He nodded. “I understand that, but … they did what they did.”
“The Silks are responsible, not Victor and the others.”
He nodded again. “Okay.”
He didn’t sound happy. “What?” I asked.
“I don’t know exactly. I guess I’m just learning more about what I’ve stumbled into and become part of.”
I was silent for several seconds, then asked, “Shall I let you alone tonight? I can go sleep with one of the others.”
“Not with Victor?”
I drew back, staring at him.
“Where is he?” he asked.
“At Daniel’s house. Daniel had room for him, and Theodora will be here soon. And … I didn’t want him here.”
After a while, he nodded.
“Shall I go?”
“Of course not.” He pulled me against him. He caressed my face, my throat. Then, as he kissed me, he slipped his free hand between my thighs. “Are you hungry?” he asked.
I shook my head against him. “No, but I want to be close to you anyway.”
“Do you? Good. If you taste me, I want you to do it from my thigh.”
I laughed, surprised. “I’ve heard of doing it that way, although I don’t know whether I ever have. You’ve been talking to someone!”
“What if I have?”
I found myself grinning at him. A instant later, I threw the blankets off him and dove for his thigh. He had nothing on, and I had him by the right thigh before he realized I had moved. Then I looked up at him. He looked startled, almost afraid. Then he seemed to catch my mood. He laughed—a deep, good, sweet sound. By touch and scent I found the large, tempting artery. I bit him, took his blood, and rode his leg as he convulsed and shouted.
The next night, the Gordons and I questioned the other two prisoners. Hayden and Preston questioned them while I prodded and reassured them. I had bitten each of them twice. They trusted me, needed to please me.
They, too, told us about what sounded like members of the Silk family abducting them at night. One had been in downtown Los Angeles, looking for one of his girls—one of the prostitutes who worked for him. He was angry with her. He didn’t think she was working hard enough, and he meant to teach her a lesson. Hayden had to explain this to me, and at last I found out what a pimp was. The explanation made me wonder what other unsavory things I didn’t remember about human habits.
The other captive had been on his way to the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena to pick up his mother who was a nurse there and whose shift was ending. Her car had stopped running the day before, and he had promised to meet her and give her a lift home.
One prisoner was a pimp. The other was a college student keeping a promise to his mother. Both had been collected by members of the Silk family and sent north to kill my family and me. Neither had any information beyond what Victor had already told us.
When both captives were unconscious, much stressed by being made to talk about things that they had been ordered not to talk about, the Gordons and I looked at one another. Again, except for the captives, the company was all Ina.
“What can we do?” I took a deep breath and looked at the younger Gordon males—men who might someday be the fathers of my children. “These people have killed my family. Now they’ve come after you. They’ll probably come after you again.”
“I believe they will unless we stop them,” Hayden said.
Daniel nodded once. “So we stop them.”
“Oh my,” Preston said, his head down, one hand rubbing his forehead.
“What else can we do?” Hayden demanded.
“I know.” Preston glanced at him sadly. “I’m not disagreeing. I’m just thinking about what it will mean, now and in the long run.”
Hayden made a growling sound low in his throat. “They should have thought about what it would mean.”
Wells, one of Daniel’s fathers, said, “I’ve been thinking about it since yesterday. We need to start by talking to the Fotopoulos and Braithwaite families, and perhaps the Svoboda and the Dahlman families as well. The Dahlmans are related to the Silks through Milo, aren’t they? All these people are related in one way or another to the Silks and to Shori.”
And I thought, I still have relatives. I didn’t know them, didn’t know whether they knew me. But they were alive. What would that mean?
“Don’t phone the Dahlmans yet,” Preston said. “Make them your eighth or ninth call. Try the Leontyevs and the Akhmatovas, and perhaps the Marcu and Nagy families.”