“Of course there is.”
“Her bastard of a brother forced me to try to turn her with my blood. He immunized her against it, but it was a test dose.”
Hunter’s gaze raked Riker from head to toe, as if trying to assess how Riker felt about this news. He wished his leader luck, because he wasn’t sure about it himself.
“So you’re saying she could turn.”
“Yeah.” Riker eyed the wet bar, wondering how many bottles of whiskey he could drink before Hunter stopped him. “There’s more.”
Hunter held up his hand. “Wait.” Swiftly, he moved to the bar and splashed two fingers of bourbon into a glass. “You look like you need this.”
Riker took the glass gratefully. For a long moment, he stared into the amber liquid, letting the colors swirl around inside the glass. Finally, he put the glass to his lips, inhaled, and downed the contents.
The burn numbed him pleasantly, but it wasn’t going to last.
“We freed a male. Young. Scared. Hasn’t ever been outside the lab. He was afraid of the damned trees.”
“Did you bring him here?”
“Yup. Straight to the Island of Misfit Toys.” Suddenly exhausted, Riker scrubbed his hand over his face. “When Terese died . . . fuck, I assumed the baby was dead, too. He wasn’t. The humans delivered him and raised him in that lab.” Saying it out loud made the liquor sour in his gut.
Hunter wasn’t one to go slack-jawed, but with his stunned stare and slightly parted lips, he came close. “Are you telling me that the male you rescued is your son?”
No one but Nicole knew the real story, that Terese had been impregnated by someone other than Riker.
He’d always planned to raise the boy as his own, so there was never any point in telling anyone the truth when Terese was alive. Then, after she died, it seemed wrong to cast even more shadows on an already dark situation. No one needed to know what happened to
Terese—she wouldn’t welcome the pity.
“Riker? Buddy?” Hunter prompted, and Riker cleared his throat.
“Yeah,” he croaked. “He’s mine.” Just because
Terese was dead didn’t mean that Riker’s promise was no longer valid.
“How do you want to handle it?”
Great question. How did you deal with a twenty year-old son you didn’t know you had and who had clearly gone through a lifetime of cruelty and neglect?
Bastien was like a puppy-mill dog that had never been outside its cage to play or socialize and knew nothing but the people who abused it.
“I’d like him to stay with me, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. I think it’ll be too much for him. I was hoping he could stay in the nursery with Morena.”
“The nursery? Isn’t he an adult?”
“He’s twenty, but I doubt he was given an education in either human or vampire life. All he knew was a cage inside a lab. He’s going to need a slow, nonthreatening introduction to our world, like Morena did with#p#分页标题#e#
Lucy. He seems to have bonded with Nicole, so she might be able to help him adjust.”
“Nicole.” Hunter said her name with a distinct wariness. “Do you really want her around your son? It was her company that did all of this to him.”
“Nicole isn’t the enemy.” Riker ignored Hunter’s dubious snort and poured himself another drink. “She saved my life, Hunt. She volunteered to be turned into a vampire in order to save Neriya’s life—”
“Which didn’t go so well, did it?”
“Not because of Nicole.” Riker threw back the shot he’d poured and filled the glass again. “It was her idea to break into the lab to save Neriya, and it was her idea to destroy the lab. She turned against her brother and fought to free us all.”
“So what are you saying? That you’re fine with having a human running around loose in our home? That you’re totally okay with everything she’s done for Daedalus?” Hunter regarded Riker with shrewd eyes.
“Are you thinking with your dick?”
Riker breathed deeply in an attempt to keep from lashing out at his leader. “When have you ever known me to think with my dick?”
“Isn’t that what you were doing in her quarters yesterday?”
If he’d been thinking with his dick, he’d have been able to finish what they’d started instead of backing off like some kind of traumatized idiot.
“What we were doing is none of your business.”
As silent and fast as a serpent, Hunter uncoiled in a lethal blur, backing Riker against the wall with a hand around his throat. “Everything that happens inside these walls is my business. You get that, right?”