Before going on I hesitated. “Are there…? Is Maxime in here?”

“No. We thought it best to… We didn’t think it was necessary to include those.” Meaning the photos existed, but not in this file.

“You couldn’t have extended your consideration to the photos of a man wriggling his hands around in my guts?” I snapped, my fingers clenching hard on the photo of Holden, wrinkling his face under my palm.

Tyler appeared sheepish, but Logan was unapologetic. “I need you to remember this, Secret. I need you to tell me everything.”

I flipped the page over, and an unfamiliar face stared up at me. No, not unfamiliar, but…new.

I’d always thought I looked more like my mother because we had the same nose and the same curly hair. But the man in the photo staring back at me could have been my younger brother.

And not the younger brother I actually had, who looked nothing like me.

As with the photo of me when I’d arrived at the hospital, Sutherland was unconscious in his portrait, making it impossible for me to tell if his eyes were the same brown as mine, but so much else was similar.

His hair was the same pale blond. We shared the same mouth, the same sun-starved complexion and the same ears. I touched the photo tentatively, not letting myself see the unhealed wounds marring his chest and arms, because all that mattered was his face.

This was my father.

It was hard to wrap my head around the idea at first since the man in this photo was younger than me, forever frozen at seventeen. But I couldn’t deny the resemblance, and my heart and stomach both flip-flopped to see his face.

“Is he…? I never asked. Is he okay?”

“He took longer to heal than one would expect from a vampire, but yes. He’s up and moving again, doesn’t seem worse for the wear. Physically anyway.” Logan emphasized the last part, and I understood what he was telling me. Sutherland was nuts.

I tried to empathize with him. My father had been turned against his will. He’d tried to murder his family and almost succeeded. He had no vampire sire to ease his transition into living with the council, but he’d still tried to be good.

And he’d been punished.

Punished because of me.

Using the heel of my hand, I roughly wiped tears from my cheeks and closed the folder without looking at any other photos.

“We couldn’t help but notice the resemblance,” Tyler commented. “Now that he’s recovered it’s…well, it’s uncanny really. Are you two related?”

I nodded, grating my fingernails down the front of the folder. “He’s my father.”

“Your…father?” Logan sounded unconvinced.

“Vampires don’t age,” I reminded him. “He’s my biological father. He was turned at seventeen, right before my mother gave birth.”

Logan nodded, and Tyler reached across the table to retrieve the folder from me before I dug my way though the cover.

“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” I said. “Any details not covered by the notes, anything I have to give you, it’s yours on one condition.”

“I’ve already promised you can see Desmond,” Logan told me.

“And I’ll hold you to that, but I want you to promise me one more thing.”

“It depends on what it is.”

“When you have everything you can possibly learn from him and there’s nothing else he can tell you, I want you to put me in a room with Friedrich Kesteral. I want that room to have no windows, and I want you to leave me alone with him for an hour.”

“I don’t think that’s a good—”

“When this man’s usefulness to you is spent, you will put me in a room with him, do you understand? Because he’s going to die one way or another, and whether it’s sanctioned by the government or not, I will be the one to kill him.”

Logan looked afraid of me for the first time since he’d walked into the room. Then he extended his hand and said, “Deal.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

It took Logan seven hours to ask me everything he wanted to know. In those seven hours I told him what I’d seen of the way the compound worked, how many different employees I’d interacted with, and repeated every conversation I’d had with The Doctor.

I still couldn’t think of him as Friedrich. The name was too normal and too soft for the man it was attached to. I’d thought giving him a human name would help me feel better about things, help me humanize him and think of him as something other than the boogeyman in my nightmares, but it didn’t do any good.

He was still The Doctor. He would always be The Doctor.

The only way I was going to exorcise my demons would be when I eradicated him from the face of the earth. I needed to be the one who killed him because otherwise I’d never believe he was gone. Until my skin was stained with his blood and I saw the light go out in his eyes, I wouldn’t be free from the power he had over me.

Nine days was all it had taken for him to beat me down, and now he owned me.

It didn’t matter that he was in captivity or I was supposedly free, because in my mind I was still wearing the collar. I was still shackled to him and would be as long as he stayed alive.

Once the major was done asking his questions—some of which were new, most a repeat of the same old story—he got to his feet and shook my hand. Tyler followed suit, giving me a firm handshake and a supportive smile.

“I’m looking forward to working with you in the future, Secret. I think this team can do great things.” Logan nodded from me to Tyler. “Of course, I don’t need to remind you your affiliation with us would best be kept quiet. I understand your vampire council likes to believe they’ve got everyone fooled. Let’s let them keep thinking that.”

“That might not be as easy as it sounds.”

“You’re their leader, aren’t you?”

“I’m one third of the leadership of one of the councils. But even there I’m outranked by one.”

“You think you’re going to have any difficulty lying to one vampire?” Logan asked.

“If you’d ever met Sig, you wouldn’t have to ask.”

“Come a time you feel you’re no longer safe, you make the call and we’ll extract you.”

I laughed, my first real non-crazed laugh since I’d been free, and the sound was so unfamiliar to me I almost jumped. “Logan, with all due respect to you, I’m not a double agent. You need me for intel on all the things that go bump in the night, fine, I’ll help you. But I’m not giving anyone up, and I’m not telling you anything I don’t feel comfortable sharing. I appreciate what the FBI did for me, and whatever part the military played, I’m grateful to you too, but you don’t understand the first damned thing about vampires. So here’s my first bit of insider information for you.”

“What’s that?”

“The moment I no longer feel protected by my own council, I’m already dead. Because that’s the only way I get out of there. Understand?”

“Yes, Ms. McQueen. I believe I do.”

“Good. Now bring me Desmond Alvarez.”

They left, Tyler offering me a brotherly pat on the shoulder before taking his exit, and I resumed pacing the room. Logan had told me Desmond was in a room next door, yet the time between their exit and his arrival felt interminable.

When the door reopened, I froze in my tracks, staring at the entry like a frightened deer stares at an oncoming car, knowing what was inevitable but unable to move out of its way.

He wore a similarly shocked expression, like he hadn’t believed he’d get to see me when they brought him into the room.

“Secret?”

I’d missed him. I thought I’d understood the depth to which I could long for someone, but seeing him in front of me told me I had no idea. My hands trembled to touch him, and a hideous-sounding sob wrested free of my throat.

I’d been drowning, and he was the oxygen I hadn’t known I needed.

“Des—”

He didn’t give me an opportunity to finish saying his name. In one moment he was filling the doorway with his body, and in the next I was in his arms. He lifted me full off the floor and supported my weight easily with a hand on either thigh, latching me to him.

I wrapped my arms around his neck, clinging to him like he was the last refuge on an angry sea. When he kissed me, I felt years of my life being restored. His kiss and its sweet-and-sour limey tang was the last piece of the puzzle falling into place.

His lips tasted salty, and when I pulled my face back, tears were streaming down his cheeks. I kissed each one, reveling in the joy that brought rather than the horrible anguish that had been causing mine.

“I thought…” He drifted off when he began placing soft kisses on my cheeks and nose before finding my mouth and seizing it in a way that left me clinging to him and gasping for air. His kiss was ferocious and claiming, burdened with need. I knew what he’d thought because I’d seen the look on his face once before when he believed I was dying.

He’d thought the same thing I had about Holden.

Desmond had believed he was never going to see me alive again.

I touched his face, letting my fingers memorize every line and groove, savoring the rough tug of his short beard on my palms. When I’d left he’d had a bit of stubble, but it had evidently been quite some time since he had bothered with a razor.

“I like your beard,” I mumbled, scratching it with my fingernails.

He laughed lightly and pressed his forehead against my sternum, where his laughter vanished into tears. When he righted himself and put me on the floor, his cheeks were stained from crying, but I didn’t think I could recall ever seeing him so damned happy.

“They wouldn’t tell me anything. I wasn’t allowed to see you, and no one would explain what had happened to you. What happened?”

The idea of telling my story again so soon after the major’s rigorous debriefing was more than I could bear. I shook my head and placed a hand on his chest over his heart. “Not now.”