Page 30 of Kept 4
“I tell you, I couldn’t say what I was really thinking, he had some kind of hold over me. It was exactly the way Margarita described it. If he’d said jump off a bridge, I would have.”
He sighs and pulls the blankets up over us.
We have spent this, our fourth day as lovers - I can’t think of us as Kept and Master - catching up on all that we have independently discovered since we parted.
We haven’t left the State Bedroom since he carried me, naked, from the armoury the day I arrived.
We’d had baths together in the room and had the disapproving butler deliver all our meals to the door. The shutters come down over the wall-length windows during the day and make the bedroom light-tight, and I sleep each daytime too, as I grow accustomed to his nocturnal schedule.
I am happier than I had ever been in my entire life.
But we both know we can’t stay like this. So today, we have been thinking through options for our future - and more importantly, how to end the future of our enemies.
He has been brutally honest with me, as always, answered all my questions, about his Kepts, his wives. Celeste was not the angelic painter of our age. She was a gold-digging bitch. The others, well, many were very nice women – and he killed them. It is in the past, and I have to accept his past if I wish to accept him into my life – which I do.
I’ve told him everything too. The weapon, the hunters, the ancient, and what destroying it would mean, how I kept dining illegally, despite my best intentions. Everything. Lastly, swearing him first to secrecy, I told him about Margarita.
It didn’t sit well with him, keeping this last thing secret, he loves his friend, Gerald.
And yet he also loves me.
Strangely though, no matter how I have joined the dots for him, he won’t contemplate the idea that Gerald istheancient. He simply cannot,will notbelieve Gerald is anything other than a normal vampire. And why should he? After all, the man has been his friend and companion for centuries, and I’d only been in the picture less than two years.
‘No,’I think, staring at the cherubs cavorting on the dome above us,‘there is no convincing him. I have to try another angle.’
“Gerald aside,” I turn my head to the side and consider him, “we need to kill Elsbeth, and bringing her here might be the only way that is going to happen.”
“Yes,” he nods, rubbing his thumb back and forth across the top of my hand absentmindedly, causing my blood to heat and my stomach to knot without him realising what he is doing, “I had already come to the same conclusion, hence my being here rather than with Gerald, as I said. I don’t want to worry you, but I have let it be known around the traps that I intend to go back to her, that I have seen the error of my ways. It only took a few phone calls – I expect she will be panting like a dog in heat on my back doorstep within the week.”
I grimace. I knew how she felt, and if he didn’t stop rubbing my hand and looking so damn hot quick smart, he was going to find he had another puppy to deal with, one who was thinking of climbing onto his lap and taking him for some exercise.
I snort and shake my head, but I’m too late – he has sensed how I feel and moves with inhuman speed to roll on top of me and claim my lips.
Later, much later, we firm up our hunting plan for the monster, Elsbeth.
11
We walk hand in hand across the snow towards Constance’s manor where tonight, everything going to plan, Elsbeth will die - or I will.
I fervently hope it is the former, but partly this revolves around Nicholas believing Elsbeth will fighthimwhen she realises she was tricked into being here and will continue to abide by the vampire rules and spare me.
Much of our conversation earlier tonight revolved around me not believing for one instant that she would, and he asserting the opposite.
“So, I can be killed by someone other than you?” I had reaffirmed earlier this evening, as we sat on the bed, going over our plan.
“Yes, but only by a vampire, and no vampire in history would kill another’s Kept – it is lore.”
“Lore, not L. A. W,” I muttered, “vampires tried to kill me in France.”
“We don’t know that – I still think they were there to kill the hunters and merely thought you were in league with them.”
I shook my head. As far as I was concerned, either Elsbeth or Gerald sent them.
“She is obsessed with you. I think she will kill me if she can.”
“I hope you are wrong,” Nicholas sighed. “Either way – if you are right, and she is so focussed on destroying you, then that might be the chance I need to kill her.”
I had nodded grimly.
