I rolled my eyes. “I’d have to bite you a lot more than once to turn into a vampire.”
“That could be arranged.” He held my gaze, his lush lips swollen, his smile light and content.
A flood of gratitude surged inside me. “I knew you’d come back,” I whispered, pressing my palm to his cheek.
He watched me a moment longer, confusion drawing his brows together, and I waited for the gentleness to return to his eyes. The warmth.
The sex had been rough and wild and searingly hot—I was all for doing that again sometime. But suddenly I longed for a glimpse of the tenderness he’d shown me in the cabin in the Shadowrealm the first time we’d been together.
“Darius?” I asked.
“Hmm?” He cocked his head, still watching me with those honey-gold eyes, but where once there was friendship and familiarity and love, now there was only a mild amusement. The coldness had slid back into his gaze, a chill that went straight to the softest part of my heart and froze it.
“Vampire or not,” he said with a low chuckle, “any man would come back forthat, love.”
I felt the blood leak instantly from my heart, pierced by the sharp arrow of that one word.Love. Where before it’d given me hope, somehow he’d managed to twist and mangle it into something cheap.
“Same time tomorrow, then?” he said. “Perhaps I’ll let you tie me back up. But not before I’ve had a chance to feed on something other than the shite they serve here.”
I couldn’t answer.
I felt dizzy. Lost. Darius and I were bound, yet even the taste of my blood hadn’t been enough to bring him back to me. To heal him.
I grabbed my shirt from the floor and slow dressed, the once-pleasurable burn of my muscles cooling into a stiff, bitter pain.
I wouldn’t let him see it. Wouldn’t let him know he’d broken me.
And I wouldn’t let him out of this room.
I picked up Ronan’s sweatshirt, holding it close as I approached Darius again.
“Whatever you want, bloodsucker.” Pasting on a mischievous smile, I stretched up on my toes, capturing him in a deeply sensual kiss. He moaned softly, drinking me in.
It seemed Darius wasn’t the only actor in the room.
Certain my devious mouth had captured his full attention, I pulled out the hawthorn stake I’d stashed in Ronan’s sweatshirt and jammed into the tender flesh beneath his ribcage, hating that Ronan and Emilio had been right.
Hating that I’d doubted Darius enough to bring the stake with me in the first place.
Twenty-Two
Darius
Intoxicating.
It was the closest word I could think of to capture her effect on me, yet it still felt woefully inadequate. The demon had told me she was a witch, and now I knew it must be true, for I was thoroughly bespelled.
I let her guide me back to the couch, where I promptly collapsed into my former position, my muscles turning numb from the effects of the hawthorn. Unlike the watered down intravenous version, the stake was undiluted, its potency unmatched.
She’d chosen a big one, too.
“You wound me.” I managed a weak smile, my words slurring. “And here I thought we had a real connection.”
“We do,” she whispered. “You just don’t remember it.”
“I could have killed you, love.”
Her eyes shone with tears—tears I didn’t deserve. After a deep, shuddering breath, she turned away from me, saying nothing more, disappearing up the stairs the way she’d come down.
