Chapter Fourteen: Hell Hath No Fury

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
- William Congreve, The Mourning Bride

She watched from the shadows as Alejandro and the human girl sat on the loveseat. It rocked backwards and forwards gently as they talked. She felt her fury rising, wanting to reveal herself and put a stop to what was about to occur, but knowing that it was not time yet. If she was to make Alejandro truly suffer, she had to wait until he was happiest.

Her plan was not going the way she had anticipated. She had been waiting for more years than she cared to remember for Alejandro to give in to the bloodlust and feed from innocents, but she had been disappointed time and time again. Then news of the attack reached her: Alejandro had attacked and almost killed a human girl. But instead of the experience changing him for the worse (but, as far as she was concerned, for the better), he was turning the girl into a vampire! It was unthinkable. This was not supposed to happen.

She was furious at Alejandro for this betrayal. How could he do this to her? He was hers. He had no right to disobey her!

She could admit, albeit reluctantly, that the human girl was passably pretty. Her hair was an attractive colour and her eyes were large and sincere, the sort of eyes that looked as though they might spill tears at any moment; it made her seem like she needed rescuing. Alejandro had always been the type to fall for a damsel in distress, although she suspected that there was more to this damsel than meets the eye. She was stronger than people realised.

But the human girl was nothing compared to her. Nothing. Her looks were unrivalled – men had started wars over her! She was the most beautiful woman alive and had been for more than half a millennium. How dare Alejandro choose an insignificant human over her?

Well, very soon it would no longer matter. She would make quite certain of that.

Saturday was wonderfully uneventful. Thea and I went shopping together for the last time, and spent too much money on things we didn’t need. It was our last day together before she returned to university. I honestly didn’t know how I was going to get by without her. She was my best friend, my rock. But I knew she was safer far, far away from me.

The peaceful Saturday lulled me into a false sense of security. I fell asleep that night curled against Alejandro’s side – for the record, he had faithfully bought a box of condoms and, with a minimum of grumbling, was actually using them – feeling unusually happy and relaxed. So it was a particularly unpleasant surprise when I had another one of my strange dreams-slash-nightmares, and this one was the worst yet.

There was a roaring in my ears. I recognised the sound on a distant level, and it struck me cold with fear, although I couldn’t place it immediately. My eyesight was blurry, but everything slowly began to come into focus. I was in a country house of some sort, not dissimilar to the one Alejandro and I lived in, but that wasn’t what caught my attention: the clouds of billowing grey smoke entering the room through the gap under the door was.

That was when I realised the roaring in my ears was the sound of a blazing fire – not the sort that burned merrily in a hearth, but the kind that decimated houses and forests without being sated. It was wild, untamed; it was death. It was a sound I had become intimately acquainted with after the singularly most frightening night of my life, ten months ago.

Sheer, unadulterated terror shot through me like an arrow. I screamed, my eyes darting around frantically for another exit. There was only one door in and out of the room I was in, and that was the one with the fire behind it. The window was shuttered and, when I threw a chair at it, it didn’t break. The part of me that was behaving irrationally, afraid of dying, made me run to the door and grasp the doorknob. It was white-hot and burned my palms, the skin literally flaying off. Even if the fire hadn’t been right behind the door, I couldn’t open it anyway – it was locked.

“Let me out!” I screamed in a voice that was not my own. “Please, let me out, let me out! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, let me out!”

But it was no use. No one was coming. I was going to burn alive, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I moved to the table in the centre of the room and slumped into one of the chairs, all the fight having been leeched out of me. What was the use in fighting?

It was almost a relief by the time the flames began licking at me.

I awoke screaming. Someone had me by the arms, their grasp tight and inescapable, and I struggled wildly for a few moments before sanity returned and I realised it was Alejandro. He was shouting at me, telling me to wake up, his handsome face creased into lines of worry and panic.

“It’s okay,” I whispered, forcing myself to relax in his grip. “You can let go now. I’m all right.”

His face was pale. “You were screaming and thrashing. I could not wake you up. I was so worried, mi amante.” He pulled me against the hard muscle of his chest, comforting himself as much as me, I think.

“I’m okay,” I repeated more strongly. “I-I had a bad nightmare.” I swallowed hard. “I was…burning.”

He pulled away from me enough to peer into my eyes. “There was a fire?”

“Yes.” He embraced me tightly again, and I allowed several tears to leak from my eyes. They dripped onto the bare, tanned skin of Alejandro’s shoulder before rolling down his back. He didn’t seem to mind. “It doesn’t take a therapist to figure out it’s a result of what happened last year. It was just a bad dream.”

Maybe if I said that enough times, I could convince myself it was true.

“And he believed you?” Thea asked me a couple of hours later. We were in the bedroom she had been sleeping in while she’d been staying with me. I was ostensibly helping her pack, but it was more an opportunity to tell her about my latest dream. I folded one of her T-shirts neatly and placed it in her suitcase, letting my hair fall across my face to obscure my expression before I answered her.

“Yes. Why wouldn’t he? He doesn’t know I had the psychic dreams last summer, and he doesn’t know I’ve been having weird dreams recently.” Guilt weighed on me like a blanket.

Thea frowned at me. “Are you certain this latest one is one of the weird ones? Don’t hit me, but maybe what you said is true – that it’s a result of what happened last summer when you, you know, almost…burned to death. I wouldn’t blame you for having nightmares about it.” She threw her favourite pair of Charlotte Olympia platforms into the suitcase; she wasn’t as bothered about packing everything neatly as I was.

“I’m certain,” I said grimly. “It had the same…feel to it as the other ones. I can’t really describe it. Besides, it didn’t take place in Alejandro’s old mansion. It was somewhere I’ve never seen before.” I hesitated. “There was something a bit different about this one, though. It almost felt like I was seeing it through someone else’s eyes instead of my own. In the other dreams I’ve had recently I was just an impartial observer – but I had a starring role in this one. I felt my hands burning.” I stared down at them, but the skin was perfect, unblemished. I sighed. “I-I don’t know if that means I’m going to be in another fire or what, but it…doesn’t look good.” I couldn’t bring myself to mention that I had felt myself dying before Alejandro was finally able to wake me up.

Thea gave me a speculative look for a moment. “You should really be telling this to Alejandro,” she said finally, her voice soft. “He needs to know.”

“I know – but how can I tell him?” I demanded dejectedly. “I waited too long. I should have told him after what happened last summer, but I thought it was a one-off. Now it’s too late. I want to tell him, but…” I trailed off and shook my head helplessly.

Thea’s head suddenly shot up and her eyes widened almost comically as she stared at something over my shoulder. I could literally smell her fear. “It…it looks like now’s your chance,” she stammered.

“What?” I turned to see what she was looking at, and had what I’m fairly certain was a small heart attack when I saw Alejandro standing in the doorway. To say that he did not look happy would be like saying Hitler had been a little mean. His expression was absolutely livid. I had never seen him look at me that way before. It made my insides clench painfully. I wanted to die.

“How much did you hear?” I asked wretchedly. I hunched my shoulders, as though making myself as small a target as possible would help.

“Enough,” he said grimly. His eyes flickered towards Thea, and he commanded imperiously, “Leave us.”

For once, she didn’t argue. She gave me a frightened look and fled the room, leaving me alone with the lion.

“Would you like to explain yourself to me?” His tone was utterly cold; he had put his emotions on lock-down.

“I don’t suppose ‘no’ is an acceptable answer, is it?” I asked miserably. I sat down on the edge of the bed and kept my gaze lowered; I couldn’t bear to look at him. I had never felt so guilty before in my life. I wasn’t afraid, because I knew no matter how angry Alejandro was he would never hurt me, but the guilt alone was enough to tear me apart. I should have told him. I should have realised that – Sod’s Law – he would find out by some other means if I didn’t admit it to his face. I had forgotten all about vampire hearing and the fact he had probably heard me halfway across the house.

“Do you think this is amusing in some way?” he demanded.

“Do I look like I’m laughing?” I retorted, and immediately regretted my words. Was I deliberately trying to pick a fight? Bad form, Lexie. It wasn’t even remotely fair of me to argue with him; I had absolutely no moral high ground to stand on. I was utterly and completely in the wrong. “I-I’m sorry.”

There was a long silence; I wanted to peek at Alejandro’s expression to see if I could gauge what he was thinking, but I didn’t dare. He said finally, “For what? Arguing with me now, or lying to me for ten months? Which do you think is worse? Would you like to know what I think?”

I winced and didn’t say anything. I was so ashamed of myself.

“What I would like to know is why my girlfriend seems to find it permissible to shout at me for keeping secrets from her when she has been keeping just such a secret from me for so long. She speaks of the importance of being open and honest with each other, but appears to have no problem concealing from me the fact she befriended a serial killer who likely works for the man plotting against me, or that she is having dreams of a prophetic nature. What sort of awful, despicable person would act in such an underhanded manner, I wonder?”

Tears burned my eyes, and I let them have free reign. I still didn’t speak, because I agreed with everything he was saying. I was a horrible, hypocritical person. I was…scum. How could I possibly defend myself when I knew he was right in every respect?

He sighed heavily, his anger appearing to evaporate. It was replaced with disappointment, which was much worse in a way. Fury was transient, easily soothed, but disappointment was a much harder emotion to temper. “Do you have nothing to say in defence of yourself?”

“Not really,” I whispered. I picked at a loose thread in my K Karl Lagerfeld skirt.

“Will you not even look at me?”

With a force of will I hadn’t known I possessed, I raised my gaze to his face. He looked beautiful and terrible looming over me in what (for him) passed as casual wear – a white linen shirt open at the collar, with the sleeves rolled up to just below the elbows, and a pair of black trousers – and a look of such disappointment in his amber eyes that I immediately lowered my gaze again.

“I’m sorry,” I said softly. “For everything. What I did was awful, and…I’m sorry. I’m not trying to make excuses for my behaviour, but I did honestly think what happened last summer was a fluke. I dreamed of the fire at your house before it happened, and I tried to convince myself it was just a coincidence. I didn’t think it was worth mentioning. Only now I think it’s happening again, and I wanted to tell you the truth so much…but I couldn’t because I knew you’d look at me like this.” Tears were falling freely now, and I continued in a choked voice, “I don’t want to have these dreams, Alejandro. They’re frightening and weird, and a part of me thought that if I didn’t mention them to you, they weren’t actually real. It’s bad enough that I’m a freak by human standards – I don’t want to be a freak by vampire standards, too.”

Alejandro gave another deep sigh. “The dreams are quite normal, Lexie,” he said quietly. “Many vampires experience such things when they are turned – it awakens a latent talent in them, I imagine. Sometimes it manifests in other ways; I, as you know, have a slight ability to influence people’s minds.”

I remembered an occasion when, before I was turned, my sister Abby had stumbled across Alejandro and me, and he had been able to make her forget what she’d seen. “The dreams are normal,” I said dumbly, unable to believe what I was hearing. I’d spent so long worrying about them, wondering what was wrong with me that I had them, when in fact it wasn’t all that unusual. Bloody fuck. “I’m not the only one?”

“No,” Alejandro confirmed, “you are very far from being the only one. A fact you would have known, had you told me about all this sooner.”

And we were back to the main point again. It wasn’t the fact I’d had prophetic dreams that was bothering Alejandro; it was the fact I had concealed them from him. Were our roles reversed, I would be having an absolute cow right now – I couldn’t blame him for acting the way he was.

There was a tentative knock on the door, and Thea stuck her head round the corner. Her eyes were wide, and she shifted nervously from foot to foot as Alejandro and I turned to regard her impatiently. “Um, I hate to interrupt,” she mumbled, “but Lexie, we need to leave now or I’m going to miss my train.”

Alejandro turned back to me. “You better leave, then,” he said neutrally. “We will discuss this further later.”

Gosh, wasn’t I just looking forward to that conversation.

“Alejandro – ” I began, wanting to apologise yet again, even with our audience.

“We. Will. Talk. Later,” he said in a tone I had never heard him use before. Without so much as a backwards glance, he left the room with me still sitting on the bed, feeling like someone had just ripped out my heart and stomped on it.

Fortunately, the fact I had to drive Thea to the railway station meant I didn’t have too much time to dwell on it. Somewhat less fortunately, all she seemed interested in talking about was what had happened, and she enlisted Jon (who was along for the ride) in driving her point home. This mainly seemed to be that I should have told Alejandro the truth ages ago, as she’d already pointed out countless times, which would have then avoided the mess I was in now. Moreover, my secret-keeping would give Violet more ammo to use against me, a sentiment Jon seemed to agree with heartily.

“Thank you, Thea, I know all this!” I snapped when her constant chatter became too much for me. My chest was aching painfully every time I thought about it.

She stopped talking abruptly for all of five seconds before saying in a much gentler tone, “Alejandro will forgive you, Lexie. He loves you. He just needs a little time to get over it, that’s all. Right, Jon?”

“Right,” he agreed with irrepressible cheer, and leaned forwards – he was in the backseat of the Vanquish, while Thea and I were in the passenger and driving seats respectively – to pat me comfortingly on the shoulder. “Although I kind of wish you’d told me about your freaky dreams.”

I shot him an exasperated look in the rear-view mirror. “Don’t start.”

“Sorry.”

We arrived at the station with almost ten minutes before Thea’s train left. I carried her suitcase since I was the only one with super strength, and the three of us trooped towards the barrier that prevented anyone without a ticket from getting onto the platform. I set the suitcase down on the ground and turned to Thea. We stared at each other for a long moment, at a loss for something to say. I had been dreading this moment almost since she’d arrived two weeks ago. She was my best and oldest friend, and not seeing her all the time was awful. How could I even begin to tell her all that?

“Well…” she said eventually. “I’ll miss you.” Her voice broke on the last word, her eyes filling with tears, and she threw herself into my arms. I promptly burst into tears myself, and we clung to each other, sobbing dramatically, as though we were parting forever instead of for a couple of months. A moment later we were joined in our embrace by Jon, who – far from crying himself – said with a laugh in his voice, “You two are pathetic!”

When we finally pulled away from each other, me wiping my eyes with the sleeve of my cardigan (with all the crying I’d been doing today, thank heavens I’d had the foresight to wear waterproof mascara), it was time for Thea to leave. As she turned to go – kissing Jon deeply before she did so – I remembered everything that had happened in her fortnight’s visit, and reminded myself sternly that I was selfish for wanting her to stay. Not only did she have a whole other life at university now, but it was far too dangerous for her to stay with me any longer. She had almost died at Dracula’s hands last year because of me, and there was no way I would let anything like that occur again. My gaze slid to Jon, who was staring after Thea wistfully, and I realised he had become almost as dear to me as Thea.

Before I had realised what I was doing, I said impulsively, “Jon, go with her.”

He gawped at me. “What?”

“Go with her to Cambridge,” I said, becoming firmer in my resolve. “You’re a good friend, and I don’t want anything to happen to you. It’s far too dangerous for you to remain here while Alejandro’s enemy is waging war on us; go to Cambridge with Thea and do the tourist thing. Visit the shops, go punting… Just do anything so long as it’s safely away from here.”

He continued to stare at me. “But Lexie… I can’t just take off with no warning. I have obligations here – I’m supposed to be around to feed you and the other vamps, remember? What’s more, I don’t have any clothes or anything with me!”

I dug my hand into my bag, rummaging around in it until I found my purse, and extracted my platinum American Express card from it. Well, technically it was Alejandro’s American Express card, but that was a trivial detail at the moment. “Buy new ones. As for the food thing, we’ll cope. There are other humans around for us to feed on, and we have plenty of bagged blood. You mean too much to me to risk losing you, Jon – please go.” I fixed him with my very best pleading expression.

Jon hesitated, the offer of a free holiday with his new girlfriend and unlimited spending money too tempting to resist. He exhaled noisily, and exclaimed, “Fine, I give in!” He hugged me briefly. “I better hurry up and buy my ticket before the train leaves, and catch up to Thea. Thanks, Lexie.” He hesitated. “Are you going to be…all right?”

I nodded impatiently. “I’ll be fine. Now go!”

I remained at the station until Jon had bought his ticket and disappeared through the barrier after Thea, and then slowly made my way back to the car. Part of me was relieved that I had one less person’s safety to worry about – was that a selfish way of looking at it? – but a larger part was still distraught over the way Alejandro and I had left things. He’d said we would talk later, I thought to myself as I clambered into the car and buckled my seatbelt. Was I supposed to take that as a good sign or a bad one? What if part of the talk involved him dumping me? My stomach dropped to my feet, and for the third time that day, I gave into the tears threatening to overwhelm me.

I lost track of how long I sat in the Aston Martin, crying noisily; long enough for the sobs to abate into pathetic hiccups; long enough for dusk to fall and the moon to rise; long enough to consider that maybe I was doing my usual melodramatic thing of overreacting. Alejandro might currently be furious with me, but he would forgive me in time, and it was hardly the worst fight we’d ever had. If we could overcome all our other issues, this one should be a doddle.

I was feeling much more positive as I started the car and pulled out of the station’s small car park, but – naturally – my good mood was not destined to last long. I wasn’t quite halfway home when I noticed a vehicle behind me that was – to quote my mother – on my arse; tailgating me, in other words. I was driving four miles over the speed limit, so it wasn’t as though I was going too slowly and the driver of the other vehicle (a black van) was getting impatient. I sighed and made a face, annoyed, and slowed down abruptly, hoping the driver would get the message. They didn’t. Instead, to my complete and utter shock, the van jolted forwards suddenly and slammed into the back of my car.

The impact snapped my head forwards and then back with enough force that I probably sustained whiplash; the back of my neck certainly hurt like hell, at any rate. Although the sudden, sharp pain made me cry out, this took second place to the shock and panic. What the bloody fuck was the driver thinking? Instinct took over, and I gripped the wheel more tightly, my eyes darting to the rear-view mirror. My eyes widened as, before I thought to do anything about it, I saw the van accelerate again and surge towards the back of the Vanquish. My whole body was thrown forwards against the seatbelt from the force of the impact.

A normal, ration person would probably have put the pedal to the metal, so to speak, and tried to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible – especially given everything that had happened to me of late – but I wasn’t normal or rational, and the anger coursing through me was such that I really needed to hit something. Some wanker had just ruined the Aston Martin Vanquish! If he didn’t already want to throttle me for lying to him, Alejandro was definitely going to do so for ruining his car.

Furious, I pulled over to the side of the road, leaving the engine running but putting the handbrake on moving the gear stick to neutral. I stayed seated for a long moment, breathing hard, my hands clutching the steering wheel hard enough to make the plastic crack under my fingers. The van had pulled up about a hundred metres in front of me on the unlit road and was just sitting there, unmoving. Without giving myself time to think about what I was doing, I threw open my car door and stormed towards the vehicle.

“What the fuck were you trying to do?” I screamed, waving my arms around like a lunatic. “You could have killed me!”

The van and its occupants remained silent. A cloud passed in front of the moon casting eerie shadows over the scene. I held my breath. We were on a lonely country road, so apart from the occasional hoot of an owl, all was quiet. There wasn’t another car or house in sight. Suddenly I realised how vulnerable I was and I felt the fear, which had been dwarfed by the anger, returning full-force.

The hairs on the back of my neck rose as I stared at the dark van. The door opened slowly, like something out of a horror film. I could see movement inside, and then two men began to emerge. I could tell, somehow, that neither of these men were human. I might have been able to defeat two humans, but two vampires was beyond my capabilities.

Panic hit me like a slap in the face as I realised the chances of me being targeted at random were slim to none; they had been after me specifically. I glanced back towards the Vanquish and suddenly the distance to it seemed too far. The men were out of the van now. I turned and started to run. I could hear them chasing me, their heavy boots pounding the tarmac.

I was seriously regretting my choice of footwear. My Christian Louboutin Piros ankle boots might look gorgeous, but five-inch heels were not conducive to running for your life in. This thought was revolving in my brain, my mind on autopilot as I raced towards the Vanquish. I knew without looking back that the men had almost caught up with me, and I put on a last burst of speed.

It wasn’t enough.

I reached the Vanquish and started to wrench the door open, but in the next instant I was slammed against the body of the car. The breath whooshed out of me. Disoriented, I began to struggle, but I was as weak as a baby compared to them. My arms were roughly wrenched behind me and bound. I gave a yelp of pain, but my cries were quickly muffled by a piece of cloth being shoved into my mouth. I struggled to free my hands, landing a few good kicks on my assailant before someone hit me hard on the head, sending me to my knees with pain and disorientation. I was only dimly aware as someone bound my feet and hoisted me up onto their shoulder. It was the last thing I remembered before blacking out.

When I came to, my head was throbbing painfully, my arms were aching from being tied behind my back, I was lying awkwardly on my side on a hard wooden floor, and to add insult to injury, I was almost certain I’d just been kidnapped. Again.

On the plus side, I was no longer gagged. “Why can’t Team Evil ever be more inventive?” I muttered to myself. “Why does it always have to be kidnap? What’s wrong with a good, old-fashioned telling off?” I giggled, at which point I realised I was slightly hysterical. My heart was beating double-time, and I was trying very hard not to give in to the all-consuming terror that was begging to be let loose. The obvious culprit was Alejandro’s mysterious enemy – Thierry’s boss – and whatever motive he had for keeping me alive thus far, I felt certain it wasn’t going to last forever.

Calm down, I ordered myself sternly. I had to remain in control. No one knew where I was – I didn’t even know where I was – so the only hope I had of being rescued was if I was my own knight in shining armour.

Well, first things first: Where was I? All I could really tell was that I was in a small, windowless room, perhaps eight feet by four feet. I awkwardly manoeuvred myself into an upright position, and as I did so, I felt something brush the back of my neck. I flinched, but realised a moment later it was nothing alive. It was…material? I tilted my head up, and my vampire eyesight allowed me to see that there was a long row of clothes above me; men’s clothes, I thought.

Was I in a wardrobe?

“Weird,” I said aloud. I shook my head to clear the cobwebs. What was next? Right, my restraints. They were only around my wrists, and they seemed to be made of rope; nothing I couldn’t handle. I tried to move my hands apart behind my back to snap the ropes, and almost wrenched my shoulders out of their sockets in the process. Rolling my eyes at my own stupidity, I slipped my hands down over my arse and (with some difficulty, I must admit) under my feet, so that they were in front of me. This time when I tried to break the rope, it was much easier, although I winced with pain when I realised it had rubbed the skin of my wrists raw.

I was feeling buoyed by my success, which is why it was such a disappointment when I tried opening the door of the wardrobe, to no avail. I pushed, I kicked, I punched, but it wouldn’t budge; there was something heavy in front of it, something too heavy for me to move. I kicked it some more anyway, out of anger and frustration more than anything else, and it occurred to me for the first time to try calling for help.

“Help!” I screamed experimentally. “Can anyone hear me? Help!”

I paused, straining my ears for the slightest noise. At length, I heard a door open in what was presumably the room beyond, and a moment later there was the sound of something heavy being pushed aside. Light flooded my prison as the door to the wardrobe was flung open, and I blinked a few times, my eyes adjusting to the sudden brightness. When I was able to see clearly again, I found a man frowning down at me.

It was Thierry, of course.

“You bastard!” I snarled, and flung myself at him.

It seemed to take very little strength on his part to overpower me, although I was fighting like a hellcat to get free. I tried to knee him in the groin – in revenge mostly, if I’m honest – but he deflected the blow and I got his thigh instead. He seized my wrists in his large hands and held me against his chest to prevent me from struggling. I ranted and raged at him, but it was to no avail. Eventually I ceased my pointless struggle and went still.

“Are you going to kill me?” I asked in a very small voice. Any other questions I could have asked, such as where I was, seemed to pale in significance to this one. It was painful seeing Thierry now – even after all he had done to me, proving himself beyond any doubt to be a villain, a small part of me still wanted to be believe my trust hadn’t been completely misplaced. I couldn’t help remembering the charity ball, when he had tried to warn me about something; this, presumably.

The expression in Thierry’s pale blue eyes was unreadable, and his tone was flat when he said, “Not yet. Perhaps not at all if you cooperate.” He released my wrists, but transferred his grip to one of my arms instead, clutching it just below the elbow. It was hard enough to hurt, but I didn’t dare complain, and I remained quiet as he propelled me out of the room we were in – his bedroom? – and into a long corridor. It felt like we walked for miles, along endless hallways and down infinite flights of stairs, before finally pausing outside an ornate wooden door.

Thierry took a deep breath, and murmured in a voice so soft I might have misheard him, “Je suis désolé.”

I glanced at him in surprise, but before I could ask what he meant, we were through the door and into a room that couldn’t be described any other way but as a drawing room. The walls were covered in intricate green and white wallpaper, the carpet was a plush cream one, and literally every item in the room was an antique. There were three tall, muscular vampires ranged around a chaise longue, all in Bodyguard Mode, and lying elegantly on it was a woman.

She was, without a doubt, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen outside of a film. She seemed to be of Mediterranean origin, with curly black hair down to her waist, cheekbones that could have been carved from ice, and crimson-coloured lips. Her eyes were dark under black, sooty lashes. She didn’t look real. Real women didn’t have such small waists, large breasts, or legs that seemed endless. She looked like a Hispanic Barbie come to life. I could only gape at her as I wondered who on earth she was, and then the other shoe dropped.

This was Alejandro’s enemy: the one who had sent Alejandro his old wedding ring; who was setting the ghouls on Alejandro’s subjects (not to mention me); who was Thierry’s boss. For some reason we had always assumed the one who had it in for Alejandro was a man, and I realised now how stupid we had been. There was no reason why the culprit couldn’t have been a woman. I still had no idea who she actually was, or why she hated Alejandro so much, but the questions seemed almost insignificant when I was right in front of her…entirely within her power.

Thierry bowed respectfully to the woman. Realising that I wasn’t doing the same – I was too busy gawping at her – he hit me over the head lightly and pressed down on my shoulder until I went into the same obsequious position he was in. I glared at him from the corner of my eyes, but he seemed oblivious to my animosity.

“You may rise,” the woman said imperiously after a few moments had passed. Her voice was high and lilting, and definitely Spanish. Thierry’s hand on my shoulder lifted, and I straightened. I took a few moments to gather my wits about me before saying coolly, “I presume I have the dubious pleasure of addressing the person responsible for all the hell Alejandro and I have been put through recently?”

She inclined her head and beamed at me, as though accepting a compliment, but the smile was anything but pleasant. It twisted her face, making her look evil, and it sent a shiver of fear down my spine. “You do indeed.”

“Would you like to tell me what the fuck you’ve been playing at? Who are you?”

She tipped her head back and laughed. Her laugh was like velvet, smooth and rich, but something about it gave me goosebumps. “How very remiss of me. Allow me to introduce myself. My name,” she said, and the corners of her lips tilted upwards in a smirk, “is Maria Cortes. Or, to use my married name, Maria de Silva.”

Oh, my God.

She was Alejandro’s wife.

And that, dear reader, is why I wanted to write a sequel.