Free A Shade of Vampire 30: A Game of Risk by Bella Forrest

thought of the promise I had made to Sendira. I said I would return “soon” with him. After almost four hours of nonstop searching, Mona and Brock had become thoroughly fed up.
    “Let’s take a break,” Mona huffed. The three of us returned to the shore and sat down among a heap of dry, flat boulders. Setting down her bag, Mona stretched out beside me, while Brock did the same a few feet away. Mona reached into her bag and took out some food she had packed. She offered me some fig rolls, which I refused, but Brock gladly accepted. He and Mona sat munching while I set my eyes on the ocean.
    He’s got to be somewhere nearby. Werewolves, being supernatural creatures, could of course travel fast even in the unnatural habitat of water. They could have gotten a fair distance by now, maybe even further than we had searched, but I couldn’t imagine that they would have gone so far because of how dangerous it was. Bastien already had firsthand experience of the perils of those waters. He’d almost been torn in two by a shark, for heaven’s sake. If Micah had not stumbled across them, he wouldn’t even be alive now.
    No, I couldn’t bring myself to believe that he would be that reckless. But then where was he?
    And I wondered why, exactly, he had been running from Sendira in the first place. This at least gave me hope that there was more to the story than met the eye, but it did not quell my frustration as we sat there on the beach.
    Sipping from a bottle of water, Mona dropped down from the rocks to dip her feet in the waves. Brock followed her lead, even as he rolled up the bottoms of his pants.
    As I sat alone now, my eyes could not help but wander to Mona’s bag, perched just a couple of feet away from me. Within reaching distance. The vial’s bulging outline was visible in the center of the fabric bag. The vial of Mortclaw elixir. The vial that was supposed to have given me the power to detect their location. God, what I wouldn’t give for that ability now. I could probably find Bastien in no time if I had that. I could find him, look him in the eye and have him explain everything before I took him to see Sendira where hopefully, finally, we could arrive at a solution to this whole mess.
    But that one drop had not been enough to give me such an ability. It was only enough to create a familiarity in me when faced with Sendira.
    But… what if I took just one more drop? Or not even a drop, but half a drop? A full drop had not made any visible difference to me, I reasoned, and I didn’t feel any different inside either. I felt just like myself. Would an extra half drop really go and change all that? I found it hard to believe that it would, and the upside to it working seemed to far outweigh the risk.
    The vial was so close to me, it felt like it was taunting me.
    Desperation was a dangerous thing—I knew that. It clouded one’s brain and debilitated one from thinking clearly, logically, objectively. But still, I couldn’t stop myself from posing the question: What would really happen if I consumed the tiniest bit more? Would I really live to regret it?
    I supposed it all came back to the same question that Mona had urged me to answer for myself before we ever started out on this mission. And the same decision that my parents had left in my hands.
    How much am I really willing to risk for love?

Lawrence
    I finished paging through the sheets of expenses, scribbling big red circles around all the items I found questionable, before moving the stack back to my father. He was still on the phone. I got up, mouthing, “Going to get something to eat,” and left his office. I exited his apartment and returned to my quarters.
    I needed space to think. My own space, without my father present. I kept trying to rack my brain as to where I could possibly find the files now. But each time, I drew a blank. It was the thought that they might be somewhere here in the IBSI’s Chicago base that was driving me insane. They could be