Page 84

He brought the file to our apartment and placed it on the kitchen table without ceremony. Audrey came with him, carrying coffee and the emotional restraint he occasionally misplaced.

“She’s alive,” Mack said.

“Undead,” I corrected automatically.

“Still an asshole,” Audrey added.

The file held three names, four countries, and seven newborn vampires abandoned over eighty years. I was not Vivienne’s first mistake. I wasn’t even her most recent.

“The vampire council has her in custody,” Mack said. “Jacqueline’s archive proved a pattern. They’re charging her with unlawful turning and abandonment.”

“Does she know you found me?”

“Yes.”

A sealed envelope waited inside the file. My name was written across it in Vivienne’s narrow handwriting.

I stared at it for a long time.

“You don’t have to read it,” Carolina said.

“What if she explains?”

“Explanation isn’t absolution.”

I opened the envelope.

The letter was three paragraphs of excuses. Vivienne claimed she’d sensed instability in my turning, feared responsibility, and believed Arrhythmia would contain whatever I became. She wrote that immortality made attachment dangerous. She expected me to understand.

I didn’t.

But I understood something else.

“She thought I was defective before Jacqueline ever cursed me,” I said.

Carolina reached for my hand. “She was wrong.”

“I know.”

That was the strange part. Once, the letter would have confirmed everything I feared. Now it was merely paper written by a coward.

I folded it once and dropped it into the sink. Carolina touched one finger to the corner. Flame consumed Vivienne’s excuses without smoke.

“Dramatic,” Audrey approved.

“I learned from her mother,” I said.

Mack slid a second envelope across the table.

“This one is harder.”

Inside were photographs of my human family gathered at a memorial beneath an oak tree. My mother looked smaller. My brother had gone gray at the temples. On a branch hung the ridiculous red scarf I’d worn every winter since college.

“They think I died,” I said.

“You did,” Carolina answered gently. “And you didn’t.”

Kingston Security had found their addresses, jobs, and ordinary lives. I could contact them. I could also shatter everything they believed about the world and risk exposing Arrhythmia.