Chapter 67 THE TRAITOR
Ava's POV
The name my father said was Adrian.
Not Adrian Vale standing right there in the room with us, but someone with the same name from Dominic's world, someone inside his inner circle who had been feeding information to the hunters for three years.
Dominic stood at the window for a long time and nobody spoke and I watched his back and the way the symbols under his shirt moved faintly even through the fabric and thought about how much he had built and protected and carried alone for so long and what it cost to find out the rot was inside it.
Finally he turned around and his face was controlled but his eyes were gold, fully, and he said to my father, "show me the communications."
My father reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded paper, printed pages, and held them out and Dominic crossed the room and took them and read and the room stayed quiet while he did, my mother's hand finding mine under the table and holding it, Elias watching Dominic's face, Adrian watching my father.
When Dominic finished he set the papers down on the table very carefully and said, "his name is Calder, he's been my second in the London operation for six years and I trusted him completely," and his voice was flat in a way that meant he was feeling something very large that he was not currently letting out.
"What does he want," Elias said.
"Control," Dominic said simply, "if bonded pairs are eliminated and the marked bloodlines are suppressed then the balance of power in our world shifts entirely toward those without bonds, toward the older faction who believe integration with humans was always a mistake."
"And Calder is one of them," Elias said.
"Apparently," Dominic said.
I looked at my father and said, "how long have you known it was him."
"Three weeks," he said and met my eyes steadily when he said it, not flinching, "I was trying to find a way to use the information that didn't get Ava killed in the process."
"You could have told us three weeks ago," I said.
"I didn't trust that telling you wouldn't accelerate things before I had enough to give you," he said, "I needed proof not just suspicion."
I looked at him and thought about all the ways that could be true and all the ways it could also be a convenient explanation and landed somewhere in the middle which was probably where the truth actually lived with my father, somewhere complicated and not entirely clean.
"So Calder knows we're in London," Dominic said, looking at Sera.
"He knows you were," Sera said carefully, "whether he knows this specific location yet I can't say."
"Then we have a window," Adrian said from near the window where he'd been standing since my father started talking, quiet and alert, "and we should use it."
"Use it how," I said.
"We go to him," Dominic said and his voice was very simple about it, the way it got when he'd already decided and was just informing everyone else, "we don't wait for him to find us again, we find him first."
"Dominic," my mother said from across the table and he looked at her and she looked back at him with those clear eyes and said,
"take Ava somewhere safe first, somewhere Calder's people can't reach her while you do this."
"I'm not going somewhere safe while he walks into..." I started.
"Ava," my mother said, looking at me now, "I spent fifteen years sick in a hospital bed because the people who should have protected me didn't and I am not watching that happen to you, let him do this."
The room was quiet.
I looked at Dominic and he looked at me and I could see in his face that he agreed with her and also that he wasn't going to push it, was going to let me decide, and that was probably the thing I loved most about him and also the most inconvenient thing about him.
"Fine," I said, "but I'm not sitting in a flat somewhere waiting, if there's something I can do I'm doing it."
"There is something," Elias said and everyone looked at him and he said, "the bond, if Ava completes it before Dominic goes after Calder then the mark fully activates and she becomes significantly harder to take, the hunters lose their window because a fully bonded marked one isn't a target anymore, she's a threat."
The room sat with that.
"What does completing it involve," my mother asked, practical and direct.
"A choice," Dominic said, looking at me, "just that, Ava makes the choice fully and consciously and the bond closes."
"And it's permanent," I said.
"Permanent," he said.
I looked at him across the room and thought about all of it, the first night in Club Obsidian when he walked in and the whole floor stopped, the contract and what came after, the warehouse in New York and his gold eyes in the dark, London and everything it had cost both of us to get here, my mother healed, my father complicated, Elias in the café and the pull that wasn't even really about Elias, all of it leading to this room, this moment, this man looking at me like I was the thing he'd been waiting for without knowing he was waiting.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay," he said, very quietly.
"Not here though," I said, looking around at seven people in a small East London flat,
"not with an audience."
My mother stood up and said briskly, "everyone out of the bedroom," and started moving people toward the door with a calm efficiency that made Adrian actually laugh for the first time in days, a short surprised sound, and even Dominic's mouth did the almost-smile.
Five minutes later the bedroom door closed and it was just us.
Dominic crossed the room to me and took my face in both hands and looked at me for a long moment without kissing me, just looked, and I looked back and let him see everything, the fear and the wanting and the certainty underneath both.
"You're sure," he said.
"I've been sure since the warehouse," I said, "I just needed to catch up to myself."
He kissed me then, smouth warm and soft, but the second my tongue touched his it turned filthy. His hands slid down my body, gripping my ass and yanking me hard against the thick ridge of his cock already straining in his jeans. I moaned into his mouth and he swallowed it, then broke the kiss just enough to growl against my lips,
"I need to be inside you. Now."