“Release me.”

“You don’t run Daedalus anymore, so you don’t give the orders. I do.”

The first stirrings of true fear welled up at his words, his matter-of-fact tone. “Why don’t you just get to the point of all of this?”

“Oh, Nikki.” He sighed. “You’re making this really difficult.”

She was making this difficult? “I’m the one strapped to a floor for no reason I can figure out, so can you tell me what the hell is going on?”

“What’s going on?” Chuck crouched beside her again. “I’m taking what rightfully should have been mine. I’m our father’s eldest. It was my mother he loved, not the whore who trapped him with her family’s wealth and connections. Your mother was nothing but a means to an end to him. The company should have passed to me, not you. I worked my way up and learned every nuance of the business. I know how many employees we have at each facility. I know how much the company spends on air travel every year. I know what kind of damn fertilizer is put on the lawn outside the Phoenix facility. You inherited Daedalus without earning your dues. You’re clueless about how it works. This company is mine.”

Nicole’s mind whirled as she tried to puzzle out where this was going. Clearly, he was bitter about how he’d grown up, but if it was the company he wanted, he had it. So why was all of this necessary?

“Chuck, the company is yours now. The board

kicked me out—”

“They changed their minds!” Leaping up, he crunched his foot into her ribs. Through disbelief that her brother had physically harmed her and pain that made her ears ring, she heard Riker’s roar of rage, followed by threats that involved Riker putting Chuck’s organs in places they shouldn’t be. “Your kidnapping drummed up a shitload of sympathy for you. The board wants you back so they can play up your ordeal to the public and shine the spotlight on Daedalus.”

Keep him calm. “I’ll refuse to come back,” she said in a rush. “I’ll sign everything over to you. Just let me go.”

“I can’t.” He scrubbed his hand over his face, and for the first time, she saw how tired he looked. His bloodshot eyes, identical to hers, sat like dull stones in their sunken sockets, and a five o’clock shadow darkened his puffy cheeks. “Don’t you see that I can’t?”

A panicky sensation began to wrap around her, squeezing her aching ribs. If he couldn’t let her go . . . dear Lord, what did he plan to do with her?

“What happened to you, Chuck?” she whispered.

“Why do you hate me so much?”

“Oh, Nicole,” he whispered back. “Have you been  listening at all? I’ve always loved you. You were sort of a dopey kid, but I felt sorry for you.”

“You felt sorry for me? Why? I had everything you didn’t.”

“Except for a good mother,” he said. “Your mother was a neglectful piece of crap. Terese took better care of you.”

Nicole wanted to argue, but he was right. Well, she wouldn’t have called her mother a piece of crap, but she definitely hadn’t been PTA and Girl Scouts mom material.

“So you felt sorry for me.” She could barely spit out the words; her body throbbed. But she had to keep pressing him, had to buy time to plan her next move.

“When did that turn to hate?”

“I don’t hate you. That’s what’s so hard about this.”

She heard a loud bang that sounded like a fist hitting a wall. “I love you, but you had everything I should have had. Our father should have divorced your bitch of a mother and married mine. Instead, I grew up in a shack across town until I was twelve and he finally decided to claim me as his. And that only happened because your mom couldn’t have any more children and he was desperate to have a boy to carry on the family name.”

Again, she couldn’t form an argument. Her own thoughts on the matter had traveled that same route on occasion, and for years, she’d harbored guilt over how Chuck had grown up and been treated by both her mother and their father.

“Nikki, I loved you until the day you came back from France and took over a company you knew nothing about.”

She wanted to tell him he was wrong, that she’d learned the ins and outs of running a corporation, that  she’d understood what Daedalus was all about. She’d thought running the company would be more about managing day-to-day operations, handling publicity, and doing paperwork. She’d been content to stay on the fringes of the inner workings. Or maybe content wasn’t the right word. Maybe she’d been happy to remain blind to what was truly going on inside the company her parents had built.

So in a way, he was right. She’d known nothing about the company, and the truth now just made her sick.

“If you’d just resigned like you were supposed to after the lab-deaths scandal, none of this would be happening.”

Like she was supposed to? She inhaled as an unimaginable thought came to her. “Oh, my God, you were the one who signed the death warrants. You set me up, didn’t you?”

“You left me no choice.”

Flabbergasted, she couldn’t even speak for a moment. When she finally found her voice, it was so full of anguish that even Chuck flinched. “How could you? My God, Chuck, you’re my brother.”

He brushed his knuckle over her cheek the way he used to do when she was little. The reminder of how close they’d been pained her. “You wanted to dismantle the company I’ve put my soul into. Your ideas to sell off entire divisions pissed off the board. Everyone was looking to me to rein you in. I had to do something. I wanted the company to send you to our Siberian post.

You’d have been out of the way but still alive. I didn’t want this, I swear.”

A chill shot up her spine. “This? What is this?”

Chuck stood and shook his head sadly, as if this was all out of his control. “This,” he said, “is a clinical trial.”

“A what?”

“Clinical trial,” he said slowly, as if she were an idiot. “Well, not technically. We don’t have government approval, and obviously, we’re bypassing the ‘informed consent’ portion of the test, but if it’ll make you feel any better, this will help a lot of people in the future. Your sacrifice won’t go to waste.”

Her sacrifice? What kind of insane trial was this?

Using his foot, he hit the latch on the head restraint, and with a snarl, she whipped her head to the side in a frenzied bid to take a bite out of him. She didn’t care that all she’d get would be a mouthful of leather. She wanted to hurt him the way he’d hurt her.

Her teeth barely scraped his shoe, and then he was gone, the cell door closing behind him with an ominous metallic clank.

Finally able to look at more than the sterile white ceiling, she craned her neck in Riker’s direction. Her heart squeezed painfully tight at the sight of him hanging from chains on the wall. Dried blood plastered his tawny hair to his forehead, and fresh blood dripped from raw wounds on his wrists, where the shackles had bitten deep. His silver eyes were molten with hatred.

“Chuck.” She peered up at him through the thick glass window that separated the chamber she and Riker were in from the main room. “You don’t have to do this. We can work this out—”

“Too late.” Chuck hit a button on the wall next to the door, and her remaining restraints popped loose.

“While you’ve been busy trying to sell off Daedalus bit by bit, I’ve made progress on the new antivampirism vaccine. But government bureaucrats aren’t convinced it’s safe, and they won’t give us the go-ahead to use convicted felons as test subjects.”

Of course they wouldn’t. The government wasn’t as concerned about the blood-borne form of the virus as they had been about the saliva-borne form. Infection via contact with a vampire’s blood was rare and, according to many lawmakers, not a pressing problem.

“I know how much you care about your work,” Chuck continued, “so I figured that if we have to get you out of the way, at least you’ll be making a contribution to humanity. I injected you with our vaccine, and now we’ll see how effective it is.”

She staggered to her feet, her aching bones and stiff muscles making her clumsy. How long had she been out? “What if it works and I don’t turn into a vampire or die during the transformation? What then? You’ll have to kill me to keep me quiet. Are you prepared to do that?”

Chuck had the decency to flush and look away.

“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“Dammit, Chuck!” she shouted. “You can’t do this. You don’t want—”

“What I want,” Chuck cut in, “is for that vampire behind you to do his best to turn you.” He reached over and hit another button.

Riker’s restraints snapped open, and he crashed to the floor. He was only down for a second before he leaped up, teeth bared and spitting blood.

“Fuck you,” he snarled. “I’m not doing it.”

Chuck smiled grimly. “I thought you’d say that.  Riker.” He pivoted around and disappeared around the corner.

“Asshole.” Riker rushed to Nicole, angling his body between her and the door as his strong, warm hands came down on her shoulders. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she lied. She was so not okay. This was not okay. Her brother— half brother—had lost his mind, and she’d put herself and Riker in terrible danger.

“What about you?” He was bruised and battered, and while his wrists had stopped bleeding, they could use some antiseptic and bandages.

“I’ll live.” Riker glared in the direction Chuck had gone. “But if I get my hands on your brother, he won’t be so lucky.”

She didn’t bother to defend Chuck or ask Riker for lenience. What Chuck had done—was doing—was indefensible.

Chuck came back into view and stopped at another chamber. With a jerk of his wrist, he drew up the blind, revealing a naked, battered female strapped, facedown and spread-eagle, on some sort of metal contraption.

Inside the room was a barred door, but what it led to

Nicole wasn’t sure. She’d never seen the design in any of the blueprints she’d studied.

“Neriya,” Riker croaked. “You evil bastard.”

“This is our breeding chamber,” Chuck said, as he punched a numerical code into a keypad on the wall.

The door whoosh ed open, and when he entered, Nicole found out what was behind the barred door.

A mountain of male vampire attacked the gate, hisgrowls and snarls like nothing she’d ever heard. He was as nude as the female, his body a mass of old and fresh scars, but it was his eyes that made Nicole gasp.

They were brown, not silver, which meant he was a born vampire, but it wasn’t the color that caught her attention; it was the pure, raw insanity that glowed like embers in them.

And they were focused not on Chuck but on the female. Nicole had to swallow against the bile that burned in her throat.

Dear God, it wasn’t a breeding chamber. It was a rape chamber.

Chuck freed Neriya from the contraption and dragged her out of the room, holding the barely conscious female so Nicole and Riker would be forced to take in the full horror of Neriya’s condition.

Her pale skin was marred by bruises, abrasions, and numerous vampire bite marks. Dried blood clung to her lips and chin, and Nicole realized with sickening clarity that she’d had her fangs extracted.

“You sick son of a bitch,” Nicole said, her voice hoarse with rage. “Who knows about this? How many board members are involved?”

“Only a handful,” Chuck said, so calmly he could have been discussing his favorite red wine. “Roland wanted to tell you about it. Before you started talking about selling off his division. And before your new vampire friends killed him.”

Dark, oily despair slithered through her at the magnitude of all this betrayal. “How long?” she croaked.

“How many years has this been going on?”

“It was our father who developed the breeding program,” Chuck said, and Nicole remembered Riker telling her something similar at the cave. “Your beloved nanny was one of his first test subjects.”

At those words, Riker lost it. Completely, utterly lost it. He hit the glass with a full body slam, his roar of hatred and rage echoing through the chamber with such force that Nicole’s ears hurt.

Chuck dragged Neriya to what Nicole recognized as an industrial-sized refrigerator. “Nicole, get your vampire friend to calm down and turn you.” He shoved Neriya inside the icy fridge. “Do it, or she dies. And I promise it won’t be quick and painless.”

Chapter 21

Riker could barely see through the anger that formed a crimson veil over his vision. When

Chuck came out of the refrigerator, his self-satisfi ed smirk made Riker swear to rip him from limb to limb.

What he’d done to Neriya and to Nicole made Riker want to do the tearing of limbs very, very slowly, over a period of days. Maybe weeks. Hell, if Riker could keep the f**ker alive long enough, months.

The human would also pay extra for Terese’s treatment. Riker had suspected abuse, but the reality was far, far worse than he’d imagined. How many times had she been strapped to that contraption? How badly had that brutal male hurt her?

“You’ve got an hour,” Chuck said. “Nicole takes blood fi rst. We’ve found that the rate of infection is slightly higher if the vampire gives blood to the human before feeding rather than the other way around.”