All Just Glass - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [60]
The last of the three photographs was of a different couple, but the tone and content were similar.
Adia gagged hard, shoving herself away from the table with the photographs as if they had a poisonous bite.
She stumbled out the door and nearly sprinted to her car. She had to … had to …
Behind the wheel, she nearly fishtailed as she U-turned out of her parallel parking space. She had to get home. No, not home; she didn’t really have a home right then, just the safe house. But she needed to get there. She needed to ask … needed someone to explain, to make things right …
How could they?
An hour before, Adia would have said she knew what betrayal felt like, what anger felt like, but she would have been wrong. She had felt nothing compared to this, which made her turn the key and walk into the safe house in a bubble of her own anguish.
Jay, who had been sitting at the kitchen counter, eating, physically recoiled from her. He started to fight that instinct and came toward her as if to comfort her, but her glare stopped him in his tracks.
“Where’s Zachary?” she asked. Her voice came out soft. She had almost expected to hear herself shout, but her lungs were too tight.
“Shower,” Jay answered as Adia became aware of the sound of running water. “He got home just a minute ago. We were going to go out to—”
“Hush,” she snapped. She stormed through the apartment and pounded on the door to the bathroom. “Zachary Vida, you have fifteen seconds to get out here or I swear by my blood I will drag you out.”
The water turned off instantly. She heard the rustle of clothing, and the door opened with seconds to spare, Zachary not completely dry, wearing only his pants, a towel over his shoulder and a necklace she had never seen before. Eternity. How ironic.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, eyes wide. “What happened?”
For a few seconds, she stared at him, trying to convince herself it wasn’t true.
“Adia!” he snapped. “Take a breath. Get a hold of yourself.”
She managed to choke out the words: “Did you know they took a picture?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Zachary—”
They both spun on the Marinitch witch when he tried to interject, Zachary silently, and Adia saying, “This is not the time, Jay!”
“There never is a time!” Jay snarled back.
“Shut up!” Adia had felt like her world had been shattering for days, but now it was as if it was gone. Everything had fallen down, and she was standing in the middle of emptiness, and every guide she had ever known had failed her. “Zachary, how could you?”
“What—” He stopped arguing long enough to examine her expression. He didn’t protest his ignorance again. Instead, he paled. “I didn’t—” He looked toward Jay, who apparently wasn’t going anywhere. In another mood, Adia might have cared, but she couldn’t stand to put off this confrontation, and at that moment she wasn’t experiencing a lot of pity, either. “Adia, do we have to …” Finally, he whirled away, his fist impacting the door hard enough to make it shudder. “It isn’t like that!” he shouted.
“Why don’t you tell us what ‘it,’ whatever you two are going on about, was like?” Jay suggested, the tension in his voice an echo of their own, though he obviously had himself more under control. That was new, the Vidas losing their minds while their kin stayed calm.
Zachary stood next to the couch, his fingers digging into the back as if he needed the support to hold himself up, as he answered in sharp, biting words, “I had a fight go south, a while back. I lost. I lost bad. At the end of it, three of them were pinning me. I was too run down to use power to throw them off. They stripped my weapons. And they offered me a choice. They could turn me over to the others, who would kill me, probably slowly—and that side of the offer was described in great detail by some of the vamps who were there watching—or I could agree to let them bleed me a little, and then they would let me go.”
He hung