“Is it okay if I touch her?” Cassidy asked him.
Julian lifted his head from the computer and blinked at her in confusion. She’d touched Aida plenty of times before. Then, he realized Cassidy was scared he would lose control if someone else touched Aida. Cassidy had grown up around mates, and she knew the rules; you did not fuck with a vampire’s mate.
“Yes,” he said.
She smiled as she rested her hand on Aida’s arm and squeezed it. The click of the keys was the only sound in the room as Julian’s fingers flew across the keyboard. In less than five minutes, he was staring at the shadowed main room of the gallery in real-time. With a few more strokes, he was in the video archives.
“I’m in,” he said.
“Holy shit,” Kyle said. “That was fast.”
“I forgot how good you are at that,” Cassidy said.
He didn’t bother to tell them he’d done this once before; they’d want to know why, and it was none of their business. He clicked through the footage of the main room and watched Aida speak with numerous people. Often, she would disappear from the camera’s focus as she led them into the hallways to give them a tour of the gallery.
He would look at the cameras in the halls next, but he remained focused on the main room until Aida locked the door and left for the night. She never showed any signs of distress throughout the day, but then, she’d been perfectly normal until he woke to find her sitting on his chest.
All the people in the footage looked normal, but he couldn’t detect another vampire through the camera as he could in person. “It’s most likely a man,” he muttered, but for the life of him, he still couldn’t figure out who.
He didn’t recognize anyone in the footage, but it was grainy, and most of the people were far from the camera. Someone could have come in through the storage room and got her there, but if they entered the main room, then they would be on camera.
He had footage of the storeroom too. There was an emergency exit in the back hall, but an alarm would have triggered if that door opened. Still, he would go through the video of the storage room and back hall next.
“Why do you say that?” Kyle asked. “Maybe one of the women from your travels got a little too attached and decided to follow you home.”
“There aren’t any women from my travels,” Julian said. “Aida has been it for me since I met her.”
“Damn,” Kyle muttered. “So, you mean you went over four years without sex?”
Julian glanced up to see the disbelief on Kyle’s face. “She’s the only one I’ve ever been with, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Kyle looked like Julian just told him Atlantis was rising from the sea.
“I crave death, not sex,” Julian said. “When you reach maturity, what you’re doing now will get worse. I buried myself in computers and hacking because I could lose myself in that world and push aside my growing need to kill. When Aida walked into my life, she gave me a sense of calm I’d never experienced before, and she did it during one of the worst times of my life. We’d just lost Doug, we had no idea if Jack was alive, and a good portion of our family was planning to return to that island.
“The whole drive to Canada, all I could think about was going to the island and unleashing this festering thing inside me. I wanted to let it maim and kill everything it came across. And then I saw her, and it all silenced. For the first time in a couple of years, I knew peace, and it was amazing. I love her so much, I left her behind because I believed that was best for her. When I did, all that peace went away.”
Kyle closed his mouth as he gazed between the two of them with a longing Julian understood well. It wasn’t Aida he wanted; it was the love and peace Julian mentioned.
“You’ll get through it,” Julian told him.
Kyle’s jaw clenched as he focused on the wall across from him. He acted carefree, but Julian knew the truth of the desperation propelling him from one woman to the next. Tears pooled in Cassidy’s eyes.
“It will be okay,” she whispered.
Kyle stared at the wall for a second more before tearing his gaze away to smile at her. “Of course, it will.”
Cassidy stared at him, but there was nothing she could say, and they all knew it. Finally, she turned her attention back to Julian. “When Aida wakes up—”
“I’m not sure I can let her wake up,” he interjected. “I don’t know what’s going on with her mind. The vampire who took control of her is strong. I don’t think it’s a pureblood, because it would most likely be older than me if it were, and I’m not sure I could have broken an older purebred’s grip on her.
“As it is, I don’t know if I’ve broken that thing’s control over her. If I let her wake up, she could be torn between what she’s compelled to do and her love for me again. You saw the reaction it caused.”
Cassidy breathed a small sigh as her hand tightened on Aida. “Her love for you must be powerful if she resisted a vampire’s compulsion even a little bit.”
Love swelled inside Julian as he gazed at her. “I know.”
“Maybe it’s not you this vamp is after; maybe she has a stalker,” Cassidy suggested.
“We’ll find out,” Julian muttered as he finished going through the video of the storage room, but no one other than Aida and Nicolette were back there all day.
He went through the camera in the back hall next, but there was nothing unusual there either. He discovered what he was searching for in the last hallway.
“Who is that?” Kyle asked as he leaned closer to the screen.
“I don’t know,” Julian grated through his teeth as the man fondled Aida’s hair.
A few more moments passed before Aida kicked him in the knee and sprinted down the hall. She didn’t get far before the man caught her and bashed her into the wall. The sound Julian emitted caused Cassidy to lean away from him, and Kyle edged protectively closer to his sister. Julian fisted his hands to keep himself from smashing the computer as the vampire worked his way into Aida’s mind.
Julian’s shoulders heaved as the red and black color returned to swirl up his fingers and across the backs of his hands. If he didn’t kill something soon, an innocent might pay the price for his pent-up fury.
On the bed, Aida stirred and murmured his name. Her hand twitched as if she were searching for him, and he clasped it. Touching her didn’t push away his rage, but he could breathe again without feeling as if every beat of his heart pounded shards of hate through him.
“She sensed you needed her,” Cassidy said. “I think you can wake her up.”
“And if her mind is still fractured?” he asked.
“Then put her back under.”
Julian brushed the hair away from her face and examined the scratch marks. “Not yet. I’m not willing to take the chance she’ll hurt herself again.”
Feeling a little bit more in control himself, he released Aida’s hand and turned back to the computer. Minutes ticked by as he sat and stared at it. Finally, confident he wouldn’t smash it to pieces, he worked to bring up a better view of the man’s face. Though it was blurry, when the picture filled his computer screen, he sensed something familiar about the man.
Memory niggled at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. “There is something about him…”
“Who is it?” Kyle asked.
“Not sure,” Julian said. “But he does look familiar.”
He looked at Aida again. He didn’t have a choice anymore; he had to wake her up if they were going to learn anything more about this man.