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“Who are you afraid of?” she asked again,eyes dark as onyx

Jiana see her ar body, she stepped back in silent invitation Inside, the house was as elegant as the grounds were harht dominated, the walls painted a lush crea on one wall It was a nude, beautifully done in its languid eroticism and framed with a sis The décor flowed flawlessly froht splashes of color provided by the furniture

Collapsing on one of those jewel-toned sofas, Jiana braced her elbows on her knees, her head in her hands “I haven’t slept since the day I left you there”

Honor experienced the saer and pity she’d felt in that basement “I was the one as tied up, but you eaker” Even now, it seeh in near-hysterical aainst the arer on no leash but his own He said nothing, but from the expression on Jiana’s face, the female vampire knew exactly what she faced

“Always so hen it co down the sublime perfection of her features Her despair made her appear even more vulnerably feminine

The hairs rose on the back of Honor’s neck Was she being expertly played? Or was Jiana’s startling attractiveness nothing but a distraction to the grief that see her apart?

“Even when I sahat he’d done,” the woman continued, “I couldn’t betray hier, Jiana He’s planning to do it again”

A sob rocked through the va her tears, she reached into the drawer of a little end table to pull out the by-now-familiar textured envelope “He sent me this”

Honor knehat she’d find, but she took it and slid out the enclosed card anyway

Perhaps this one will beI haven’t told the others, but it is to be a pair, a man and a woman You will enjoy that, will you not, Mother?

26

Honor’s voice came out a whisper “Mother?” Vae, and the children they sired or bore to that point, mortal But Jiana was at least four hundred

It was Dmitri who solved the question of how a child of Jiana’s could have survived to perpetrate such atrocities “Jiana was a young vaave birth to Aent, was meant for the Tower”