Page 63 of Protecting His Vampire Mate

I felt raw panic sweep through the connection. Then, abruptly, I couldn’t feel Bryan’s mind at all.

I let out a shuddering breath, feeling like icy water had just been dumped on me. You’d think that it would get easier to have the connection abruptly severed between us, that I would get used to it the more times it happened. But you would be very wrong. The opposite seemed to be happening, in fact. The feeling of loss was getting worse each time.

“My feeding habits are none of your business,” he said stiffly, scowling at me. Then his stomach literally growled. He grimaced, then added, “But I do need to feed soon. I’m not going to have a choice.”

“Feed from me, then.”

“Damn it,” he swore, clapping his hand over his mouth and turning his head away from me abruptly. “No. No way am I doing that.”

“Why don’t you want me to see your fangs? You’re a vampire. This is a natural part of it. I’m not freaked out or anything.”

Bryan didn’t answer me.

“Is it because it would seal the mate bond?” I asked him, confused. “Because I don’t mind if you can hear my thoughts. And you could still throw up a wall between us any time you wanted.”

“It’s not that,” Bryan muttered, pushing himself up in the bed. He drew his knees up to his chest, still avoiding my gaze. He looked so small that way, like he was trying to take up as little space as he possibly could. And he sounded so lost and miserable that it broke my goddamn heart.

That was when it all clicked into place for me.

I had, somewhere in the back of my mind, assumed that Bryan felt irrationally guilty on some level, like he hadn’t done enough to resist the compulsion Giles had used on him. Hell, Bryan was probably filled with a metric fuck ton of emotions about what had happened to him. I knew I would be. Anyone would be. Because what Giles had done to him was the worst kind of violation.

And none of it was Bryan’s fault. None of it. Nathaniel, acting as the city’s vampire king, had known that. And even Tatiana Solomon, the Queen of the Witches, had known Bryan was innocent. Even the families of the witches Giles had forced Bryan to kill understood that it was Giles who had committed those murders, not Bryan.

But now, it was so painfully obvious once I saw it that I kicked myself for not realizing it earlier. I knew that I didn’t know everything Bryan was feeling. But I knew one thing with absolute certainty. After what Giles had made him do, Bryan was ashamed of being a vampire.

That’s why he was refusing to feed himself. That’s why he hid his face from me every time his fangs dropped. That was at least part of why he’d run from me in the first place.

Because he’d been forced into a situation that caused him to hate who and what he was now.

No. Absolutely not. Not on my fucking watch. No way was I going to sit idly by while my mate suffered. Not when there was something I could do about it.

An idea slid into place almost immediately.

“Hey babe, the sun’s almost down,” I said, fighting to keep my voice normal and even. I reached for my jeans and started yanking them on. I was so furious that my hands were shaking. “You should get dressed. We’re leaving.”

Bryan did look up at me then. He blinked at me a few times in confusion, but the misery and shame were still etched across his face, plain to see. Seeing his pain further added to the righteous fury that had ignited in my heart.

“Leaving? As in… like, the town? Like, leaving for good?”

His eyes widened and I sensed how startled and alarmed he was, as I pulled a clean shirt out of the duffle bag that I’d brought with me and yanked it on with more force than was strictly necessary.

“You’re angry with me,” he said quietly, sounding even smaller than before.

If I could have brought Giles back in that moment, I would have happily done it so that I could make him suffer for what he had done to Bryan. But my fury was just self-indulgence. It wasn’t helping anything. And I was careless enough that now my mate thought it was directed at him.

I crossed the room and dropped to my knees beside the bed. I took Bryan’s hand in mine.

“I’m not angry with you,” I told him. “I’m angry with Giles. If I could kill him all over again, I would.”

“Then why are you getting dressed?”

“I’m getting dressed because we need to get you fed properly. You won’t drink from me. And I’m guessing you won’t feed on anyone else, either. Which means we need to figure something else out.”

And also because I now planned on showing Bryan exactly what kind of good he was capable of bringing into the world as a vampire. I couldn’t undo what Giles had done to him. But I was going to give Bryan something else to hold on to, a counterbalance to the darkness he now saw in himself.

But I’m not an idiot. I didn’t tell him about phase two of my plan.

“I’m okay. Seriously. I just had a hunger pang,” Bryan said, crossing his arms over his chest. “It’s nothing.”

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