Vampire Most Wanted(89)
“You haven’t been an immortal for long, sweetheart. You might not be reading everything clearly.”
“Yeah, but Jackie and Vincent didn’t read that and Vincent is four or five hundred years old,” Tiny pointed out.
“But I’m older,” Mirabeau pointed out quietly. “And it’s possible that wasn’t on the top of her list of concerns when she arrived at Jackie and Vincent’s. After all, Marcus was hurting, she was hurting . . .” Mirabeau shrugged.
“But it is now?” Marcus asked with a frown. “On the top of her list of concerns, I mean.”
Mirabeau nodded. “She wants you as her lover and life mate. That’s on the top of her mind right now. That she wants you, but doesn’t think she can have you. That she has to escape. That you would turn from her anyway if you knew she was Basha. She knows you’re a spy for Lucian.”
“How the hell did she find that out?” Marcus growled, stabbing another apple, a little too enthusiastically this time. He snapped the stick.
Mirabeau took the apple from him to remove the stick and replace it. “I’m not sure. I guess she could have read Jackie and Vincent, but I don’t think that’s it.” She was silent for a minute, and then shrugged and said, “It doesn’t matter. The point is she knows you were sent here by Lucian to find her. She also knows Lucian is on the way here and she’s desperate to escape.”
“What do I do?” Marcus asked quietly.
Mirabeau shrugged. “You two need to spend time together doing more than fighting or having sex. You need to gain her trust, Marcus. I think Jackie’s right and she isn’t rogue, or at least not intentionally. But you need to get her to trust you so you can find out what’s what.”
Marcus was silent for a minute. He knew Divine—Basha, he corrected himself, had been feeding off the hoof despite the Council’s banning it. But she hadn’t known about the ban. He wasn’t sure that was enough to get her off the hook for it, but surely it had to be a consideration. He couldn’t imagine she’d done anything else that would label her a rogue.
“About that,” Mirabeau said, and Marcus peered at her blankly. He hadn’t said anything. Oh right, he recalled, she could read his thoughts.
“About what?” he asked finally.
“The rogue thing,” she said with a grimace.
“What about it?” he asked warily, suspecting by the way she was avoiding his eyes that he wouldn’t like what she was about to say.
Mirabeau hesitated and then heaved a deep sigh. “Well, Lucian and the boys had Leonius sometime back. About two years ago. They raided a hotel in Toronto, and caught Leonius. Well, actually, they shot him,” she corrected herself. “Through the heart with an arrow. He wasn’t going anywhere.”
Marcus narrowed his eyes when she paused again. He knew the story, but asked anyway, “And?”
“And someone took him. Just picked him up and carried him off while everyone was busy with his victims.”
“Someone?” Marcus questioned grimly.
“Yeah, well, they didn’t know who at first, but Mortimer, the head of Lucian’s Rogue Hunters—”
“I know who Mortimer is,” Marcus interrupted impatiently.
“Right. Well, he reviewed all of the hotel security tapes and it was a woman. Cameras in the stairwells showed a blond woman carrying Leonius up to the roof. I saw them. There were no really good pictures of her face, but from what I saw, it could have been Divine. A blond Divine.”