Page 139 of Eternal Obsession

“Now you offer tea?” After I’d shared that. Still. “And let you phone your colleagues?”

“You have to trust me. For the sake of those girls, for the sake of other women who may be in danger.”

“Not from me,” I said.

“Please, after all you and I have been through.”

“I am peaceful and kind and have witnessed things that you can only read about. I have seen things that even the history books cannot accurately convey. You have touched my life as I have touched yours. In your world, you would have me locked away or worse. And in my world, you are but nourishment.

“Orpheus brought us together for his own amusement and gain. He means to destroy me, after two hundred years of me chasing him. He has tired of the game. How do you think you can possibly challenge such a creature? He would easily kill you. Of that I am certain.”

“What then? I turn a blind eye and allow these events to go unpunished. I will not!”

“Go back to your world. Turn away from mine. I will leave here tonight, and you will never see or speak of me again. No one would believe you anyway.”

A glint of something silver—a shiny object held at Ingrid’s side—distracted me.

“Ingrid, what is that for?”

She waved the long blade at me and stepped forward, her confidence returned. She had regained control. “It’s time to face justice, Jadeon. Or if you are innocent like you say, you’ll be vindicated, and then you’ll lead me to the one who is responsible.”

I leapt forward and grabbed her hand in mine, grasping her fingers tightly around the knife’s handle and thrust it into my abdomen. The sharp blade embedded, and I let out a howl.

Ingrid shrieked, her hand still clenched firmly.

Blood poured from my wound and onto her, seeping from around the gash onto my clothes. I removed the knife, dropping it to the floor.

“Oh, Jadeon, no! Please, no, what have you done?” she cried, pushing against the wound, stemming the bleeding. “I’ll get an ambulance.”

“Is this what you want for me, Ingrid, to see me dead?” I ignored the pain.

“What have I done?” Her thoughts scrambled as she felt her world implode, her life as she knew it slip away.

No one would see her as innocent in this—her thoughts struggling for reason as she realized the implications.

My own pain was agony, drawn not from self-preservation,, but from the quiet despair of knowing she feared the wrong thing. What haunted her was a whisper of the truth, and the truth itself was far more terrible. Because once she laid eyes upon the proof she had desperately longed for, she would be changed.

Irrevocably.

No part of her untouched, no part of her heart left whole. I grasped her shoulders, pulling her back. I lifted my blood-soaked shirt, placing her fingers where the knife had penetrated.

“Look,” I said.

The wound healed, the blood seemingly drawn back into my body.

Ingrid’s bloodstained hands fumbled over my stomach, probing the area. “But how?”

“I thought we’d already established that,” I said, smirking with affection as somewhere amid the monstrosity my dark humor shimmered at this absurdity.

“You can’t really be a . . . vampire!”

“Did I miss something?” I wiped my bloody hands on my trousers.

Ingrid’s body was pressed to mine, her wide eyes lifted to me in stunned disbelief, lips parted, as if words had simply abandoned her.

My poise returned, and I became once more the dignified gentleman standing before her, proud and unflinching, my height and stillness ruling the room.

Ingrid looked astonished. “No!”