The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (37 page)

His drinking’s gotten worse since Damon’s been gone, and that’s saying something.

He grunts. “What does it matter? Even if I didn’t have a magically regenerating liver, I’m headed back to the big waiting room in the sky at any second. With my luck, probably
before
we find Damon again.”

I cough a little, trying to ignore the fact that I kind of want a hit off that flask, too.

“Answer me this,” I say, not looking over at him. “What are the chances that you’re going to be more likely to flip personalities when you’re drunk? Lowered inhibitions and all that.”

“I’ve never flipped when I was drunk,” Ric says. “And it hasn’t happened since…anyway, I think Damon and I dealt with that.” Metal scrapes as he screws the lid back on. “But I’ll lay off if you’re worried, okay?”

“I’m not
worried,”
I protest. “I was just saying ‘what if,’ you know? Elena doesn’t need that right now.”

His gaze dodges guiltily toward the window. “I know. Hey, I’m—”

“Ric!”

Elena’s voice blasts down the hallway and the whole house feels like it freezes under the chill of her panic.

Ric takes off with a whisper of disturbed air and I’m left sprinting in his wake.

We find Elena and Stefan standing deathly still in the foyer, and from the way they’re staring at each other, I can’t tell if they’ve been fighting or if they just got bad news.

“Elena…”

“
No
,” she snaps. “Tell them. They deserve to know, too.”

Stefan’s chin goes up a fraction of an inch, and I see the muscle in his jaw flex briefly. “You can’t stop me, because it’s already done. But I couldn’t leave until I warned you.”

Every cell of my body is tingling with awareness of a crisis, but I have no idea what this new threat could be.

“Warned us about what?” Ric asks uneasily, his gaze flicking around the foyer as if he expects to see evidence of a coming attack.

Stefan’s eyes flicker and my stomach sinks as I try to brace myself.

“I’m giving Silas to the Augustines,” Stefan says. “In exchange for Damon.”

DAMON

I lie slowly back onto the thin foam of my mattress, my weight slouching into its cheap cushion. It’s not that I hurt after the sessions in the lab: they use anesthetic and I heal quickly, even from the incisions that gouge all the way through my skull. It’s more like phantom limb pain, a deep ache in a part of myself I can’t even name.

My hand is trailing off the side, onto the polished concrete floor. I pull it onto the cushion with me, moving cautiously as if it’s unfamiliar or bruised. I wouldn’t even touch the mattress until Lia gave me a sheet because I couldn’t stand the disgusting texture of the bare foam. The other Augustines were convinced I would use the sheet to garrote someone, but she ignored them.

Lia.

I spend all day with her in the lab, usually, but I want to talk to her alone, when I’m not buckled to a chair for my own safety. In a way, it’s beautiful what she’s done here.

Throughout history and even in my lifetime, there have been people who tried to build a place in the world where vampires can live as themselves, without lies. But no one has ever found a way to free us from our addiction to human blood, and no one has ever done it without calling on brutal force to keep order.

It makes sense why she needs the loyalty bond, so she doesn’t have to hurt anyone and so they won’t hurt anyone else. I wince, lifting a hand to the nearly invisible line on my scalp where they cut into my head this morning. They’re so careful when they remove the top of my skull that there are no shaved patches, just a path of missing strands barely an eighth of an inch wide, covered easily by the rest of my hair so that no matter how many days they operate, I don’t look any different.

It’s just…the loyalty bond doesn’t
feel
like a safeguard. Hour after hour in the lab, all the questions, the pictures of Elena and my brother and then Lia’s face, somehow brighter and more memorable than all of the others. My fingers worry at the narrow line of missing hair. How can it take so many hours to build a safeguard into my brain? Why do they think I would betray Lia? She’s my best friend.

Something like nausea needles through my body and I groan deep and low, rolling onto my side and squeezing my eyes shut. Because of Elena, I remember suddenly. I would betray anyone for Elena and they know that, somehow. I fight with my brother and disagree with him all the time. I wouldn’t kill him, not even for Lia, but our lifestyles have never been the same, so Dr. Penfield doesn’t seem to be worried about his influence.

My thoughts feel slippery and vague; the normally vivid lines of who I am and what I believe faded and tattered around the edges. I’m so tired but I can’t just lie here until they take me back to the lab. There’s something I need to remember, something I need to hold onto…

And then, like curtains drawing back to reveal the treasure beneath, her face appears in my mind.

Smooth, olive-toned skin and soft lips, the bottom one caught between her teeth as she looks worriedly at the stack of Monopoly money I’m counting across the board toward Ric. Her fretful human heartbeat picks up as the stack grows.

“I’m out,” I announce, but as I move to drop my stack of deeds into the middle of the table, Ric reaches out and slaps my knuckles.

“No way. Keep mortgaging, Salvatore. You’re paying every penny of that debt you can scrape up.” He leans back in his chair and clasps his hands behind his head, obviously happy to drag out my current financial weakness for his own enjoyment. “If you come up short, I suppose I could be talked into a spell of indentured servitude.”

I roll my eyes and flip my properties over one by one, adding up the mortgage values in my head as I say sardonically, “It’s not the Confederate version of Monopoly. I’m pretty sure there’s no forced labor card.”

“Bullshit,” Ric disagrees, raising his glass of bourbon and pointing one finger at me while he swirls the ice cubes in the amber liquid. “Wherever there’s capitalism, there’s forced labor, whatever they happen to be calling it at the time. Tell you what, why don’t I let you keep playing and you can give me 80% of the rent you collect on each property. Seventy percent for the privilege of letting you keep it, and 10% to pay down your running debt.”

Elena glares. “Don’t be mean, Ric.” She glances at the mess of bills and upside-down properties in front of me. “How much extra do you need?” she asks, sounding far more anxious than she should about a simple board game. She takes her only remaining five hundred dollar bill from where it’s tucked under the edge of the board, and nudges it toward me. “Here.”

The electronic sounds from the living room pause, and Jeremy wanders in, loudly crunching his mouthful of chips. “Is Damon
losing?”
he asks, eyes scanning the board and widening with glee when they land on the mess of my finances that’s still $2,250 short of what I owe Ric.

Not that I’m ready to admit that total yet.

“Figures,” Jeremy bitches. “The one Saturday this summer I decide to skip watching him building hotels and counting his money, and he finally slips up.” Elena pushes the five hundred dollar bill a little closer to me and Jeremy snatches it off the table. “No way! No helping! He’s butchered you a thousand times, Elena, let him suffer.”

Of course I’ve beaten both of them, repeatedly, because with Jenna’s death fresh and Stefan conspicuously missing, they need something to keep their minds busy and board games are a great distraction for the uber-competitive Gilbert siblings. Unfortunately, the eldest one tends to buckle when it comes time to sweep in for the final kill and she’s always trying to give somebody a break on the rent for Pacific Avenue with two hotels on it, or let them roll again and skip the move that would knock them out of the game.

Granted, I’ve never had to be on the receiving end of her Mother Theresa complex before, but this afternoon I got word from an old acquaintance that Klaus was spotted two towns over, and where Klaus is, my brother is. Unfortunately, that’s close enough for Klaus to possibly hear that Elena survived his little ritual and if I go to pick up my brother and drag him home, then I leave Elena unprotected while I’m gone. It’s a hell of a distracting quandary, and probably most of the reason I’m in so much debt right now.

“Seriously?” Elena sniffs, snatching her fake money back from her little brother. “That doesn’t mean you guys have to be such jerks about it.”

I pick up my properties again, prepared to announce my final defeat to Ric, when something softly touches my thigh. The cards spew out of my hand and all over the table as my ultra-sensitive nerve endings inform me that yes, that is
Elena Gilbert’s hand
and it is
touching my leg.

“The loss of your dignity is making you clumsy, Salvatore,” Ric drawls. “You’ll have to watch for grey hairs next. I hear they’re highly correlated with stress.”

A red-faced Elena leaps up from the table. “I’m going to get a drink,” she announces loudly, snatching her mostly full glass of lemonade off the table. “Anybody else?”

“Whiskey and Coke,” Jeremy calls out, looking disappointed when it doesn’t net him his usual withering look.

I lower my chin slowly, taking a surreptitious peek into my lap, where there is a neat stack of hundred dollar bills lying there like an offering. Because even when I deserve to, Elena can’t stand to see me lose.

I exhale, letting myself indulge for a second in that one, precious memory of the summer I spent searching for Stefan and lying to Elena.

When I open my eyes to the ceiling of the cell, my mind is calm again. It’s not Lia I care about, it’s Elena. I need to find a way out of here and away from the Augustines, and to do that, I have to keep them from making me forget what’s important.

The bolts on my door slam noisily open and I squeeze my eyes shut again and swallow, because I’m not ready. I need hours yet to build on this newly recovered resolve before I’m ready to face them and their machines that blur everything inside of me until my thoughts feel like a foreign language.

“Mmm, did I interrupt naptime?” a familiar voice purrs. “Don’t worry, I promise that what I brought is better than anything you’re dreaming about.”

“Unless you can make your poisoned birthday cake look like the Swedish bikini team, I kinda doubt it,” I say without opening my eyes. “Now get out of here. Visiting hours are over.”

“It’s noon,” Katherine says indignantly, tossing her well-conditioned hair back over the silky shoulder of a blouse that looks like it was tailored directly onto her body. She’s oddly casual otherwise, wearing designer jeans and a pair of New Balance sneakers that look suspiciously like the ones she was sporting when she came back from her road trip with Jeremy and Matt.

I push up to a sitting position and lean back against the wall. “Acceptable visiting times for backstabbing bitches like you are pretty short. It’s one of the downsides to betraying people who are trying to protect you from evil vampire societies.”

Katherine props her hands on her hips and gives me a patronizing look. “Don’t tell me you’re still pouting about that. I gave them the address to your hotel twenty-four hours after I left it, which means it was probably twenty-three and a half hours after
you
left it. No harm, no foul.” She lifts one hand and waggles a blood bag at me. “Besides, I brought lunch.”

I drop my eyes pointedly to her neck. “I prefer a hot meal to leftovers.”

“My blood’s the cure for immortality, remember? Somehow I doubt that’s what you’re after right now.” She tosses me the blood bag, and I catch it gently, not wanting to risk rupturing the thin plastic. The Augustines are still feeding me human blood for now, but never enough of it to really satisfy my hunger. I pop the bag open and take a drink.

“Care to test that theory? According to the Hunter’s Sword, there was only enough cure for one vampire, even though Qetsiyah seems to think that your blood can cure Silas and all the Originals.” I give her a sharp smile. “I’m betting it’s watered down enough now that I could bleed a little off the top without losing my youthful good looks.”