Page 51 of Protecting His Vampire Mate

CHAPTER FIFTEEN || BRYAN

We had hardly spoken on the drive back, but it wasn’t really an awkward silence or anything. Something small yet vital had changed between us. For instance, on the drive back, he had held my hand and, even though I knew I shouldn’t, I had let him.

I was being a jerk, and I knew it.

Because I was stringing him along, wasn’t I? It was cruel of me, and I didn’t want to be responsible for breaking his heart, but still, I let him hold my hand. And after Ella had taken my pain and shoved my face in it, with the added bonus of letting me know that Teresa Dames was apparently still lingering nearby, hell-bent on haunting me, I had begged him to hold me.

It had been yet another moment of weakness, no matter how good it had felt. And now something was very different between us, a connection that was so immediately there that I could almost feel it like a physical sensation. This was different from when I had woken up in a blind panic and had needed the touch.

But nothing had really changed, had it?

After all, I couldn’t build a life with Tobias. He deserved way, way better than me. And, after this was all said and done, he’d go back to his coven.

Despite his obvious fears to the contrary, they probably needed him.

And I couldn’t go back to my old life, even if I had wanted to.

I couldn’t face my sister and tell her what I had done. Worse, I couldn’t tell her what had been done to me. I couldn’t let her tell me it wasn’t really my fault.

Because it was.

Deep down, I knew that it was all my fault. It had to be. There was a reason Giles had picked me to be his puppet, after all. He could have chosen any other vampire in the city. But he had looked at me and somehow decided that I was exactly what he needed.

And before that, when I had been on spring break with my friends, roaming the streets of Vegas, drunk off my ass and deciding I was too wasted to go gambling with them after all, a murderous vampire had taken one look at me and immediately marked me for death. I’d encouraged my friends to go on without me, so I was standing alone between two buildings, surrounded by other tourists. I’d been bleary-eyed and trying to cut through the haze of intoxication long enough to figure out how to use my phone to summon a ride back to the hotel, but I had still felt perfectly safe.

That’s when he grabbed me, dragged me into the alley, and tore my throat open with his teeth.

Vampire bites are supposed to be pleasurable to mortals. When they’re consensual, at least. There’s a bit of magic in our saliva that allows us to control what the experience is like for our feeding partner. And we can make our bites become a euphoric, pleasurable, almost sexual experience. Or we can make it so that they don’t really feel like anything at all if we’re not actively trying to give pleasure during the feed.

But we can also make our bites hurt, very badly.

This vampire had wanted me to suffer, and I had. It had been torture, like hundreds of red hot and dull razor blades tearing my flesh open with excruciating slowness.

He had wanted me to struggle against him. He’d wanted my last moments to be spent in horror. For no reason at all, except that he had looked at me and he’d clearly seen something that made it okay for him to do that to me.

And I did struggle.

I fought him with everything I had. But that just made him laugh. “Oh yes, little one, you have much fight in you. You and I will have such fun together once you are able to see the world through my eyes.”

My maker, Veronika, had pulled him off of me.

Then, as I collapsed to the ground, the world already beginning to go dark around me, she beheaded the vampire with a machete. Then she dropped to her knees beside me.

“You’re too far gone for me to heal,” she said, speaking quickly. “And you will die before I can explain what I must do to save you.”

I struggled to respond to her, but I couldn’t make myself form words. I couldn’t feel anything. It was getting harder to breathe. Harder still to even care, like I wasn’t there at all anymore, but already somewhere else. And my surroundings were growing dark, fading away from view even though I hadn’t closed my eyes.

“Forgive me,” she whispered. Then the world refocused and I noticed that her teeth were suddenly far sharper than they should have been. But that didn’t matter at all. It seemed far away somehow, unable to hurt me.

My eyes finally slid shut.

Then a coppery-sweet taste filled my mouth. Without even deciding to, I swallowed.

It was pure electricity, surging through my body.

My eyes flew open. I no longer felt weak or far away. And I didn’t feel drunk anymore, either. Vitality surged into me. I grabbed her bleeding wrist with both hands, drinking gulp after gulp of the richly sweet coppery stuff that was pouring into my mouth.

She pulled her wrist back, watching me intently. “That will be enough, I expect.”

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