“Did you spill some of your dinner?” He’d chosen to bring a blood pack into his media room instead of eating in front of her, so it was possible, albeit unlikely. “Or are you hurt?”
His shoulder lifted, even as his brows drew together in seeming confusion. “A small puncture from the second zombie’s claws. It’s mostly healed already.”
His black hoodie must have concealed the wound and the blood. “Is rapid healing another vampire thing?” When he nodded, she skimmed a light circle around the stain with her fingertip, his deltoid cool and firm beneath her caress. “It still hurts, though, when you get injured?”
“Yes.” He made a sound low in his throat when she stopped touching him. “Edie…”
She pressed her forefinger to her pursed lips and laid it, feather-light, over that little patch of blood. “My mom did this. It shouldn’t have made me feel better, but it always did.”
She dropped her arm to her side. His throat shifted in a hard swallow as he twisted his neck to study the spot where she’d done her best to kiss his wound and make it better.
“That’s not sanitary,” he eventually muttered.
This time, her smile felt genuine. “No. Most good things aren’t, I’ve found. Which is ironic, coming from a soap maker.”
He smiled back at her then. Not Chad’s goofy grin or Gaston’s superior smirk, but an actual smile. Possibly the first he’d ever offered her.
Soft with humor and something that might have been fondness, the curve of his perfect mouth crinkled the corners of those piercing eyes and wrung the oxygen from her lungs. It crackled through her nerves and set off countless mental sirens, and she couldn’t bring herself to care. Not when he was looking at her like that.
He licked his lips. Her breath caught.
Then he stepped away—one stride, two—and the earth spun back into motion.
His hand raked through his hair. “If you toss and turn all night, you’ll keep me awake too. Take the bed, human, and shut the door behind you.”
“And you’ll sleep out here?”
She didn’t completely understand his change of heart, but she wouldn’t argue or question it. Not when she needed every bit of energy and strength she could muster to face what was coming tomorrow.
“Yes. So move,” he ordered, and waited impatiently as she disentangled herself from the blankets, gathered her few belongings, and heaved herself to her feet. “Don’t show your face again until morning. I don’t like having my rest disturbed.”
She rolled her eyes. “Sweet dreams to you too.”
His back muscles shifted in mesmerizing ways as he bent over the sofa and began rearranging the blankets in what heclearly considered a neater, superior fashion. Tearing her gaze away took more effort than she was comfortable admitting, but she finally headed for the distant hallway. Only to halt again, unable to stop herself from asking the most crucial question of all.
“You told me so much tonight. About yourself, your species, and the zombies, and…I think it was the truth. I think all of it’s the truth.” He’d stilled, one hand braced on the back of the sofa, when she turned her head to watch him over her shoulder. “Why, Max?”
Between them, the silence stretched like taffy.
“The sort of noble fool who’d try to save Chad from his well-deserved fate?” He shook his head, still facing away from her. “She wouldn’t betray anyone willingly. And even if you passed along everything I told you, it would simply be one story among many, no more or less believable than all the others.”
That sounded like the beginnings of trust to her, however reluctant and tattered.
Still: “If I did betray you, you’d make me regret it, I presume.”
“Obviously,” he said after a moment. Oddly enough, it felt like the first lie he’d offered her in hours. “Go to sleep, Edie.”
So she did, wrapped in the embrace of a mattress she’d legally marry if such a thing were possible. She sank into that premium memory foam, tugged his silky-soft sheets and ornately quilted blanket over her, and closed her eyes.
After the shocks she’d experienced that night, after the documents she’d studied and the horrors they’d revealed, she expected nightmares.
To get to her, though, any threat would have to go through him.
She slept like a child in her mother’s arms.
6
“Stay here,” Max told Edie the next morning as she popped several mints in lieu of an actual breakfast. “Only an idiot would wander outside after a breach. Besides, the zombies won’t make it past the moat. They don’t have a pass to let down the drawbridge and open the passage to Zone B. Even if they did have a pass, they wouldn’t understand how to use it. They can’t have gone far, which meansyouwon’t make it far before they find you.”
