AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I knew I was lost…” He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed her palm. “When you died in my arms.”
Okay, she definitely flinched. Not her best memory.
“I wanted to change you. You were dying in front of me, and I knew you were supposed to be a Born. Catalina had told me about you.”
Had she really thanked the witch properly for that? Nah. She hadn’t let Cat know how much she appreciated the woman’s secrecy. Payback, um, gratitude would come eventually.
“You weren’t going to stay dead.”
Who did these days?
“You weren’t supposed to stay dead,” he amended. “But I was shit-scared and when your eyes closed, I wanted to change you.”
Her body felt frozen.
“I wanted it so fucking much.” Another hot kiss against her palm.
“But you didn’t try.” No bite. No exchange of blood.
“No.” His breath blew against her skin. “Because if I was wrong about you, if the witch and that damn seer were wrong, I wasn’t about to make you into the thing you hated.”
And she had hated the idea of vampirism. Becoming a vampire had once been her worst nightmare. Strange, because now, things all seemed so different.
“If you were dying, I wasn’t going to make you come back to me. That was the hardest thing I ever did.” His lips thinned. “Watching you die and not knowing if you’d ever open your eyes again.”
The last thing she’d seen had been him. “You left me.” The words came out as an accusation and she realized that, yeah, that had bothered her. No matter what was going on between them, no matter what secrets he’d kept—and she’d known there were secrets even then—she’d expected him to stay with her.
“I thought I was the last person you’d want to see.”
He’d been the one she wanted the most.
“I knew you needed time to adjust. Seeing me—I was afraid it would push you too much.” His gaze held hers. “But then you came to me.”
Sex.
Blood.
So much hunger.
“You weren’t afraid of me,” he said.
“I was afraid of myself.” A stark confession. One she should have given sooner. “I didn’t want to become?—”
Like Grim.
Like Leo.
Like so many of the others she’d taken down over the years.
Not a monster. She hadn’t wanted to be a woman ruled by bloodlust and lost to humanity.
“You have control, Dee. You’re not going to turn and start killing innocents.” He freed her hand and rose, moving slowly away from her. “That’s not going to happen with you. There’s no Born to take over your mind. No one to force you. There’s just…you.”
It had been just her for years. Maybe she was tired of that. She wrapped the sheet around her body. “So what happens now?” Did she go back to Night Watch? Keep hunting? While he—what? Got the hell out of town as fast as he could?
Just…you.
She’d be left alone? Again?
