SATURDAY, 5:03 P.M.

JEROME TURNED AWAY, but even though the vampire’s back was to her, Adia felt unable to move. She watched as he retrieved one of many small boxes from a closet on the other side of the room and set it down on the counter.

“Some of my favorite photos can’t go on the walls,” he said, as if making casual conversation. Given the photos that were on the walls, Adia wasn’t sure she wanted to contemplate what this vampire would find too objectionable for public display.

He opened the box and flipped through the stack of photographs therein before selecting three, which he presented to her, fanned out so she could see the images even without taking them from his hand.

She stared at his face for a moment, strangely unwilling to look down at what he was showing her. She had seen enough of the “art” he put on his walls to know he liked to immortalize his victims. Did she really want to look?

He stood there patiently for a moment and then put the photographs down on the table. “I hope you’ll leave them here when you go. I don’t have copies.” Then he disappeared, in one irritating blink of an eye.

At last, alone, Adia looked down at the three pictures he had decided to share.

The first one showed the same beautiful blond woman, in her bright indigo club dress, looking up at Jerome as he reached out a hand as if to pull her into a dance. The expression on her face was ambivalent, equal parts uncertainty and daring joy. The lights had caught a sparkle in her bright blue eyes.

Adia had never seen the girl in the photograph, but she recognized her. She knew exactly who she was.

The next image was of the same woman, now in casual clothes, stretched out on a couch, snuggling with Jerome but looking directly at the camera with a distressed, startled expression that was incongruous with the relaxed posture. Adia knew perfectly well why she hadn’t wanted her picture taken at that moment.

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 his head, making his decision clear.

Vida law forbade making deals with the vampires, even to save one’s life, but that law was designed to keep witches from betraying each other or sacrificing their beliefs as part of a deal with a creature who could not be considered trustworthy. Zachary had made a mistake, but it wasn’t an unforgivable one, in Adia’s eyes.

“That’s it?” she asked. She had seen only one photograph of Zachary. It was possible it hadn’t been like the other ones, that it really had been just one fight gone bad. Jerome could have been messing with her. He would have known she would assume the worst, given the other images.

But Zachary shook his head. “After that, it ate at me. I got sloppy. I think part of me was trying to lose fights, so they would kill me and I wouldn’t have to admit to the rest of you … or to myself …” He dared to look up a minute, but whatever he saw in Adia’s face made him look away again.

Jay said, “You lost a fight, Zachary. That’s not worth losing yourself over.”

“You don’t understand,” Zachary replied, his tone utterly flat.

Adia shook her head. “Zachary—”

“No,” he interrupted. “Just … no. You know perfectly well I couldn’t tell you. I certainly couldn’t tell Dominique. I couldn’t tell anyone except—” He swallowed thickly.

Adia saw Jay’s eyes widen as if he knew something Adia didn’t know and had just made the connection.

“Believe it or not,” Zachary said slowly, “vampires will pick out their favorite hunters. And other vampires know about it. My ‘patron,’ as she puts it, made it clear to me that she wouldn’t reveal me to others of her kind, but that if I got in trouble, I could say her name and she or one of her associates would come get me. I swore up and down I’d never use it, and I never have, but she and her friends frequent a lot of the rougher circuits, so sometimes I don’t need to. I’ll be in a fight, and then suddenly it’ll be over and …”

When it became clear that he wasn’t going to say more, Jay asked, “The guy who helped Nikolas pull Sarah off you was one of your friend’s friends?”

“What guy?” Adia asked, startled … and yet not. Jerome had said he had warned the twins, and that had been when they had found the first photograph, which she realized now hadn’t been left accidentally. It had been a message, though not to her.

“I didn’t see him, since I was locked in the closet at the time with a broken arm,” Jay answered. “I just heard his voice.”

“Jerome,” Adia said.

Zachary flinched and nodded. “I’m sorry, Adia.”

“Why didn’t you ever talk to me?” she asked. “I’m not Dominique, Zachary. You could have told me what was going on, and we could have worked it out. We could have gone after them together, or just—”

“Because you needed to be better than I was!” he shouted. “Adia, I know I’m weak. My entire side of the line is. My mother went mad after my sister’s death. She went out, and never came back. My little brother followed her, and we never saw him again. The only reason I’ve survived is because Dominique looked out for me, and you know what kind of perfection she demands. I couldn’t spread my weakness to you and Sarah.”

“There is no such thing as perfection, Zachary,” Adia said, aware she was quoting Jerome. The vampire had been right.

Jay collapsed dramatically to the couch. “I knew your line was weird, but I never even imagined how profoundly messed up you all are. It’s no wonder Sarah had a fling with a serial killer, or that Zachary unwinds with the undead. You’re all so obsessed with being perfect, you end up hating yourselves.”

Zachary tried to glare at him again, but in Adia’s view, the expression seemed halfhearted.

No one was perfect.

Maybe that was true—obviously it was true. Adia had known for a long time that she was far from perfect, but she had always managed to fake it by looking to Zachary, and Dominique, and Sarah as examples of what she could be. But it had been a house of cards, and now it had all come tumbling down.

Adia jumped as her phone buzzed, announcing that she had a text message. She read it and felt her blood go cold.

No one was perfect.

But someone needed to try to be.