“Perhaps. On the other hand, what’s to stop me from killing her quickly and then going after Sidonie?”

“Maybe her intent was to split your forces. She knows you have only the four of us. If you send one or more of us after Sid, you’ll be facing her without full back-up.”

“We’re assuming it was Silas who took Sidonie. What if wasn’t? What if this is nothing more than coincidence?”

“I’m not sure I believe in such a coincidence.”

Aden frowned. He wouldn’t have believed such a thing before tonight, either. But what if Silas wasn’t behind the kidnapping? Then where the hell was Sidonie? His jaw clenched, his gut telling him to drop everything and go after her. Fuck Silas, fuck the damn Council and their rules. But then his gaze roamed over the lobby, touching on each of his vampire children in turn. To a man, they were utterly loyal to him, and they trusted him to repay that loyalty with a care for their lives. If Aden lost the challenge to Silas, whether by forfeit or weakness, his children would be the first to suffer, perhaps even die.

But even more than that, he had an obligation to the larger vampire community to maintain the discretion that permitted them to live in peace among humans. Which meant dealing with the human police over the bloody spectacle that someone had left in his lobby. That was what it meant to be a vampire lord. It wasn’t the wealth or the prestige, though those were nice enough. But at its core, being a lord meant taking care of those whose lives were entrusted to you. And as much as it grated on him to accept it, more lives than Sidonie’s were at stake tonight.

Whoever had taken Sidonie had done so for reasons involving him. He was certain of that much. They’d taken her from his stronghold, after all—a bold move meant to make a point. If the power behind the kidnapping turned out to be Silas, then she would die tonight and Sidonie would be safe. But if it wasn’t Silas? He sighed unhappily. Then whoever it was would contact him soon enough, and in the meantime, they would keep Sidonie alive. It was a bad bargain, but the only one he had.

His attention was drawn to a black panel van that had pulled up out front.

“Trav?”

“That’s the vamp cleaning crew, my lord,” Travis confirmed.

“All right, let them handle this and the scene upstairs. Freddy, I want you to reach out to our local sources, everyone we know. If anyone’s heard word of Sidonie’s whereabouts, I want to know about it, no matter how doubtful the information. In the meantime, we have to mop up this clusterfuck someone left on our doorstep. Silas may not care about creating a spectacle of our affairs, but I must.

“And when we’ve finished with that . . . I’m going to go kill Silas and bring Sidonie back home.”

Chapter Eighteen

IT WAS LATE BY the time Aden finished cleaning up the mess the assassins had left behind, although most of his personal involvement was along the lines of wiping memories and dealing with the police. Apparently the doorman’s uncle was high in the police chain of command. He’d raised holy hell with Detective Trevisani and had insisted on a personal interview with Aden. The initial demand had been for Aden to present himself at the station house, which he’d refused outright. They’d tried the usual bluster, threatening to arrest him, but Aden knew his rights and, more importantly, his power. Let them try to arrest him. They wouldn’t make it two steps into the building before they forgot why they were there. The uncle had finally settled for a personal visit to the scene which Aden had been more than willing to accommodate.

But by the time the uncle departed with his thoughts suitably altered, Aden was seething. Silas, or whoever had engineered this clusterfuck, had been so wrapped up in their own needs that they’d disregarded one of the main tenets of vampire society. Vampires did not go around leaving piles of bodies for the human authorities to find, not even in the guise of human violence. Only the quick action of Aden and his people had ensured that there was nothing to tie vampire interests to the doorman’s death. Aden’s residence in the building became nothing more than a coincidence, with the police convinced that he and his people were innocent and had no specific knowledge of the day’s tragedy.

But if Aden hadn’t succeeded in cleaning up the disaster on the fifth floor before the police got wind of it, if he hadn’t gotten to Detective Trevisani in time to steer the investigation along the desired path, it could have proved disastrous. Not just for Aden, but for vampires everywhere, especially given the high profile visitors in the city for the territorial challenge.

But then perhaps that had been Silas’s goal. She’d never been one to risk her own life when someone else’s life would do. She was no different than every other woman in Aden’s life before he’d become Vampire. Always willing to let him bleed to ensure their own safety and comfort. That wasn’t to suggest that women hadn’t tried to use him since he’d been turned, only that they hadn’t succeeded. The lone exception in a lifetime of bitter experience with women was Sidonie, and now someone was threatening to kill her. Aden’s vision filled with blood as he contemplated the pain her abductors were going to suffer when he got a hold of them.

The first step toward that goal was meeting Silas. Aden’s two SUVs pulled up in front of the warehouse near the Chicago River where Silas had set the formal challenge. The building appeared abandoned, its brick walls pockmarked and blackened with age, the windows old and thick, dull as they reflected the distant light of the waning half-moon.

Many of the buildings in this area had been given historical landmark status, a shining memory of another age. Sadly, this warehouse was not one of them. It was clearly abandoned, although on this particular night, there were a fair number of vampires clustered inside. Aden wondered if Silas had purchased the building for her own use during the challenge, or if she was simply squatting. It was also possible that this was one of Klemens’s old buildings, since Silas had been close to Klemens and would know about his properties. If it had belonged to Klemens, it would be Aden’s before the night was over, along with everything else Klemens had owned. Assuming it was still standing after Aden killed Silas.

The area around the building was oddly suited to tonight’s activities. The streets were dark and narrow, with only a few lights along the river more than a block away. At first glance it seemed deserted, but it wasn’t. There were people in the shadows, human predators drawn out by the unexpected activity and by the expensive vehicles which were out of place on these shadowy streets in the middle of a Sunday night.

Travis and Kage got out of the first vehicle and immediately dropped back to Aden’s SUV, taking up positions front and back. In the front seat, Freddy and Bastien opened their doors simultaneously and joined them, leaving Aden alone until Bastien stepped back to open his door.

Aden slid out of the SUV, standing still for a moment as he surveyed the surrounding buildings, the alleys and streets. His power swelled, riding the edge of his anger, the midnight blue of his eyes gleaming from beneath half-closed lids. He sensed the heightened aggression of the human watchers at this invasion of their territory, felt their shock as his power reached out like a physical thing, a rolling wave of energy that buffeted each of them, shoving them back into the shadows. He smiled grimly at the sound of their hearts racing with unaccustomed fear, at the sweat-scented waves of dread rolling off of them as they slunk away. They were not predators this night, they were prey.

Aden turned his back, dismissing the humans from his mind, as he studied the old warehouse. Other than theirs, there were no vehicles in front and no other vehicles in sight, but for a few older cars parked along the curb, none of which Silas would have used. She was too vain to sink so low, even for purposes of subterfuge. She must have arrived earlier. This was her choice of battlefield, after all, so she’d want to prepare it to her best advantage, to deploy her people. He had no illusions about whether this meeting was meant to be a trap. He assumed it was.

He also knew the trap wouldn’t be an explosion, because there was no question that Silas and her minions were inside the warehouse. The presence of so many vampires was as impossible to fake as it was to miss. They hummed like a bad fluorescent tube on the inside of his skull, and if he concentrated he could detect Silas buzzing louder than any of them. She was definitely in there this time.

He glanced around at the four vampires he’d brought with him. They were dressed as he was, in all black—a long-sleeved T-shirt, combat style pants tucked into ATAC boots. Freddy and Kage were conventionally armed, and there were several additional Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns within easy reach inside each of the trucks. It wasn’t usual to bring human weapons to a challenge fight; the combatants were expected to rely on their vampire abilities and nothing else. But Aden didn’t trust Silas. For all the old-time formality of her blood-scribed parchment, she’d proven her willingness to play dirty at every step. There had been Stig Lakanen’s attack that first night, when Silas had goaded the much weaker Stig into going after Aden, even though she’d known he would fail. Then, she’d worked with Professor Dresner to maneuver Sidonie into Aden’s camp, using her to set up the ambush at the club—an ambush which Silas had fled, leaving her minions to bleed and die in her wake. And now she’d likely taken Sidonie hostage, probably hoping to blackmail Aden into conceding the fight. As if he were too stupid to understand that she’d kill him anyway, the first time his back was turned.

Not that Aden had any intention of conceding anything to Silas.

The territorial challenges were supposed to be one-on-one, vampire vs. vampire. The kind of petty wrangling that Silas had engaged in—using humans as tools, letting others die in her place—only underscored her weakness. A weakness that would see the Midwest drowning in chaos if she became lord, as vampire after vampire challenged her from inside and out, nibbling away at the territory, breaking off chunks until it was fractured and vulnerable.

That wasn’t going to happen. Even if Aden hadn’t been certain of his superiority, confident in his ability to destroy Silas and every other challenger, he knew Raphael would never have permitted Silas to rule. The Western Lord would take her out himself first, letting Lucas continue to hold the territory until a more suitable candidate stepped up. Perhaps alone among the contenders, Aden had no illusions about Raphael’s role in choosing Klemens’s successor, nor his cold-blooded willingness to do whatever it took to ensure his vision of a secure North America. And now that Aden understood the threat from Europe, he wholeheartedly embraced that vision and would see to it that the Midwest did its part.