Sierra Dean - Secret Unleashed

“Bri…” I couldn’t figure out what to say to her.

My dreams were a strange place to begin with, which made this that much more difficult. In the past, she’d used our connection—me as her patron, she as my ward—to communicate with one another on a subconscious level.

For a moment I wanted to believe this was that kind of interaction. Somehow I had been wrong about her death, and she’d managed a miraculous recovery. Surely that’s what this meant. It couldn’t be my psyche playing cruel tricks on me.

“You look sad. Aren’t you happy to see me?” She practically oozed warmth, her smile drawing me in.

Tears stung the corner of my eyes, threatening to fall, but I blinked them back, worried she might vanish if I turned away for a second.

“Are you real?”

“I don’t know how to answer that. I’m here, aren’t I? So I guess I’m real enough.”

“Are you alive?” I was trying to work around the elusive, often-aggravating dialogue of a dream.

“I haven’t been alive for a long time.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Do you know what you mean?”

My dreams were a fucking nightmare sometimes.

I reached out, hoping by touching her I could get a feel for what was happening. If this was a dream and not some communication from beyond the grave, I needed to know.

But if she was really there, I needed to find a way to bring her back with me. Though I understood the impossibility of that, I was still desperate to try.

When I touched her hand, her fingers turned gray and crumbled apart into dust. Her arm followed suit, caught on the breeze, and bits of her drifted onto the surface of the water then sank out of sight.

“Oh. Look what you’ve done,” she said, her voice never losing its cheerful quality.

I jerked back my hand in horror, hoping it would stop, but she continued to dissolve in front of my eyes.

“I’m so sorry.” Now the tears fell, and there was no stopping them. I wasn’t crying for the loss of her in the dream, but rather the restored knowledge she was gone forever from my real life.

“I was supposed to tell you something.” Her arm dropped away, and her chest began to crumble, exposing bits of rib before they too became ashes.

“Tell me.” I wiped away pink tears with the heel of my hand.

“The betrayal is not what you think.”

“The…betrayal? What betrayal?”

“Sometimes you misplace your trust, but then you find it again.”

“Brigit, what are you talking about?”

“You look really pretty in red,” she commented, and her gaze rested on my hands.

Instead of being covered in her debris, my arms were coated with thick blood, all the way up to my elbows, dripping down in a puddle around my feet.

“Don’t worry,” she whispered. “Someone else will clean up your mess.”

When I woke up, I was still in the box.

My heart seized as I stared into the black interior of the coffin, and in defiance of all logic I pushed out, scrambling against the velvet walls. I couldn’t stretch my arms fully in any given direction, and each time I tried to find purchase on something my hands slid off.

So, of course, I attempted to sit up.

My head thumped the roof, and I broke out in a cold sweat. Why had I let Ingrid talk me into traveling this way? How had Holden been so cavalier about the whole thing? As if being inside a coffin was no big deal.

Considering how many people wanted me dead, I’d given them a perfect opportunity to come right to me. And now what? I was stuck in the coffin, unable to tell where I was or who was waiting outside. What if I’d been buried alive?

Just the thought of it made my panic swell, adrenaline coursing through me as I clawed at the velvet and pounded my fists into the metal underneath.

“ Let me out, ” I screamed, my voice raspy with terror.

Something bumped against the coffin, and I went still, straining to hear what was going on. The lid creaked and lifted, filling the small space with an impossible amount of light. I squinted at first—momentarily blinded—but once I realized I had been released, I scrambled out of the coffin and shot to the other side of the room.

A boy who appeared to be no older than twelve or thirteen years old assessed me with a quizzical expression, fingering the tattered lining of the casket and nibbling at his lip with a tiny fang.

“Madam, are you quite all right?” he asked, his voice soft and carrying a French accent. “You seem to have destroyed your chamber.”

I swiped my arm across my brow to keep the sweat in check, and my gaze darted around the unfamiliar room. No offense to the kid, but a small French boy wasn’t going to put me at ease. Alexandre Peyton looked seventeen at most, and his angelic face made him very misleading. This stranger could easily be one of Peyton’s minions.

“Where’s Holden?”

The room we were in was lovely. Modern without being too cold, elegant without being too stuffy. The walls were painted a warm gray, and the furniture was accented in shades of violet and charcoal. My coffin was placed near a king-sized bed, and the rest of the room was a suite built to invite comfort. Large chairs and couches were set in front of a slate fireplace, and beyond that was another bedroom, where I could see a coffin identical to my own.

Holden’s coffin.

The lid was open, but there was no sign of the vampire sentry anywhere, so I repeated my question. “Where is he?” When the boy didn’t answer straightaway, I switched into the French my grandmere had drilled into me as a child. “ Où et Holden? ”

I must not have butchered the pronunciation too badly because the boy’s smile broadened, and he began chattering away in mile-a-minute Parisian French. My grandmere was Creole, and I’d been raised in the Canadian prairie. The French I spoke was a bastardization of Quebecois and Bayou. It certainly wasn’t the soft, eloquent language this kid had perfected over a century or more.

“ Désolé, mais mon français n’est pas très bon. Pouvez-vous parler un peu plus lentement, s’il vous plait? ” I hoped he wouldn’t be offended I’d spoken to him in French and was now asking him to slow down.

He frowned but appeared more disappointed than irritated.

“Your accent is atrocious,” he commented.

“Isn’t it though?” I offered him a halfhearted smile. My heart was pounding, and he would definitely be able to hear it. So much for playing down my mortal side.

“How interesting.” He tilted his head to one side, eyes narrowing, and looked at me as if I were a piece of art he was having trouble capturing the meaning of. “We were told you were…unique, but I suppose I didn’t believe it until now.”

Perhaps I should have taken his fascination as a compliment, but him gawking at me just added to my nervousness. I still didn’t know where I was, or who he was. The presence of Holden’s coffin calmed me slightly, but not as much as having the actual vampire present would.

“Who are you?” I asked, trying a different tactic since he still hadn’t told me his name.

“Oh! Mon dieu , my apologies Tribunal Leader McQueen, I have forgotten my place entirely.” He did a half bow, holding his hands at the small of his back. His shoulder-length brown curls tumbled forward to cover his face briefly, and when he righted himself, I looked at his eyes. They were a lovely color of green, not the solid black of a vampire itching to feed. “My name is Maxime.”

“Hello.” I raised my hand in a limp wave, and in spite of the fact he clearly knew who I was, I added, “I’m Secret.”

“Yes, of course.” He bowed again. “Do you prefer Tribunal Leader Secret?”