AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“He’s dead, vicious girl,” Silas said softly, bending down to catch my hand. I was still stabbing him. “Or as close to it as you can get with a blade. Give the knife to me, and I’ll behead him.”
It was a strange thing to say, and even stranger that it was comforting. When Silas pulled the man off my body, I scrambled woozily to my feet, surprised when he straightened in a blur to catch me.
“You’re alright now. You’re safe with me.”
Was I? Silas hated me. Was I really safe with him? I couldn’t stop shaking, unsteady and terrified now the initial relief of not being alone had worn off.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Roxana,” he said as if he could hear my thoughts. I froze when a cold kiss brushed my temple. What the fuck was happening? He hated me, or worse—wasapathetictowards me.
“Who is he?” he demanded, kneeling when I was steady and hacking off the vampire’s head as promised. I froze, watching Silas behead a man with swift, brutal movements. What air I’d managed to inhale froze in my lungs.
He threw a sharp look at me. “Ana. Who is he?”
I swallowed my panic. “He mentioned a matriarch. River’s family is threatening me, forcing me to choose him.”
“Hmm,” Silas replied, wiping the blood from the knife on my attacker’s trousers.
That was all he said—justhmm.
Vampire removed of his head, Silas rose in a honed, powerful motion. His cool hand found my waist again, steadying me when I wavered.
I didn’t know why he was touching me, or why it filled me with a terrifying mix of panic and relief.
“The house isn’t safe,” I said, my voice thick as I pointed out the obvious. I wasn’t having a panic attack, mostly because Silas was here with me, but one wasn’t far off. “The garden is completely secure, but he got inside—through the house. He had to have comethrough the house.He’ll come back for me.”
Silas glanced down at me with deep red eyes, graveness etched into his cold, aquiline face.
“We’ll make the manor safe,” he said finally. And then without prompting, he added, “I thought you were meeting a secret lover. I heard you sneak out, and I jumped to conclusions. I was almost hoping you were breaching the courting agreement, so I could reject you and move onto another engagement, but now I’ve seen you kill…”
“What?” I whispered, blood pounding through my ears and—through my neck, because fuck, that guybit me.
Silas tilted his head, watching me, every bit as aware of the blood running from my body as I was. It soaked my pants too, leaving the vicious, throbbing wound in my middle.
“And now the thought of you meeting anyone else makes me murderous. One little kill and you’ve got me enraptured, Roxana. My Ana.”
“Uhhh…”
My Ana?What the fuck? And what was with the bright gleam of obsession in his crimson eyes, and the way he refused to let go of me?
“Why did you behead him? You don’t even like me—why did you help?”
Silas’s jaw clenched, his shoulders thrown back and something proud, offended, in his posture. “Letting an innocent woman be harmed goes against everything I believe in.”
That … was unexpected. I tried to hide my surprise but didn’t quite mask it. “I might have misjudged you,” I said quietly.
“I might have done the same to you,” he replied. His mouth quirked at the corner. “You are a magnificent murderess. Watching you take his life wasbeautiful.Truce?”
Um. “Truce,” I agreed, my head spinning. His attention was flattering, and so were his words, but I blamed it on blood loss.
We both tensed at pounding footsteps along the path. Silas pushed me behind him, a threatening hiss in his throat, but it was Claude who burst through the rose bushes and flowers, his silver hair in disarray and his dark eyes wild.
“My Roxie,” he breathed when his frantic eyes found me. He completely ignored Silas, blurring with vampire speed until he was in front of me, cupping my scratched face in gentle hands. He pressed his lips to my temple in a long kiss, a hard breath punching out of him. “You snuck out, and then we found a threatening note and—you’re alive,” he said with a shuddering exhale, mostly to himself. “You’re alive.”
“I’m fine,” I agreed, a bit thrown by his distress. He cared about me this much, this soon? My chest warmed. “I’m okay, Claude. Promise.”
He pulled away, his expression deadly in its intensity, and my heart skipped—before it softened when he lifted his hand, his pinky finger extended. “Promise properly.”
I smiled, unable to stop its spread across my face when I locked pinky fingers with the ancient vampire. “I’m really okay, I promise.”
