Page 83 of Cloak of the Vampire
For the first time since I met him, Ragnor snapped. “Do you really think Ifelt likegiving you the Imprint?” he shouted, closing the gap I tried to put between us in two steps. “Do you think I liked throwing you into the deep end of the pool without first teaching you how to swim?”
“Then why?”I screamed, pushing at his chiseled, immovable chest. “Why did you do it?”
In a blink, his eyes were glowing the brightest I’d ever seen them. “Because I couldn’t fucking control myself!” he bit out, face utterly furious as he grabbed my fisted hands. “Because I saw your pretty hazel eyes, and any and all rational thoughts left me!”
I froze, my eyes widening as I stared at him, shocked. “What?”
An animalistic growl vibrated from his chest to mine as he plastered my front against his. “It’s just as I said,” he said gravely. “Right from the start, you’ve been driving me absolutely fucking crazy.”
A gasp escaped me, and my heartbeat was in my ears. As I stared at his handsome face with his expression open and fragile for the first time ever, he took my breath away. It was as if I was seeing him for the first time. As if he was a different person—not a vampire Lord but just a man.
For a few moments, I couldn’t speak. I was lost in those eyes that showed so many emotions, all of them raw and primitive yet absolutely enthralling. But then I replayed his words and found the words to ask in a soft, weak voice, “Why didn’t you tell me everything from the start? That my situation was different, and I was an accidental exception?”
He let my hands go and looked away. I tensed, and for a moment I thought he wouldn’t answer, that he would shatter the moment, but then in a barely audible voice, he said, “I didn’t want you to know.”
My heart stopped.
He let out a rough sigh. “I don’t have a good excuse, Henderson,” he said, returning his gaze to me. “I was just too pissed off at myself for doing something even stupid young Lords don’t do, and I took it out on you.”
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. All I could do was return his gaze with mine, trying to find something to say, to show him that I understood now, that I could finally get over this now that he came out and admitted it; then a mechanical voice came from his desk.
“My Lord, Zoey Rittman is here for you.”
And just like that, the magical moment we’d just shared was gone. Within one blink and the next, Ragnor’s face closed down like a door slamming shut, his eyes no longer a wild yet soothing neon blue but a hard and cold midnight blue.
“Time’s up,” he said, devoid of any emotion.
But I didn’t take it to heart this time. Because I felt the same need to protect myself. To put my walls back up. To put that moment of raw, painful honesty behind me.
So I merely nodded, turned on my heel, and left, feeling that, after his revelation, I would never be the same.
CHAPTER 31
RAGNOR RAYNE
It was hours later when he was finally alone.
Ragnor opened the drawer of his office desk and pulled out a small oil painting portraying a woman, and his eyes moved over every line, every brushstroke. The colors were so vivid that the woman looked almost alive: her bright, fiery red hair softly falling in waves to her waist, her mesmerizing blue eyes looking to the side, a small half-laughing smile on her face, her skin a lovely shade of rose.
She was everything. She would always be everything. And yet another face was etched in his mind, a new face of a broken woman with shattered hazel eyes and long brown hair. She should be nothing. She should always be nothing.
Yet everything in him was urging him to go back, to take her in his arms, to never let her go.
But he couldn’t. Not when he’d exposed so much of himself, shown his vulnerability in a way he hadn’t done in centuries.
He recalled that night, that fateful night he saw Aileen Henderson hiding behind the trash bins. It was as though he’d been possessed; he was supposed to kill her, not give her the Imprint. But he couldn’t help himself. He lost any sense of control and simply acted.
He’d tried keeping his distance from her. He’d tried to treat her like anyone else, but how could he when she was everything he saw when he closed his eyes?
Telling her some of the truth hadn’t been the plan. But she’d pushed him, and at that moment, he wanted her to understand. He wanted to erase that look of desperation mixed with disgust from her eyes.
He glanced down at the portrait once more before closing his eyes. In truth, none of that mattered, not really. He’d made his bed and now had to lie in it, because that girl was not his.
There could only be one for him.
Ragnor opened his eyes, and instead of his office, he recalled that image from an eon ago, when the red hair sprawled across the marble floor, floating on a pool of blood, the pale body lifeless, the blue eyes opened and empty.
A knife twisted in his chest. Yes, none of that mattered. Aileen ... didn’t matter.
