Page 16 of Forever Bound

"Angel… " he tests the name on his tongue like a new flavor. "I am Ivan."

"It's…nice to meet you, Ivan. I'm glad we can communicate now. But, are you going to tell me what's going on?”

He takes my hand and presses it to his chest. I feel his heart thump, just as I did the other night.

"The villagers left you for me to drink from. As a sacrifice," he says.

"Yeah, I got that part. So why didn't you partake?"

"When I came close to you, something happened." He frowns, looking down at my hand still on his chest. "My heart hasn't beat for hundreds of years. But when I met you, it beat again for the first time." His eyes are luminous as he stares into my soul. "I thought it was a myth. A fairytale for monsters."

"What was?"

"The tales of the one true mate," he says in answer. "There were stories that if a vampire finds their one true mate, their heart will beat again, and if their mate is a vampire, they will be able to feed off each other alone for all of eternity."

My heart skips a beat at this. "So…you're saying I'm your mate?"

He nods. "And you completed the ritual. I would have warned you. That's why I didn't want to drink from you. You didn't know what that would mean, but I did. By sharing blood, we have bonded for eternity. Where you go, I go. If you die, I die. And vice versa. We are forever connected."

"Oh shit. So if I stabbed you with that stake, I'd be taking my own life too?"

He nods.

"And if that monster kills you, he kills both of us?"

He nods again.

"And this can't be undone?" I ask, but in my heart, I don't want it undone. I know literally nothing about this dude, so it's stupid as hell, but everything in me wants to be with him forever. Except…

I jump from the bed and away from him, though it pains me to do so. "This is a mistake. You don't want me. I'm the completely wrong person," I say as sobs rack my body against my will.

He reaches for me, but I push him away.

"Why do you say these things?" he asks.

Through the tears, I look up at him. "Look at me. Look at my face. At my scars. I'm not beautiful. Not anymore. I'm a monster."

He narrows his eyes at me as if to say, and? Have you seen my face lately?

I hiccup, thrown off track by this weird telepathy we have.

"That's not all though," I say. "The night you found me, you asked me if I was guilty. I didn't get a chance to tell you everything. I didn't get a chance to tell you the truth."

He raises an eyebrow at me. "Then tell me now. Why shouldn't I love you and take you as my mate, Evangeline Love?"

"Because I'm the real monster," I say. And then I tell him my dark secret. The thing even my best friend in the world doesn't know. "The worst kind of monster there is." I suck in a breath, steeling myself for what I'm about to say. "You should have fed on me that night. I deserve to die."

"Why?" he asks, his voice calm, his large, muscular body a rock for me to lean against. But I can't. Not now. Not until he knows the truth.

"Because six years ago, I killed my whole family."

Chapter 5: Where we drink too much homemade vodka and tell all our secrets.

I shiver and hiccup,which is a really weird reaction to telling someone the truth, but there it is. I get hiccups when I confess grave sins.

Ivan places his large hand on mine, thin scars—almost like veins—running over his pale skin. "You do not have to speak of this if you do not wish to," he says in a deep, sexy voice.

At this point, if I'm being totally honest with myself, everything he says and does is sexy. Maybe that's the way it's supposed to go with the mate bond thing, I don't know, but it's distracting as hell. It's really hard to get your emo angst going on when you're turned on, ya know?

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