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"No, he won't. It's okay, Tess."
"This female doesn't belong here," Rio snarled.
"I say she does. Now back off and let her go."
Rio relaxed only a fraction and swung his head around to look at Dante. Jesus, it was hard to remember the warrior before the ambush that had left him so wrecked, both physically and emotionally. The once-handsome face of the Spaniard with the ready smile and lazy wit was now a tangle of ruddy scars; his humor had long abandoned him for the fury that might never ease.
Dante parked himself right in Rio's face, staring past the scars on the warrior's cheeks and brow into the nearly insane eyes that looked so Roguelike even Dante was taken aback for a second. "I said, stand down," he growled. "The woman is with me. She is mine. Do you understand?"
Sanity flared within the bright amber depths of Rio's eyes, a lightning-quick glint of awareness, of contrition and regret. He wheeled away from Dante with a grunt, his breath still sawing in and out of his open mouth.
"Tess, it's okay now. Step away from him and come to me."
She let out a broken gasp but didn't seem capable of moving. Dante held his hand out to her.
"Come on, angel. Everything's all right. I promise you, you're safe."
Looking as if it took all her courage to do so, Tess sidled away from Rio and put her hand in Dante's open palm. He brought her to him and kissed her, relieved to have her near.
As Rio slunk to the corridor wall and dropped into a huddled crouch on the floor, Dante's pulse downshifted to something almost resembling normal. Tess was still upset and trembling, and while he didn 't think Rio posed any danger to her--especially now that Dante had made his position clear--he had some serious damage control to handle.
"Stay here. I'm just going to help Rio get back to his bed--"
"Are you crazy? Dante, we have to get out of here. He will tear both our throats open!"
"No, he won't." He held Tess's anxious gaze even as he moved closer to Rio's huddled form on the floor. "He won't hurt me. He wouldn't have hurt you either. He didn't know who you were, and something very bad happened to him that's made him wary of females. Believe me, he's not a monster."
Tess gaped at Dante as if he'd lost his mind. "Dante, the fangs... those eyes! He's one of the ones who attacked me--"
"No," Dante said. "He only looks like them because he's angry, and he's in a lot of pain. His name is Rio. He's a Breed warrior, like me."
"Vampire," she gasped brokenly. "He's a vampire... "
Damn it, he hadn't meant for her to learn the truth like this. God help him, but he'd thought he could ease her into his world--a world that belonged to them both--once she understood the vampire race was nothing to be feared, and once she saw how she was part of it, as a Breedmate.
As the only woman he would ever want at his side.
But everything was unraveling fast, a thread of half-truths and secrets that was spiraling down around his feet as she stared at him in panic, her eyes pleading with him to make sense of an unfathomable situation.
"Yes," Dante admitted, unwilling to lie to her. "Rio is a vampire, Tess. Like me."
Chapter Thirty-three
Tess's heart took a sharp pe into her stomach. "W-what did you say?"
Dante looked at her, those whiskey-gold eyes far too serious, his expression much too calm. "I am one of the Breed. A vampire."
"Oh, my God," she moaned, her skin going tight with alarm, with revulsion.
She didn't want to believe it--he didn't look like the creatures who'd assaulted her or the one who now lay in an anguished ball on the floor of the infirmary. But Dante's tone was so level and matter-of-fact, she knew he was telling her the truth. Maybe for the first time since she'd met him, he was finally being honest with her.
"You lied to me. All this time, you've been lying to me."
"I wanted to tell you, Tess. I've been trying to find the words to tell you--"
"That you're some kind of sick monster? That you've been using me--for what, just to get close to Ben so that you and your bloodsucking buddies could kill him?"
"We haven't killed the human, I swear to you. But that doesn't mean I won't, if it comes down to that. And, yes, at first I needed to know if you were involved in his Crimson dealing, and I thought you might be useful in getting more information on those activities. I had a mission, Tess. But I also needed your trust so that I could protect you."
