Page 60 of Purchased

“I can eat one, but two is a stretch.”

“Stay here.”

I go to the car, open the trunk and retrieve the blankets and towels kept there in case a picnic should ensue, or a swim should happen. There are spare clothes, of course, because a shifter never knows when he is going to burst out of his attire.

“Put this on,” I say, tossing her my spare clothes. I wrap the bodies up as best I can, knowing we are leaving a bloody mess, knowing that it will be found, certain that this is a mistake that will echo throughout time.

The drive back to the chateau is heavy, and without the gaiety that the drive away contained.

“Are you mad at me?” Beatrix has the nerve to ask the question while wearing my shirt and blazer, sitting in the passenger seat with her legs tucked up under her and an expression that I can only describe as serene on her beautiful face.

Meanwhile, the blood on my skin has started to itch, and my shirt sticks to it whenever I move, creating an unpleasant sensation of fabric and blood sucking away with every motion of my chest or arms.

“Yes,” I say. “I am mad at you.”

“I thought so,” she says, satisfied, as if that makes her feel good to know she read my expression right.

“It was a mistake to stop beating you,” I sigh. “I got soft and now we have two dead gendarmes to deal with.”

“That’s your fault. The bodies part.”

“How could it possibly be my fault?”

“You wouldn’t let me eat them. We could have taken them back down to the crypt and fed on them and left their bones with the rest. It would have been a poetic and romantic end for them.”

There is something wrong with my mate, something psychologically darker than I could have imagined. She looks innocent because of her age and her pretty features, but she is the most fearsome of our kind I have ever encountered.

“You don’t agree?”

“I think eating people whose only crime was trying to make sure nothing untoward was happening to you is not the proper way to reward them.”

“Is that what they were doing?”

“Yes. They probably thought I was taking advantage of you. Older man with younger woman, out late at night, she has no documentation, but does have an English accent… they probably thought you were being trafficked.”

“Oh,” she says. Then she repeats it more softly. “Oh.”

“And that is why they are going to have a proper burial and why their families will be receiving a stipend from an anonymous source for the rest of their lives.”

“So you’re really mad,” she says with a sigh.

“For killing going on three men now? I’m not pleased, Beatrix. That much is certain.”

“I just wanted them to leave us alone. They were being rude and invasive.”

“That was their job.”

“Well, they should have done it more nicely. Besides, you don’t know what their intentions really were. They might have been trying to help me, or they might have been trying to take advantage of a teenager from another country with a weird accent and no ID.”

She’s not wrong. She’s not right, either.

The sun shines. The wind whips through the open windows. The car handles a little worse than it did before because it is light and the rear is around four hundred fifty pounds heavier than before.

CHAPTER12

Armand

We get back to the chateau a day after we left, and I feel like I am a different man than I was when we drove away. Responsibility has always weighed heavily on me. It weighs even more heavily now.

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