Iniquitous (The Marked #3)(37)

“Then that’s what we’ll do, love, but don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said without looking at me. All cautions aside, he appeared to be up for the challenge. “We’ll give it the old college try first thing in the morning.”

“No.” I shook my head decidedly. “We need to start now. Tonight.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“They couldn’t have gotten very far. If we put the word out and make some calls, I’m sure we could track them—maybe even catch up to them.”

Dominic looked at me as though I’d left my mind behind at the castle. “You need to go home and rest, angel.”

Home. Ugh. There was that damn word again. The word that seemed to be completely incongruent with my life.

“I can’t go home,” I said, shaking my head. “Not when all hell is breaking loose around us! We need to start working on this tonight, Dominic. It’s too important.”

“You’ve been missing for weeks, angel. Your family and friends are probably worried sick about you. You’ve been drained and starved and beaten. You need to go home and recuperate or you won’t be of any use to anyone.”

“I don’t need to recuperate. I’m perfectly fine,” I insisted.

His eyes fell heavy on me, weighing me down like gravity.

“What is this really about?” he asked gently, catching me off guard.

“What? Nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I redirected my focus out the window. I didn’t want to talk about my actual feelings. I didn’t want to talk about any of it. I just wanted to hunt down the sisters and hide from my other problems for just a little while longer. Was that too much to ask for?

“Angel?”

“I’m not going back there,” I finally said, irritated that he could see through my walls so easily.

“To your uncle’s?”

“Yes, to my uncle’s. Not until I find out who was responsible for what happened to me at the party. If the Council was behind the attack, it means they know the truth about my blood and they’ll come after me again.” I left out the part about how I wasn’t sure I could trust my uncle anymore either, and that I had suspicions over his involvement in the attack against me. It was too ugly to even think about let alone to say out loud. So I didn’t.

“Then where am I taking you, angel?”

“I…I don’t know,” I sputtered as my mind went blank at his question. I hadn’t actually thought that far.

He looked at me and smiled knowingly. “Why don’t you just say it? You know you want to.”

His arrogant tone struck a sour chord with me.

“Actually, I don’t want to,” I snapped back defensively. “Jeez. Get over yourself, Dominic.”

“Actually,” he mocked. “I wasn’t referring to myself, but thank you. That was very revealing.”

I glared at him as prickling heat painted my cheeks. “You’re…you’re so freakin’ delusional. And annoying!” I crossed my arms and pressed back in the seat. “Just take me to Gabriel’s.”

“Gabriel?” He huffed out a laugh. “If the Council is truly after you, as you suspect, Gabriel is the very last person you should be running to right now.”

“Give me a break. How many times are we going to go through this? He would never do anything to hurt me.”

“Perhaps not intentionally.”

I hesitated for the briefest of moments. “He wouldn’t,” I repeated, though there was less vigor behind my words this time.

“Are you willing to stake your life on it?”

A shiver of uncertainty climbed down my back. Could I trust Gabriel not to turn me into the Council? What if they promised him that no harm would come of me? What if they convinced him that they just wanted to protect me? Would he fall for it?

I couldn’t answer the question with absolute certainty and I hated myself for it.

“Never mind,” I said and then shot him a warning look. If he so much as uttered anything close to ‘I told you so’, I was going to rearrange his pretty little vampire face.

A few beats of tension-filled moments passed between us.

“I must say,” said Dominic, finally breaking the silence, “I expected you to say Romeo. I assumed he’d be the first person you’d want to see.”

Trace…

He wasn’t just the first person I wanted to see, he was the only person. His face had haunted me for weeks, tormenting me with the prospect of a perfect love, yet slipping away from me as though it was never intended to be mine. He was the one who brought me out of the darkness, and sometimes he was the one that brought me into it.

I knew I could go to Trace. I knew he would protect me with his life; that he’d sooner die before giving me up to the Council. But…I shook my head. But what about his father? I mean, Peter Macarthur was just as indoctrinated to the Order as my uncle was. And they were both present the night of my attack, whispering secrets to each other that I hadn’t even begun to unravel yet.

Nope. I can’t go to Trace’s, I decided. “It’s too risky to go there.”

Dominic looked at me strangely, though he didn’t say anything.

The silence immediately bombarded me with truths I didn’t want to fess up to. I knew that my refusal to go to Trace had a lot more to do with my fear of facing him than it did with anything Peter Macarthur could do to me.