Page 6 of Cuddling Sucks in Coffins
I quirked an eyebrow. “How so?”
“Walking across a room, stretching down to my toes... I can feel every part of my body reacting to a single movement. It’s freeing.” His mouth twisted. “I don’t think I’m explaining this very well.”
I cupped my chin in my palm, elbow on the table, and coasted the toe of my boot up his leg. “You’re doing fine.”
“In that case...” He gave a secret smile down at the tabletop, as if a memory had just played across its surface. “There was a day when I was able to move again after several years. I’ll never forget that feeling”—he gazed up at me, a sudden hardness to his expression—“of simply walking.”
“Move...again...” I swallowed down the hidden question mark in those two words.
Jacek’s past was violently scarred upon his back, and I didn’t know if his moving again was related or if I wanted to know. Someone had obviously hurt him, a man with a gilded smile that stuttered my breaths every time I saw it, and it hollowed out my heart to think about someone willfully looking past that just to torture him. To break him. But it hadn’t. He was the very opposite of broken.
“I was held captive for two hundred fifty years,” he continued. “Chained to the same wall I stared at for all that time. I memorized that wall, the zigzag of cracks, how the cold stone numbed my cheek so much when I passed out against it that I could hardly move my face to speak.”
My throat pulled tight, and I closed my eyes against the images his memories provoked. His back would’ve been left exposed to whatever horror had chained him up in the first place.
“Who?” I whispered.
He searched my eyes, his signature grin gone as well as any sign of distress, which proved a million times over how strong he was. “A slayer named Roseff.”
That truth slammed into me, stealing my breath and shattering my entire world view. Slayers were the good guys, at least according to me and how I saw my duty. If no slayer was supposed to live past twenty-one and survive Paul, then how could a slayer’s brain become so warped in such a short amount of time? I would never dream of torturing a vamp. My kills were quick—I made sure of that. I respected my role and the vamps, so much so that I slept with three of them. Still, though, I wasn’t a...monster. But I needed to be if I was going to defeat Paul.
Shit. Was that what had happened? Had this slayer tortured Jacek in order to survive Paul somehow? Was that what I would become?
“A...a slayer tortured you for two hundred fifty years?” I slid my hand across to the table for him to squeeze, for proof that he was here, with me, instead of chained to a wall somewhere.
He threaded his fingers through mine and held my hand with both of his. “I wasn’t the only one, but yes. Rather than killing us, Roseff would pick us apart slowly, study how long we could go without blood, and see what made us tick.”
“A madman.”
“I actually wasn’t a vampire when he captured me. I was human, twenty-four years old and working for the family business building wagons.” He shrugged. “But instead, I was meant to be food for the other vampires the slayer had captured. A striking case of wrong place, wrong time. There is no casual biting among vampires. We bite to change others or during sex. I consider myself lucky I was changed.”
I could only imagine why he thought that way.
“It was Sawyer who sprang all of us out,” he said quietly, his gaze vacant.
Sawyer had also been accustomed to chains when he was sold into slavery before the Necron Brotherhood “rescued” him. How could either of them function after something like that? It was a testament to their strength, their unerring will to do better than those who wronged them. It was humbling, honestly, that they chose to function around me.
“How do you do it?” I asked, barely able to push the words around the knot in my throat. “How can you sit in the same room with me, a slayer, after one of us did horrible things to you?”
He slid me a sideways look and half smiled. “You’re not my captor. Far from it.”
“Maybe that slayer was good at one time.”
“If so, I never saw it. Ever in that entire span of two hundred fifty years. With you, I see good, more and more every single day, more than I’ve seen in any slayer except...” A shadow crossed his face, another memory from another time, and he seemed to cave in on himself a little.
“Except what?”
He inhaled and let the breath out slowly. “In my two hundred seventy-four years, there has only been one slayer who used that role for cruel intentions. Not too bad, if you really think about it.”
That didn’t exactly answer my question, but I let it slide. For now. I didn’t want to make him relive anything he didn’t want to.
“So this slayer...” I hesitated to even use that word since he’d been anything but. “How did he live so long? What happened to him?”
“Roseff figured out a way to become immortal. A vampire slayer in the most literal way possible. That had been his goal all along, why he kidnapped humans and vampires alike, why he experimented on them, tortured them. He wanted to be the slayer forever, and he found out how.”
I rolled this over in my mind for a moment. “Then how am I here? The slayer?”
“I killed him,” he said matter-of-factly. “As soon as Sawyer set me free, I moved across my cell, driven by freedom and revenge...and killed him.”
