Page 63 of An Acquired Taste

A blur of motion out of the corner of my eye is the only warning I get. Cold fingers clamp around my ankle hard enough to make me cry out and buckle. I look down to see Alexander crawling with a mad glint in his eyes, fangs sliding out as his mouth comes for my leg—

And then Sebastian reaches down, grabs him by the neck, and rips Alexander’s head clean off his body. I stare, mouth open, as it rolls to a stop near one of the hedges.

Sebastian clears his throat.

“Apologies,” he says. “I was hoping to spare you that sight.”

“That’s, um…” I can’t seem to look away from the severed head. “Quite… alright…”

Sebastian places a finger on my chin and tilts my face until I’m looking at him. I keep waiting for fear to hit me after the sheer power I just witnessed his hands being capable of. He just killed someone. He admitted he killed his previous valentine too. But I find nothing but gentleness in his eyes when he looks at me. I feel nothing but safety in his touch. He just ripped off another vampire’s head… forme.

Is it fucked up to find that romantic? Probably. But I find myself tearing up anyway.

“Oh, God,” I say, sniffling. “This is going to cause a whole mess for you, isn’t it? The Solomon Court… and Celeste… and the war…”

Amazingly, Sebastian cracks a smile. “That’swhat you’re worried about?” He pulls me toward him. I bury my face in his neck and wrap my arms around him, and he holds me like I’m a precious thing while I cry. “It’s alright, darling,” he murmurs against my hair, and I nearly melt at the endearment from his lips. “This is a clear-cut case of vampire law. It won’t be any trouble.”

Despite his assurances, now that the floodgates have opened, I can’t seem to close them again. There’s so much that I’ve been bottling up. He strokes my hair while I blubber half-coherent confessions and apologies about my first meeting with Alexander, and my night out with him, and his visit to the house.

He pulls back to look at me. Shock flickers across his face, and then anger. “He wasat the estate? How?”

“I… I don’t know? I swear I never told him where I was. I thought that maybe it was public knowledge…?” But Sebastian is shaking his head.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Sebastian murmurs. “Hardly anyone knows where I make my home. Certainly not Alexander de Solomon. If you didn’t tell him, then…” He pauses, realizationbreaking across his face. “You said you had a drink with him at the Valentine’s Day Ball.”

“Yes?”

A muscle twitches in Sebastian’s jaw as he clenches it. He looks even angrier than before. “He must have dosed you with his blood and used it to track you there.”

I press a hand to my mouth. “Oh, God.” If he followed me after the Valentine’s Day Ball… Now I’m remembering the times I thought I was being watched over the last several months. Barnabas snarling at something in the fog. The dark figure I saw in the tree line, which I assumed was Sebastian…

And if he dosed me during that first meeting, he must have done so again when I went to his apartment.

Seeing my panic, Sebastian pulls me against him and kisses my forehead. “It’s alright,” he says. “You’re safe now. And I’m sorry I failed to protect you before.”

My eyes start welling up again. “You don’t hate me?”

He wipes away my tears. “Alexander manipulated you from the start,” he says. “I know how he operates. And… I only made it easier for him by keeping you at arm’s length.” I shake my head, ready to argue, but he continues before I can. “I know that you have a lot of questions, Amelia, and I think it’s time for me to give you the answers you deserve.”

But then he tenses and pushes me behind him as he turns to face the entrance to the hedge maze. I had almost forgotten that there’s an entire party and several dozen vampires not far from here. When I see Dominic and Dante, Alexander’s fledglings, approaching us, my stomach sinks.

The two Solomon vampires both stop abruptly as they see Alexander’s body—and, several feet away, his head.

“He’s dead,” Dominic murmurs. “I felt it, but… I couldn’t believe…” He stares at his sire’s head, dazed. At his side, Dantestares at us instead, his shoulders squared and his expression guarded.

“You killed him,” Dante says to Sebastian.

Sebastian lifts his head high and nods. “He laid his hands upon my valentine,” he says. “I challenged him to combat. He accepted, he lost, and he refused to yield.”

Dante looks at him, and then at me. I’m sure he remembers that night out at the vampire nightclub, and I’m braced for him to accuse me of being at fault somehow—but he only nods. His face is unreadable, but I remember the way he urged me to get away from Alexander at Rouge. I wonder how much loyalty he really felt for his sire. After a moment, he turns and puts an arm around Dominic’s shoulders.

“Let’s leave them to it,” Sebastian whispers to me, once it’s clear neither of them intends to confront us. He leads me out of the hedge maze and to a bench in a quiet corner of the gardens, barely touched upon by the light and music of the ball.

“This is not precisely how I intended for this night to go,” Sebastian says.

I croak out a laugh from my still-sore throat. “No? What did you intend?”

He takes both of my hands in his. “Well, I was going to start by telling you about Etta.”

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