Page 11 of Incandescence

As long as the vampire didn’t feed from her again, her will wouldn’t be broken, nor would she be desperate for sex. She’d be physically and mentally stronger, at least until our next blood craving.

She fell on the vampire’s arm like a starved dog attacking a meaty bone. She took as much as I had, then dropped his wrist and backed away, her face blanching whiter still even as her lips were smeared in contrasting red. She shuddered. “I didn’t want this—”

“You needed it.”

She swiped her arm across her mouth, smearing blood. “That’s no excuse. I’m not addicted. Not like—”

“Me?” I finished drily.

She took another step back. “I need to get out of here.”

I grabbed hold of her arm to keep her still. “And if our brainwashing prevents us from leaving?”

“Then I’ll use a chair to break a window and jump to my death.”

I grasped both her arms, fury of a totally different kind burning through me. After the vampire had captured me, I’d survived by becoming a human husk, empty of emotion and feelings. I wasn’t that person anymore. “That won’t happen, not while I’m alive. We will escape this place. Escape it together.”

Chapter Seven

Maya

Ilooked up at theman I’d once thought was indifferent, and saw fire and passion blaze through his dark eyes, along with a whole bunch of other emotions I knew weren’t there just from his recent feeding. He clenched his big hands and he stood taller, his posture confident and strong.

He was becoming the man I guessed he used to be. The man I’d glimpsed behind his apathetic stare.

His fervor increased my own and dizzying relief pushed away the horror of what I’d done. I swallowed the last of the metallic flavor in my throat, which tasted too much like rapture, before I nodded. “Even monsters have weaknesses. We can defeat this. Together, we’re stronger.”

Despite the roiling disgust that filled me from the inside out after feeding from the vampire, it’d also made me feel invincible, as though I could achieve anything. Jumping out of a window had become the least likely conclusion and the very last resort.

Alexander cupped my face, his voice low. “Together we will.”

He bent his head and kissed me, his lips warm, his breath tainted with the blood we’d shared. But somehow that didn’t matter. If anything, it made me want him all the more.

I pressed closer to him, his cock a thick wedge against his jeans, his kiss deepening and his groan tingling my lips and making my belly quiver with need.

I pulled back and looked up at him, seeing him through new eyes. He was a survivor first and foremost—he knew what needed to be done to live. His mental strength would see us through this ordeal.

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