Gypsy Freak (All The Pretty Monsters #2)(72)

“Where are we meeting?” I ask Arion, even though I don’t want to be pulled away at this moment. “They won’t stick me underground,” I add as I grab the gun loaded with silver bullets from my bedside.

Lemon whimpers and scurries off when she sniffs the silver in the air.

“We’re in agreement?” Arion asks in an almost muted tone.

“Why wouldn’t we be?” I ask as I hang up.

Lemon frowns when I dump the loaded clip and put in an empty one.

“It’s just for show,” I tell her with a wink as I glance back down at Violet. “It’s a gamble, but I’m guessing I’m not wrong about this.”

“About what?” she asks as I walk by her.

“History always finds a way to repeat itself, even when she’s fucking buried and as dead as she can be,” I say so quietly I know she can’t hear the words.





Chapter 27





VIOLET


I hear a door shutting, and my eyes fly open.

Ingrid pops out from under a table across the room, pushing half her hair out of her face as she slowly approaches me with a drink in her hand.

I give her a weak smile. “I don’t think drinking is a good idea.”

She nods as she starts drinking the drink. “This is for me,” she informs me, causing me to try to laugh, but I end up whimpering in pain instead.

It always feels like I’ve been hit with—

“Emit,” I whisper as I close my eyes tightly. I killed his wolves. Right in front of him.

“He’s okay. He made us clean you up. We thought they slit your throat, but it was just a red mark when we found you. One of the glass balls in your bra blew up a bunch of mirrors downstairs when we were playing with it. Can you tell Damien it was you? He won’t be mad at you,” Ingrid says in her very quiet, hushed tone.

“Where is he?”

“He left. Arion’s top vampire is here, and she’s—”

“Shera?” I ask on a grimace, remembering what I did to her just recently.

She nods. “All the others are hiding like I do right now. She’s terrifying.”

“Yes,” I agree as I sit up, wincing when my throat burns, “she really is.”

Considering my luck with wolf betas, I decide not to hang out with the vampire beta I’ve actually pissed off. I never did anything to the two betas who grabbed me, or the third who came out of nowhere and battered me over the head.

I’m not even sure who slit my throat.

Those betas were wolves. At least one of them was. And all the people in that barn were…wolves too…I think.

It’s a bunch of incoherent snippets and flashes of memory after the latest throat-slitting incident.

My hands comes up to my throat, feeling the skin completely sealed and the lacing absent. How much did Emit see? Thank fuck he stayed out of sight.

“Where are you going?” she asks when I wobble to my feet, still exhausted from my panic attack—as I like to call it when I break out and turn into a lethal, crazed, unstoppable monster.

“To find Emit,” I say when my shaky legs threaten to give out.

“He’s dealing with the…mess he made,” Leiza says as she comes through the window, startling me. “Shera is downstairs!” she adds on a hiss, a little growl lingering in the back of her throat.

The mess he made?

I don’t say anything as I try to recall what happened after the mess I made.

My hands shake a little as I go to look out the window at the long drop.

“I can make a rope with sheets,” Ingrid suggests.

The telltale whirring of threads finds the air as the drapes begin unraveling.

“Or you could do it that way,” Leiza says with a shrug as the threads start wrapping around my waist and then tie off to the massive bed post.

I turn and climb out the window, as Leiza leaps out over my head.

I’m a little envious of how she simply lands in a crouch. But running and quick escapes are the only tricks in her wheelhouse.

“I thought you were dead for sure,” Leiza adds, as I fumble my way down the side of the house.

I lose my footing at one point, and I spin into the side of the house, groaning when my forehead slams into the wall. My life sucks so hard sometimes.

Leiza hisses out a sympathetic sound, as though she’s cringing in pain with me.

I try to drop the rest of the way, but two feet short, the threading runs out of length, and I’m jolted around as it cuts into me. I slam into the wall again, bouncing off it painfully hard this time. Before I can be swung back into it, I let the threading unravel, and I roll my ankle when I land, which sends me crashing to the ground with another long groan.

“No wonder you survived. You probably test your survival skills with every move you make,” Leiza says so seriously, somehow making that very insulting sentence sound endearingly genuine.

I don’t know whether to glare at her or thank her, so I opt to ignore her and circle back to it when I’m not suffering a possible concussion—or two.

“Do you know where they’re meeting?” I ask her as I push to my feet and stagger my way toward the nearest vehicle that she’ll have to drive. “I really need to talk to Emit.”

And offer him all I have in the world for the promise of keeping a secret before he tells the other three.