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“Then why is there a stake in your back pocket?”
She stilled and looked up at me sharply. She looked horrified, and she had every right to. What the hell was she thinking? Did she really think she could just stake me, and I wasn’t going to notice?
“I can explain.”
“Give it to me.”
I stepped back and held my hand out, waiting. She blushed, reached behind herself, and pulled the stake out. She placed it in my hand.
“Please don’t kill me,” she whispered.
“Kimberly, I went through all of the trouble to turn you into a vampire. The last thing I want to do is kill you.”
At the moment, that wasn’t entirely true. I was quite annoyed that in an effort to be kind and generous with her, I’d trusted her intentions. Apparently, she really wasn’t as docile as I wanted to believe that she was.
“Sit down.”
She walked to the bed and sat down on it. Somehow, despite being sneaky and kind of a troublemaker, she sat patiently and waited for me. I looked over at her, wondering how we were ever going to make this work.
She didn’t trust me.
Was she ever going to?
I knew in my heart that trust was something that was going to take time, but we didn’t have a lot of it. If Lex wasn’t successful tomorrow and couldn’t figure out who the source was that was infiltrating the Grove and stealing people away, then we were all in danger. Kim and Raven would be especially in danger. They were young vampires, and their hearts were only freshly turned. The vampire slayers who harvested hearts loved that.
“I killed your friends,” I told her.
She bit her lip and nodded. She knew that part of the story.
“But they weren’t actually your friends.”
“You didn’t know them,” she whispered. “How could you say that?”
“Because Jacob, Clay, Ruth, Tanya, and Megan were all part of an organization that hunts vampires.”
“We were hunters,” she said. “Of course, they were.”
“No,” I shook my head. “You were a freelance hunter. They weren’t.”
“What? Yes, they were,” she said. “We all were. I mean, yeah, sometimes we got tips as to where we should go look, but everyone did that.”
Okay, so maybe I needed to try a different approach. Kimberly was a very smart person. If she wasn’t, she wouldn’t have lived so long. She would have died early in her vampire hunting days, but she hadn’t. She’d been clever and shrewd, and she’d managed to find a way to make the most of any situation she’d had to face.
Still, she didn’t seem to do well when presented with realistic, logical information. Instead, she seemed to do better when she came to her own conclusions. Maybe that was what I needed to do. I didn’t want to have this conversation at all, but she’d literally just been about to kill me. It was time to help her understand that I wasn’t the bad guy in this situation.
“Kimberly, think back to that day.”
“What day?”
“Kimberly, don’t be an idiot,” I said. My voice came out harsher than it needed to, but I was tired of playing games.
“Fuck you,” she whispered. “You don’t need to talk to me like that.”
“Pay attention to me and I won’t have to,” I said. “Now think back to that day.”
“The day you first fought me,” she said.
“Yes.”
