Corinne gave a slow shake of her head. "Why would anyone want to hurt any of the young Breedmates who were captured along with me? Insanity, maybe. Evil, certainly. That's the only way to explain the things he did. The torture and experimentation ..."
"Oh, darling," Regina cried, the words lost within a choked intake of breath. "All this time? All these years, you've been made to suffer such things? To what end?"
"We were used for a very specific purpose," Corinne replied, her voice sounding wooden even to her own ears. "The one who took us - the one who locked us in a lightless prison and treated us no better than cattle - needed our bodies to help him grow his own army. We weren't his only captives. He also had another, a creature I'd only heard about in stories Sebastian used to tell Lottie and me to frighten us."
Her mother's face drained of all its color. "What are you saying?"
"There was an Ancient imprisoned in the labs too," she said, speaking past Regina Bishop's recoiled gasp. "Our captor used him for experimentations as well. And he used him for breeding, to father Gen One vampires who'd be raised in service - enslavement, more like it - to the madman who'd controlled all of us."
For a long moment, her mother simply stared, mute and pale. A tear rolled down her cheek as the understanding settled on her fully. "Oh, my dear child ..."
Corinne cleared her throat. She'd gone this far now; she needed to speak the rest. "I fought every chance I got, but in the end they were stronger. It took a long time, but eventually -
thirteen years ago, as best I've been able to guess - they got what they wanted from me." She had to draw a deep breath in order to continue. "While I was in those awful laboratory cells, I gave birth to a son. I have a child out there somewhere. He was stolen from me just hours after he was born. Now that I'm free, I intend to get him back."
Something wasn't right.
As Hunter parked the car in the Order's private hangar at the airport, he kept thinking back to Corinne's reunion with her Darkhaven family. He kept wondering why his predator's instincts were circling back around to Victor Bishop like a hound on a trail that had nearly gone cold.
Nearly, but not quite.
Something about Bishop's reaction toward Corinne's reappearance didn't ring true. The Breed male had seemed shocked, certainly, and obviously moved to see the young woman who'd been dead to all of her kin for such a long time.
As any Darkhaven leader would be, Bishop had been notably concerned about the immediate security of his home and its inhabitants. He'd been cautious and protective, all things to be expected. Yet Hunter had detected something more in Bishop, something that seemed to run deeper than his outward expression of astonishment and relief at Corinne's unexpected homecoming.
There had been a remoteness to Victor Bishop's gaze as he looked at his daughter. There had been a hesitancy to the man, a hint of distraction in his demeanor, even as he'd embraced her and told her what a relief it was to see her again. Victor Bishop was hiding something. He was holding back somehow with Corinne; Hunter was sure of it.
Then again, who was he to judge when it came to any demonstration of emotion?
He had been raised to deal in logic and facts, not feelings. His instincts were honed toward stealth and combat, toward the pursuit and destruction of any given target. In those things, he was expert. And it was those very things that awaited him in Boston - both the pursuit of the Enforcement Agent who'd fled the club in Chinatown and the rooting out and destruction of Dragos and his untold number of homegrown assassins.
But still ...
Suspicion nagged Hunter as he got out of the vehicle and strode toward the corporate jet inside the private hangar. Ahead of him, at the lowered steps of the Cessna, one of the pilots came out and greeted him with a polite smile.
"Mr. Smith," murmured the human. He and his copilot were part of a discreet charter service kept on permanent retainer by the Order. Hunter knew little about the arrangement, other than that the humans who operated the private jets exclusively for the Order were top of their class and paid a good sum to ask no questions of their typically late-night clientele. "We are cleared for taxi and takeoff as soon as you are ready, Mr. Smith."
Hunter gave a faint nod of acknowledgment, his instincts still prickling as he put his foot on the first step. It was then that the realization hit him.
Something Victor Bishop had said.
What of your abductor? he'd demanded of Corinne.
Good God, please tell me the bastard who stole you from us is dead. Although neither Corinne nor Hunter had mentioned any details about where she'd been or who had held her, Victor Bishop spoke as if he knew the blame for her capture rested on a single individual.
An individual who had the Darkhaven leader visibly anxious. "Paranoid" was the word that sprang to Hunter's mind when he recalled the hurried orders that sent Bishop's guards in a scramble to batten down the hatches of the estate and to hustle Bishop's mate and Corinne into the mansion. Now that Hunter thought about it, Victor Bishop had been acting like a man on the verge of a coming siege.
The question was, why?
"Is anything wrong, Mr. Smith?"
Hunter didn't answer. He pivoted off the plane's staircase and stalked across the concrete floor of the airport hangar, his boots thumping hard with every long stride. He got back into the car and turned on the engine.
The black sedan roared to life, tires screaming as he punched the gas pedal and headed back to confront Victor Bishop and whatever secret he was hiding.
Chapter Eight
Corinne sat with her mother at the dining room table, watching in a state of quiet distraction as Tilda brought out the last of the serving platters from the Darkhaven's kitchen. The food looked wonderful, smelled even better, but she had no appetite. Her gaze kept straying toward the adjacent foyer just outside the formal dining room, to the closed doors of her father's study.