Meanwhile, her sense of urgency escalated. Justine might not be back for a day or two, and they had a long time to go until then, but Julian was right — it wouldn’t take Anthony long to hunt down some prey and to pick up food and water.

The pieces of her pick slipped again. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t get the damn pieces in the damn lock. Her core overheated, and she started to melt down.

“Julian,” she said very low as she fought back tears. “I — I don’t think I can get this. The lock is too small, and I can’t hold the pick at the right angle and still get the other piece inside to trip the tumbler. I need thinner pieces of metal, and I don’t have any.”

Silence spun out. When he spoke, he sounded entirely calm. “That’s all right. Melly, look at me.”

All the antagonism was gone. This was the Julian who had looked into the camera and told her she would be okay.

Damn it, the bastard Julian didn’t bring her to tears anymore, but the nice Julian did. Blinking the wetness out of her eyes, she sat back on her heels and looked up at him.

He regarded her with an expression that was every bit as calm as he sounded, that wolflike gaze of his trained on her face. He even gave her a small smile. “It’s all right,” he repeated. We’re going to go to plan B.”

“I didn’t know we had a plan B,” she said raggedly as she swiped at her nose with the back of one hand.

“We’re going to make one up right now,” he told her. “Along with a plan C if we have to.”

Rising to her feet, she frowned. “What do you have in mind?”

“You need to get out of here,” he said. “And Vampyre Guy is the way to do that.”

“No.” She started shaking her head and decided not to stop for a while. “I’m not leaving you.”

“You have to. He knows the way out, and when he shows up here again, he’ll have brought in enough prey to keep the ferals satisfied until he can get out again. Meanwhile, Justine is busy doing other things. We don’t know if we’ll ever get another chance like this again.”

“I couldn’t convince him to make one lousy phone call,” she pointed out.

“You almost did,” he told her. “You have him half-seduced already, and you didn’t even put the full weight of those gorgeous green eyes of yours into the effort. If he walks away, he’ll have time to talk himself out of calling Tatiana, but if you talk him into taking you with him, you can make the phone call yourself.”

A small, feminine part of her perked up. He still thought her eyes were gorgeous?

Well, now she was just being pathetic.

Ducking her head to hide her expression, she rubbed the back of her neck. After a moment, she muttered, “I don’t know; it sounds really risky.”

“Can you take him, if you had to?”

The question brought her gaze back to his face. His expression remained calm and steady. This was the man who had become a Roman emperor’s most successful and celebrated general, and he was assessing her, not judging, maybe for the first time in twenty years.

Just the simple connection of his eyes meeting hers without antagonism shouldn’t feel so exhilarating, but it did. Resisting the emotional pull of it, she fought to become as analytical as he had.

“I think so,” she told him. “I’ve had a lot more training than most people realize. And he’s not only a young Vampyre, but he’s also taking a lot of his cues from Justine’s behavior, even if he’s doing so subconsciously. He doesn’t see me as a threat.”

“You think so, but you’re not sure,” Julian said. “Is that what feels so risky?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure how much training he’s had, and I’m not one to make that kind of mistake about somebody else,” she pointed out. “But no, that actually wasn’t what I meant. If Justine decides to come back before help arrives, and she finds me gone, you realize she’ll kill you. If she can’t torture you, you’ll have lost all value to her.”

“You can’t think about that.” He shook his head.

He sounded remarkably calm about the prospect of being murdered. Even as one part of her took note, she snorted. “You can’t tell me what to think, or not to think.”

His expression turned impatient. “The risk to me only means you’ll have to hurry.” He paused. “I’m pretty sure we’re underneath San Francisco.”

“Yeah, I figured that out already.”

“That means help is a lot closer than you realize,” he told her. “When you get out, you shouldn’t just call your mom. You need to call Xavier too — he’ll be able to get trustworthy people to you much faster than Tatiana could.”

She cast a leery glance over her shoulder at the empty cells. “Do you have any idea where we are in the tunnel system?”

“Nowhere I recognize.” He angled his face up toward the chains overhead and braced his body to pull on them again. “If I had ever seen these cells or heard of them, I would have had them filled in with cement a long time ago.”

As he strained to break free of his bindings, her gaze pulled back to him.

She didn’t want to look. She didn’t. But she also couldn’t help herself.

Nothing about Julian was smooth or civilized. His powerful, heavily muscled body still retained a deep, burnished tan from when he had been human, and he still carried all the scars he had acquired throughout his years of waging war. The rough life he had lived showed on his hard face — while he had been turned in his midthirties, he looked more like a man who was in his midforties.

His looks might be rugged, but he didn’t carry an ounce of extra fat anywhere on him. While certain parts of Roman society had been famous for its excesses, it was clear that Julian had not taken any part of it. His tastes ran to the simple, even Spartan.

That had been another thing that had attracted her to him. Given the many opportunities to indulge in excess that he must have encountered throughout the centuries, he still maintained an aura of mature, settled discipline.

She had tried before to imagine him as a young Gladiator in the arena. Back then he must have been as dangerous as a lean, half-starved alley cat. Now, the alley cat had long since vanished. What stood in his stead was a scarred and even more deadly lion who carried the weight of having lived for many years in his prime.

The muscles in his biceps, chest and flat abdomen bulged as he heaved again at the chains. He was an old Vampyre, on a par with Justine in terms of sheer age, and given the years of the blood oaths he had taken, Melly thought she had some kind of inkling just how Powerful he really was. Yet there wasn’t an inch of give in his restraints.

Disquieted, she swallowed hard. “Justine built this place too well.”

Spearing her with a sidelong glance, he said, “Yes, and none of it is new construction. She must have been using these cells for years.”

Rubbing her arms against the chill, she looked around. “You never could fully eradicate the feral Vampyre problem.”

“No, I couldn’t. No matter how many times I burned out the tunnels, eventually they always came back. Whether it was fair or not for them to judge me on that, it’s always been a black mark against me in the Nightkind council.” He wiped his face on one bare arm. “This has got to be a completely separate tunnel system, or I would have found it before now.”

Her body wasn’t doing very well at warding off the deep underground chill any longer. Shivers ran through her muscles, and she felt too hollow, almost lightheaded. She forced herself to concentrate. “What happened to turn Justine rogue? Do you know?”

His attention focused on her. “That’s right, you don’t know any of the events from the last two days. She tried to have Xavier assassinated.”

“What?!” She hadn’t thought she had any room in her to be shocked at anything else, but she was wrong. “Please tell me he’s all right.”

He gave her a grim smile. “Luckily, Xavier is one tough son of a bitch to kill. He needs some recovery time, but he’ll be fine.” Telling the story in a few concise sentences, he filled her in on what had happened in the Nightkind demesne over the last forty-eight hours.