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His mind worked overtime. I could feel him working through all the possibilities. I didn’t get thoughts, only feelings and glimpses of emotions.
“We’ve made it impossible to hide things from one another.” I searched his face.
He flexed and stretched, bringing his fingers to the spot on his neck, uniting us. “Maybe that was the point?”
I wasn’t a liar, but we all had our secrets. We all had things we kept to ourselves, and we’d ripped our worlds open, emotions laid bare.
“I guess.” I tried staunching the flow like he’d had me test, but not fully, not to the point where it would be painful. I watched him closely, gauging his reaction to it all. “And this?”
“Painful, but more like an itch I can’t scratch than a tube I’m unable to breathe through.” He closed his eyes and did the same, slowly closing the tap and the flow between us.
My chest tightened, but I could breathe. I knew where he was, but it wasn’t a flood of his emotions. Only flickers. The main focus: his heartbeat. My heart in his body.
I swallowed past the uncomfortable feeling. “Tolerable.”
“Yes,” he agreed, hand still on the mark. “Do you think my returning the mark made it worse?”
“I don’t know.”
“We may have opened an ancient can of worms we do not yet know the full consequences of.” His brows pulled together.
While I liked to live in the moment and take life as it came to me, Vin would never be that way. He would plot and plan and find every bit of information he could about this, but what if there was none? What if we were the first to open this up? The first of our kinds to join ourselves.
“But now, if you die...” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to.
The words hung between us, heavy.
Destructive.
“I could kill you, too,” I finished for him.
TWENTY-FIVE
VINKETTIN
We rearranged ourselves without separating, finding a spot of cool grass to catch our breath. His knot wasn’t going down anytime soon, and I didn’t want it to. It was a different kind of connection, lying in the clearing, face to face, limbs tangled, and forced to slow down, if only for one night. We needed it. We needed to be totally absorbed in one another. When all else faded away, these were the memories we’d carry with us for the rest of this life and the next.
I’d grown more and more greedy with Dominic with each passing day.
Scarcity had gone to my head.
I rubbed my nose over his. The clouds written in his gaze told me as much as his feelings did. I reached between us in the new connection. Turbulence flowed in his brain, and he worked on dampening the bond between us. Not cutting it off but controlling the flow. The tighter he made it, the harder it got to force air into my lungs. I had a feeling it would take a long time to control how much we wanted each other to know.
I’d scared him. There was no doubt in my mind about the feelings coming through our shared bond. I didn’t think he would kill me, and I didn’t believe he thought I would kill him, but power was important to Dominic and his kind. This gave me power he hadn’t approved. It wasn’t offered and freely given, and therefore, he didn’t like it. The vampires’ entire way of life was power dynamics. Most of the first few years of their lives were spent in unquenchable thirst and learning the power structure they were subjected to.
As a daywalker, I skirted around most of these things but was still subject to some of them. Without a maker, it left me immune to direct orders, but I was still bound by blood.
If he could have jumped back, I think he would have. But we were stuck together, forced to work this out, and I wasn’t unhappy about it.
“Can you feel every word I say as well?” What a curious experience this would be.
“Stop being fascinated with every fucking thing about this instead of the larger implications. What will come of this if I’m hurt?”
“I can’t help the way my perception takes things.” I stroked my fingers over the spot on his neck I’d bite. My mouth watered at the idea.
Daywalkers could be choosy about who we drank from because we needed blood less than vampires did. We could consume food and often avoided blood until we needed it. Dominic’s blood was intoxicating. Once I had a taste, I didn’t want any other. But it probably wasn’t healthy to use him as my sole source. I would have to return to the idea of drinking it at bars like so many others did. It felt too intimate to do from others with our bond.
I dipped my head to kiss the spot, sucking it into my mouth to leave a bruise over the mark there. He moaned, finding it as pleasureful as I did, I was sure.
