miriam in a hospital bed from an overdose instead of Persephone.
Bain hadn’t even realized Miriam’s best friend, Persephone, was back on the blue shit. The last he heard, she’d been in rehab and doing well. Now here she was, back on cobalt, and from Ulrich’s recounting of the situation, she’d almost died tonight. Still might. From the sound of things, it was bad.
If not for Ronan, she wouldn’t even have a chance. She’d already be dead. Micah’s brother had saved her.
And now he himself was fighting for his life.
From a fucking werewolf bite.
What in the hell were werewolves doing in Chicago?
That’s the issue he wanted to be getting to the bottom of right now. That was why he was here. Well, it was one of the reasons, but he would keep his personal motivations to himself for now. In time, all would be revealed.
The point was, he didn’t have time to hear about Persephone’s cobalt habit, especially when her reasons for using the shit were sitting right in front of him.
Gregos and Ulrich had tried to force a mating on her with Gregos’s son, Arion. Ari would have made a fine mate for Persephone, but he had already taken a mate. Severin. That hadn’t sat well with Ulrich. It hadn’t gone over well with Gregos, either, who refused to acknowledge Severin as his son’s mate on the basis that theirs was an unnatural union. To compound the matter, Ulrich was furious Bain wouldn’t enforce the arranged pairing between his daughter and Arion.
But that hadn’t stopped Ulrich from seeking out a more suitable mate for his daughter. And he’d put Bain’s son, Colin, at the top of his wish list. Ulrich had made numerous inquiries, each increasing in demand, seeking an audience between Colin and Persephone and an agreement that they would be joined as mates.
A severely inappropriate overstep on Ulrich’s part. One that broached on dissension and insurrection, but one that was meant as a hard shove. The insinuation was that since Bain’s law to protect biological matings had taken Persephone’s arranged mate away from her, then he should give his son—the prince—in exchange.
A ballsy, bully move. And foolish. A move that would backfire if Ulrich didn’t tread more carefully.
For all Bain cared, Ulrich could send him a hundred requests to arrange a pairing between Colin and Persephone. The answer would forever be no. He had no intention of giving Ulrich that kind of royal access. Besides, he had learned his lesson with his daughter, Miriam. Never again would he interfere in the mating habits of his children.
He had never planned to pair Miriam to a male who hadn’t biologically mated her, but he had paraded eligible males in front of her relentlessly in search of one who would strike up a bonded claim. And when that claim came from the most unlikely source—the playboy enforcer, Io—he had resisted. Almost to his and Miriam’s detriment. She had almost died because of his opposition to Io’s mating bond to his daughter.
Never again. Now that he’d had time to see Miriam with Io and vice versa, he knew that male was the best thing that had ever happened to his daughter, despite Io’s womanizing past. Io didn’t so much as look at another female’s shadow, anymore. He adored Miriam, and she treasured him. To see them together was like watching the living definition of true love.
It was proof enough that biology knew best, and from now on, Bain wouldn’t meddle with its decisiveness. He didn’t care whether a mating was heterosexual, homosexual, made between a vampire and a human, or whether the mating involved more than two people. His laws on the matter were clear. As long as the mating link was borne of biology, it was sacrosanct. He would honor all biological matings over any pairings that were engineered by outdated practices, such as those inherent to the wealthy, aristocratic families who preferred arranged unions to biological ones.
Such families believed they knew better than biology who was suited to whom. They wished to serve pedigree, not the survival of the race. Only those proven by wealth, political position, and social status were good enough to mate with their children.
Those families never learned. They still tried to manipulate bloodlines to their desires, even risking the extinction of their line by forcing a pairing that would never produce young.
And once a family got it in their heads that it was time to mate off their female progeny, they were relentless in the pursuit of an acceptable male.
Case in point, it had only been two months since Persephone’s failed joining with Arion Savakis.
Two months.
And Ulrich had been shopping her around like a broodmare at auction for weeks. Almost immediately after the pairing with Arion fell apart, he was putting out feelers, searching for a suitable replacement. He hadn’t even given her time to mourn before putting her back on the market. Hadn’t given her time to process what had happened. For God’s sake, give the young female a moment to catch her breath.
And Bain knew his son wasn’t the only male Ulrich had been making inquiries about. He’d approached several families but had narrowed the choices down to the prince and Otto Chastain’s son, Cecil. The Chastain line was wealthy beyond imagining, but they were useless.
Otto was a pompous, loathsome vampire, and his son was just as incompetent. No female would choose him of her own volition. Pairing him with Persephone was lunacy.
Bain had no doubt her father’s meddling had been key in driving her back to cobalt. Yet Ulrich sat in front of him, fuming, his face filled with blood, insisting that Bain do more to fight the insurgency of blue death that was driving a knife into the heart of their people when he should have been paying attention to what his daughter was trying to tell him through her self-destructive behavior. But, as usual, he saw only what he wanted to see and refused to admit he might actually be the cause of Persephone’s drug addiction.
Persephone deserved to find what Miriam had found. Miri was undeniably happy now, her own cobalt addiction, which Bain had shamefully taken responsibility for, was rapidly fading into the past, thanks to Io. Miriam had a new lease on life, and Bain owed everything to Io for saving her.
If only there were something Bain could do to save Persephone the same way. It was blatantly obvious to Bain that she didn’t want the life Ulrich insisted on forcing her to accept, but her father was too damn deaf to hear her pleas for help, even when she was screaming at the top of her lungs.
But Bain had no grounds to interfere. Until another male biologically mated her, there was nothing Bain could do.
“Why is she doing this to me?” Ulrich said, dropping his face into his hands.
Bain shook his head. “She’s doing it to herself. The question you should be asking yourself, Ulrich, is what reason she has to self-medicate to the point of almost dying.”
Ulrich slammed his palms on the table and shot out of his seat, leaning across the expanse of polished wood. “I know what you’re getting at, Bain!”
“Ulrich . . .” Gregos blanched as he reached for Ulrich’s arm.
“No, Gregos!” Ulrich whipped his arm away, launching himself from the table. He paced aggressively, taking abrupt, angry breaths. “I will be heard on this!” He jabbed his finger into the air in front of him.
Bain remained seated, eyes narrowed, body taut. If Ulrich so much as flinched his direction, he would subdue him so fast, the idiot wouldn’t know what hit him until after his ass shot out his mouth.
Bain might have been royalty, but he was expertly trained in self-defense and could more than hold his own in a fight. He’d seen his share of battles during the war and took credit for hundreds of kills. If Ulrich moved on him, it would be the last move he made.
“What’s on your mind, Ulrich?”
Ulrich spun to face him. “Your inability to put an end to this poison killing our people! Your lack of support when I petitioned you to dissolve Arion and Severin’s mating so Arion could honor the arrangement Gregos and I made for him to mate my daughter! Your continued refusal to give me an audience to discuss an alliance between Persephone and the prince.” He seethed, his face red. Then he sealed his fate. “Your complete inadequacy as the ruler of our people!”
Bain blasted out of his chair and was on Ulrich in an instant, capturing Ulrich by the neck, wrapping his massive hand around the thick column supporting Ulrich’s head before the other male could escape. He lifted him off the floor Darth Vader-style until they were nose to nose.
Ulrich clawed at Bain’s hand, struggling to breathe. Gregos shrunk toward the exit like a cowardly snake.
“I have maintained my patience with you beyond what others would deem reasonable, Ulrich,” he hissed. “You know the laws regarding mating. Laws my father put into effect that I have no reason to alter, nor do I wish to, because to rescind them would be a death sentence.
“I will not condemn the males of our race to mania or death for losing what is biologically theirs to possess. I will not allow our race to turn back to a time when we lost males by the hundreds—the thousands even, to the edge of certain extinction. Do you know how perilously low our male population fell not even two thousand years ago? If we had remained on that course, any who survived would now be under dreck rule. I will not see our race regress. I will not allow our males to suffer or die because the females their bodies chose were already bound to another through arranged couplings.
“You know this, and you know my position, and yet you insulted me and insolently wasted my time with your useless petition to dissolve a mating deemed honorable by the laws of my court.
“You insulted me further by seeking an arrangement between your daughter and my son, breaking the chain of protocol that should have prevented you from making such a request of your king in the first place. Especially when I know you are working on a separate arrangement to mate your daughter with that insolent half-wit, Cecil.
“You continue to insult me now, and I would be within my rights to snap your neck and impale your head in front of my home as a lesson to others who would think to insult me and my sovereignty as you have. If not for the undue attention such an act would bring upon our race by human law enforcement, you would be dead by now, so mind your tone with me from this day forward, Ulrich, or I will follow through on my threat. As for remaining in my employ as a liaison, consider yourself demoted to civilian, your rank stripped. I will give you only one warning. The next time you force me to discuss this topic with you will result in your last breath.”
Ulrich continued to thrash, attempting to free himself, but Bain was just getting started.
“As for your daughter.” Bain squeezed Ulrich’s throat a little tighter. “Persephone doesn’t want an arranged pairing, you egotistical ass. That’s why she’s using cobalt. That’s why she’s trying to kill herself on that shit. Because she doesn’t want to be saddled with a male whose greatest love is himself and whose second greatest love is his family’s money.
“But you’re so obsessed with the idiocy of ensuring strong bloodlines that you fail to see the simple truth to your own daughter’s unhappiness. To the very truth that she’s using cobalt to rid herself of your foolishness.
“Yet you dare to question how I’m handling the cobalt problem. Have you no brain inside that skull of yours? Have you not paid attention during our council meetings? Punishing drecks for dealing cobalt is not within my jurisdiction. That is Premier Royce’s responsibility. If you want to deal with the cobalt issue in your own home, I suggest you look to yourself. Because it is you, not I, who is the answer to your problems, Ulrich.”
Gregos cleared his throat as he took a hesitant step forward. “Meaning no disrespect, Your Highness, b-but”—his whole body trembled as he swallowed—“couldn’t Premier Royce’s lack of attention to this matter be considered”—he pressed his lips into a thin line—“a violation of the treaty?”
Bain narrowed his eyes on Gregos, coming to a sudden realization. “Are you saying you want war?” He turned his gaze on Ulrich.
Ulrich and Gregos had been meeting with high-ranking members of vampire society in recent weeks. During the daily briefings Bain held with his liaisons, they’d hinted of restlessness within the community. He often noticed the two of them exchanging knowing glances—the same glances he’d become wary of only a moment ago—during those same meetings.
Awareness gripped him by the balls. He couldn’t say with certainty that Gregos and Ulrich had been unifying the people against him and, thus, staging a coup. He couldn’t even say that they were stirring the civilians into thinking war was in their best interests. But his instincts told him they were up to something that could jeopardize the entire vampire race. He needed to tread carefully with these two and find a way to look into the intrigues they were orchestrating behind his back at the earliest opportunity.
Gregos attempted to speak again. “Your Highne—”
Bain dropped Ulrich to his feet. “Get out.”
Ulrich fell into a coughing fit, bent forward, clutching his throat.
Gregos frowned nervously. “But, sire—”
“I said get out.” Bain glared at him then shot daggers at Ulrich. “I will not entertain this conversation further.”
One thing had become clear in the last thirty seconds. They were plotting against him, he just didn’t know how deep or far their disloyalty and deviations ran, or how forked their tongues were.
But he had a plan. One he intended to unveil tonight. One that would reveal their treachery if any was to be found.
He could put it off no longer. It was time to take precautions.
Time to tell Micah the truth.
Time for Micah to fill the role he’d been meant to fill.
No, born to fill.
And then he would get to the bottom of the treason apparently going on right under his nose.