Page 48 of Forged in Blood

Despite her hooded sweatshirt, Ophelia shivers and tries to curl into a ball on the porch bench. I resist the urge to wrap my arms around her and share my body heat. I know how this night will end, and there’s no sense making it any more painful for her than it’s already going to be. Not even I am that cruel. At least not to her. Not anymore.

“You want my sweater, sweet girl?” Malachi asks.

I shoot him a warning look over the top of her head.Don’t be acting like a fucking sap.

Fuck off,he fires back.

If she didn’t wear those tiny little skirts, she wouldn’t be cold.

I love her tiny skirts.

Ophelia shakes her head and pulls at the sleeve of her own sweater, completely unaware of our alternate conversation. “No thanks. I’m okay.”

I glance down at her bare legs, and my cock twitches. Yeah, I love her tiny skirts too.

“Why did he get so mad?” she asks, her lip quivering.

I stuff my hands into my pockets because her scent is still on my fingers and it’s driving me wild with the desire to touch her again. Not just touch. Taste too. But Alexandros’s rage was enough to convince my libido to let my brain take over for a bit. The only reason we haven’t taken her back to her dorm is because Malachi and I agreed that it wasn’t worth the risk of doing anything else to incur his wrath.

“He forbade us from biting you,” Malachi says. “And when Axl tasted your blood, we all felt it. The professor too. I guess he thought Axl disobeyed him.”

I snort a laugh. “If he thought that, Axl would have no head.”

“What?” Ophelia blinks at us.

Malachi takes her hand and squeezes it. “Decapitation is the only way to kill a vampire.”

I punch him on the arm. Like she needs to know how to kill us. “Way to go, jackass.”

Malachi scowls at me. “What? It’s not like she could do it. Have you ever tried to deprive a vampire of his head?”

“Have you?” Ophelia asks.

He shrugs. “No. But it would be tough.” He rolls his neck. “We have very strong spinal cords. It’s an evolutionary thing.”

Ophelia scrunches her tiny nose. “The professor would never hurt any of you though. You’re like his… sons.”

Fuck, she’s so damn naive and sweet. My yearning to corrupt her makes every part of me ache.

“He wouldn’t have much choice if one of us broke an oath to him,” Malachi explains. “He’d be bound by vampire law.”

Her eyes go wide, the expanse of her pupils shadowing the electric blue of her irises. “So you have to obey everything he says or you get your head chopped off?”

I roll my eyes. She makes it sound like puppets. “It’s not like that. He doesn’t go around making us take oaths for the hell of it. We have very few rules we’re not allowed to break.” Which makes me wonder even more why we’re forbidden from biting Ophelia. I felt only an echo of the power and the euphoria Axl felt when he tasted her virgin blood, and it was one of the most intense experiences of my life. It has to be something to do with that. And Alexandros knows what she is, so why the fuck won’t he let us in on the secret?

Malachi interrupts my train of thought. “It doesn’t make sense for bloodborne vampires to go around tearing off the heads of the vamps they sire.”

She chews on her lip. “But why?”

I scrub my face with my hands. “Why do you have so many fucking questions?”

“Excuse me for being curious about the world of supernatural beings that I didn’t know existed until a few weeks ago,” she snaps.

Malachi shoots me a smug smile. “Yeah. It’s natural to be curious.”

She tilts her head and bats her eyelashes at him—he’s such a dick—before returning her attention to me. “So why can’t they go around tearing heads off?”

We’re stuck until the professor tells us what to do with her, so I might as well humor her. “Because sired vampires can’t survive if their master is dead, which means turned vampires protect their sires at all costs. Survival instinct 101.”

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