Page 42 of The Pureblood Daughter
He pushes a hand through his dark hair and stands. His black trousers hug his legs flatteringly, and he no longer wears a cravat, leaving his neck exposed. Two pinpricks of dark red are visible from where Adelina still sits in bed, and the sight of them makes her squirm with discomfort and something darker: lust. The idea of doing it again, of pressing her lips against his neck and drawing blood, should disgust her, but it does quite the opposite.
“When I first saw you here, in the ballroom, I felt something unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. I was drawn to you in a way I’ve only ever heard of, in a way I never dreamed of feeling myself.” His hands are on his hips as he paces the floor alongside the bed. “It’s that special connection—thatbondbetween us—that allows us to speak to each other via extrasensory means.”
“Your voice in my head,” Adelina whispers.
Theodore nods, but his eyes remain serious. “You must understand, this bond only forms between... my kind.”
His words, though harmless individually, string together a meaning that very nearly sends Adelina gasping for breath.
“D-do you expect me to believe I’m a—”
The word refuses to form upon her tongue. She can do little more than stare at him, mouth open just so, hoping he’s not saying what he seems so clearly to be implying.
“Miss Gray—”
She narrows her eyes at him, and he clears his throat.
“Adelina, given what happened in the carriage, I believe now more than ever that you’re not, nor have you ever been, human.”
If he expects her to respond, he’ll be disappointed.
All emotion, thought, and reason vanished with that one word:human. If she’s not human, there’s only one thing she can be.
“The tonic, then, would make sense,” Theodore says, his polished boots clicking on the hardwood floor as he walks the length of the spacious room. His brow is furrowed, as if he’s pondering a difficult puzzle. “I expect it had just enough blood to keep you from going mad with thirst, but it must also have contained a concoction to keep you weak; otherwise, I imagine you would have discovered the truth long ago.” He lets out a small chuckle, though it lacks humor. “You’d not have been able to control yourself.”
Her sickness, the shakes, the dizzy spells. The doctor claimed not to know what ailed her, what mysterious illness had her in its grasp, yet he was the one who supplied the tonic, and at her father’s behest.
“My father,” she whispers, her gaze falling to the bed as she lowers the blanket she’s been clutching to her chest. The air in the room is cool against her bare arms, causing gooseflesh to skitter across her exposed skin.
“Robert Gray.” On Theodore’s lips, the name sounds like a curse. He pauses before the tall arched window and pulls one of the heavy draperies back to peer outside. Moonlight slips through the glass, illuminating his green eyes. “One of the guild’s most celebrated hunters.”
“Guild?Hunters?”
She’s reminded of the pouch containing the silver bullet, and Adelina searches the bed before casting her gaze across the room to the chair. Visible just beneath her dress is the pouch, its strings still pulled tight.
“The bullet,” she whispers. “You said it kills your... kind?” She’s not yet convinced by his words, can’t bring herself to use the wordourinstead. This must all be a joke or a dream, surely.
The viscount nods, a muscle in his jaw flexing before he allows the drapery to fall closed once more, veiling the room in darkness.
“How much do you truly know about Lord Gray?”
Adelina opens her mouth to tell him she knows her father as well as she knows herself, but that would be a lie. There was a time when she didn’t know he kept a flintlock pistol with silver bullets in his office desk or that he had mysterious visitors at all hours of the night. Likewise, she never thought him capable of raising a hand against her, but he very nearly struck her as she sat there in bed, frightened and confused.
“It seems I don’t know him half as well as I thought I did.” She looks down at her hands, tangling her fingers in the bedding. “Perhaps you know him better than I do. So, tell me, who is my father?”
“He’s not your father, but you already know that.”
His words send a bolt of pain through Adelina, a pain that has been there since she learned she was not a Gray by blood. It shouldn’t still hurt—she’s a woman, after all, not a child—but somehow, it does.
“Robert Gray is a hunter; he has been since he was young. And though I know little of Lady Gray, I have reason to believe most of Lord Gray’s closest friends and acquaintances share his preoccupation with killing my kind.” Theodore wraps a hand around one of the bed posts, his face dark as he looks down at Adelina. “When I met you, I thought you had to know, but you seemed... innocent to it all.”
“Hardly. Naïve is more like it.” Though emotion threatens to tighten around Adelina’s throat, she forces it down and throws the blankets aside to stand. The chemise she wears is thin and clings to her breasts, her nipples puckering in the cold as she turns to face the viscount. “Is this why my father forbid me from seeing you?”
Theodore’s gaze travels briefly down her body before he clears his throat and straightens his shoulders. “Yes. Our families have been enemies for centuries. It is only within the past fifty years that a tentative truce has been called. After all, it’s not so easy as it once was to go about killing one another.”
Adelina gasps at the ghastly image, and the viscount reaches toward her, his hand hovering in the air between them.
“Forgive me,” he says. “I forget myself. I shouldn’t say such things.”
