Renie

Dexter and a small group of his security personnel arrived within minutes. His eyes narrowed when Ysanne told him to remove Isabeau, but he made no objections. He was only the hired help after all, and it wasn't his place to question Ysanne's decisions. But he clearly wasn't happy as his people escorted Isabeau from the room.

I kept expecting Ysanne to defend Isabeau, to insist that she was innocent, but she didn't. Then I wondered why I expected it at all. After what she had done to Edmond, she could hardly change her tune for Isabeau's sake. Despite the possible relationship that existed between them.

And then she surprised me.

"I think you're making a mistake," she said in a quiet voice, not looking at anyone in particular.

Jemima glanced at Isabeau's empty chair. "In what respect?"

As if it wasn't perfectly obvious.

"Isabeau didn't do this."

"Then who did?" Charles asked.

"I don't know."

"Then you don't know that she didn't do it."

"Vampires from every House in the UK and Ireland were involved in the attack on Belle Morte. That means suspicion should be cast on every House, not just my own."

"The attack was obviously timed with the release of the rabid," Henry pointed out. "Whoever let it out was already inside Belle Morte, which backs up the theory that it was one of your vampires."

He didn't say Isabeau's name, which I was grateful for. I may have had my own doubts about her, but I didn't want everyone leaping to conclusions. I'd already witnessed the brand of justice that vampires favoured and I didn't want Isabeau to suffer that unless she really was guilty.

And if she was guilty, I wanted her to suffer as much as was physically possible.

"Perhaps, but the evidence against Isabeau is hardly concrete. If she is not responsible, one must wonder what the real perpetrator wanted." Ysanne stared around the table, her eyes boring into each member of the Council. "And what they plan to do next. Someone who goes to these lengths does not give up simply because their schemes have been thwarted."

Ysanne's words chilled me. If Isabeau wasn't behind this, the real criminal was still at large, possibly still lurking somewhere within these walls. The old rumour of secret passageways crawled back into my brain, and I looked uneasily at the wood-panelled walls around us.

"It seems to me that we still have a great deal to discuss regarding this situation," Ysanne said. "Now that the rabid is no longer here, I have had the west wing prepared for visitors. I would be honoured if the Council members stayed here while we continue this investigation."

"You are too kind." Charles didn't sound entirely sincere, but Ysanne chose to ignore it.

She rose to her feet, smoothing down her crisp, white blouse. "Then let us adjourn. I'm sure you are all hungry, and my donors are ready and willing to feed you. We can reconvene after we have eaten."

I realised I didn't even know how many donors were left alive after the attack. Had the dead donors been replaced yet, or was Ysanne covering up all evidence of the attack? That seemed more likely. All of this was about maintaining the balance between vampires and humans, and admitting that a bunch of vampires had butchered defenceless donors – most of who were barely out of their teens – would seriously shake that balance.

Ysanne had managed to cover up the truth about June's death, and I was willing to bet she had managed to cover up what had happened here, too. But she couldn't keep something like this quiet for long. There was no way she would allow any photographers or TV crews inside when people were dead and the House was still reeling from an attack, but Vladdicts and other vampire fans worldwide would start asking questions when the stream of information from their favourite House went quiet. The vampires were too much in the public eye for the world not to notice something was wrong.

If Ysanne and the Council hadn't managed to sort out this mess by the time the human world realised something was wrong, the fragile balance that they had worked so hard to maintain could be shattered.

Edmond

Edmond leaned his head against the stone wall behind him, Renie's words playing in an endless, savage loop through his mind.

The cells of Belle Morte were a far cry from the luxury of the rest of the mansion. Even calling them cells was too kind. They were dungeons – bleak stone rooms, almost medieval in their austerity, with no furniture and no amenities, nothing to break up the solid stone except for iron rings driven deep into the cold walls.

He'd only been down here a day, and already his muscles were cramping into hard knots from sitting on the hard ground. Vampires could withstand a lot of physical discomfort, but Edmond still hadn't fully healed from the whipping he'd taken a few days before. Blood matted his shirt to his back, making him stick to the wall.

While Renie had been going through the worst of the turn, Edmond hadn't left her side, not even to feed. He hadn't given himself a chance to regain his strength. In hindsight, that had been an incredibly foolish thing to do. He had known that Ysanne would punish him for turning Renie, and he should have made sure he was strong enough for that. But he hadn't been able to tear himself away from her side in case she woke up and needed him. Now he was paying the price for that.

Unable to feed as long as he was imprisoned, what little strength he had left was bleeding out of his limbs, stripping away his power. His stomach was hollow and knotted with hunger.

He shifted position and fire raced up and down his arms, making a groan hiss between his teeth.

Silver chains bound his wrists to the iron rings in the walls; the metal burned through skin and flesh. Blood formed small puddles on either side of his body, and every time he moved, the silver chains scorched through fresh tissue. It was agony.

But the pain was nothing compared to the words that Renie had flung at him.

What have you done to me?

I'm a monster.

She probably didn't even realise how her words had torn him, sharper and more lethal than any silver chain could ever be. After everything, Renie still thought him a monster.

Edmond had often thought how hard it would be to see her walk out of Belle Morte and never come back. He had faced the awful reality of seeing her die out there in the snow. But this was something he had never foreseen.

He had never thought that fate would be cruel enough to send him another woman who had the power to fill the aching cracks in his heart, only for her to turn on him. He had never forgotten the way Charlotte had looked at him when she found out what he really was, the way her eyes had filled with horror and disgust. He would never forget the way she had turned against him, or how she had brought an angry mob to his door, with every intention of wiping him out.

Edmond had loved and lost since then, but no one else had ever betrayed him in that way. Renie hadn't betrayed him, but the look in her eyes had been so close to Charlotte's. More than three hundred years separated the two women, but Renie's words had slashed at his heart, reopening the wounds of Charlotte's words – wounds that had taken so long to heal.

He closed his eyes, but that did nothing to dispel the accusations that Renie had burned into his brain.

Unbidden, the memory of another woman came to mind. Six years after the disastrous end of his relationship with Charlotte, he had met and fallen for Marguerite – a simple, honest woman who had wanted nothing more than to love and be loved. Unlike Charlotte, she had quickly sensed that Edmond was more than he seemed. Wary of what had happened with Charlotte, Edmond had been determined to keep his secret, afraid of ever again seeing that kind of disgust fill the eyes of a woman he loved. But Marguerite, ever gentle and ever loving, had pried his secrets from him, learning what he truly was. Unlike Charlotte, she hadn't turned from him. Edmond had been convinced then that this was the woman he would spend eternity with. He was still too young and naive to truly understand the concept of eternity – to really consider that Marguerite would, all too quickly, grow old and die.

He'd thought he would have a lifetime with her.

He'd had less than a year.

There would always be pockets of the world where cruelty and darkness existed, but for so much of Edmond's life that kind of darkness had dominated everything. He knew the dangers people faced simply by walking down the street, but Marguerite had never seemed to grasp that. She'd never seemed to understand the capacity for evil that occupied so many human hearts.

She'd been attacked when she was walking home one night, and left for dead. Edmond had gone through the same thing when he journeyed to Paris as a young man, facing the reality of dying like a rat in the streets. Francois had saved him and made him a vampire. Edmond had done the same thing for Marguerite. But she hadn't survived the turn.

Just as no one really understood why some people went rabid instead of becoming a vampire, no one really understood why, on occasion, a human body rejected the turn altogether. But it could happen, and it had happened to Marguerite.

She had died in his arms.

She was the last woman he had truly allowed himself to love. In the build-up to the French Revolution, when Edmond had immersed himself in a life of selfishness and decadence, taking what he wanted when he wanted, he had enjoyed the bodies of more young women than he cared to remember, both human and vampire. But he had never allowed himself to get close to anyone. After the Revolution, when he fled Paris with Ysanne, he had stuck to taking casual lovers, nameless women that he could always keep at arm's length.

When he met Caoimhe, while travelling through Ireland, she was the first woman in a long time that he had enjoyed more than a single night with, but he had never fooled himself into thinking he loved her. She meant more to him than the others, but he couldn't love her.

He had already realised that vampires weren't meant to have happy endings. They were lonely creatures who often gravitated towards each other, but they weren't meant to be happy.

So when he fell in love with Elizabeth, in the later years of the 19th century, he had refused to pursue the attraction. He was terrified that she would curse him when she found out the truth, or she would die too, ripped away from him as soon as he dared open his heart to her.

Elizabeth never made any secret of the fact that she returned his affections, but Edmond had given in to love before and it always ended in heartbreak. He was afraid that if he allowed himself to truly love Elizabeth, she would die. So he loved her from a distance, while she fell in love with a human man, bore his children, and lived a long and happy human life.

Since then, Edmond had built thick stone walls around his heart, determined to never again let it be broken. And for a long time it had worked. Any time he found himself becoming attracted to someone, he would take those feelings and grind them under his heel, savagely reminding himself what had happened to every woman he had ever loved.

He had lived that way for a long time, cold and lonely, but free of the pain of heartbreak. It was better that way.

And then Renie had arrived in Belle Morte.

Even in a crowd of lovely women, she had stood out. She was brighter and bolder than the rest, full of fire and temper. Other women looked at him with awe, wanting to be with him simply because he was a vampire. Others hoped that if they could tempt their way into his bed, he would grant them the immortality they craved. Too many of them saw him as a novelty conquest, some glittering, unattainable prize.

But not Renie.

Right from the start, she had treated him like he imagined she would any human man – refusing to cower in the face of his coldness, refusing to be star-struck by the simple fact that he was a vampire. She was nervous around him, true, but that was because of the power he wielded, not because people across the planet knew his name. She had been the first human girl in a very long time to treat him as a person, rather than a trophy, and that caught him totally unawares.

It had been one thing to barricade his heart against people who saw him as a vampire rather than a man, but Renie was a different force altogether. She had crashed into him, cracking that wall, and his old, dead, wounded heart had started to feel something for the first time in longer than he cared to remember.

He had tried so hard to stay away from her, but it was as if she had her own gravitational force and he was helplessly caught in it.

Edmond Dantès had never wanted to fall in love again, but he had forgotten that true love isn't that easy to fight.

And that was what this was.

He loved Renie.

She had torn down his walls and exposed his raw, aching heart. Much as he tried to fight it, he had found himself giving her that heart, one small piece at a time.

And once again it had been shattered.

Renie didn't love him.

Worse, she blamed him for the fact that she was a vampire. She blamed him for everything she had lost and everything she would now have to adjust to.

He was exhausted.

He had seen and done and suffered so much, but Renie's rejection had crushed him. Edmond lifted his arms and the silver chains that bound his wrists sizzled deeper through flesh. His skin was slick with blood. He welcomed the pain this time, let it burn through the rawness in his chest.

It was better that he feel this than anything else.

It was better to burn.