Page 37 of King of the Damned
I smirk. “Someone had to make sure you weren’t the first human to turn into a vampire from a simple bite.”
My teasing doesn’t bring brightness to her face as I thought it would, so instead, I change the subject.
“I am sorry for last night,” I tell her.
“Which part?” she asks, and I can hear the pain in her voice.
“All of it,” I admit.
Adelasia stands from the bed and I do so with her. I try to reach for her, but she steps back and then looks up at me. She’s quiet for a long moment, and while she gathers whatever thoughts are in her head, I find myself staring at her lips.
I take a step closer to her and she doesn’t recoil this time. I press our foreheads together and the smell of me lingering all over her excites me all over again.
“Why do you make it so hard to hate you, Adelasia?” I whisper against her lips.
“Maybe you’re not meant to,” she whispers back. “And I think that scares you.”
I crave more of her, more than I allowed myself to take last night. More than I’m willing to take now and more than I ever should have taken in the first place.
“I may not know everything about your world, Kaius, but don’t mistake me for a fool. I had the same vow on my skin, and I think you're not sorry at all about last night.”
I don’t like the way she’s suddenly gained the ability to read me like an open book, and I find myself feeling defensive.
“You think I’m nothing more than a heartless, soulless, wretched monster. Why would I be capable of feeling anything for you?”
She doesn’t back down from my challenge, and instead meets my poison with tenderness.
“I don’t believe you’re any of those things, Kaius. I think for the first time in a long time, you feel like you have something to lose.” She uses her free hand to tenderly caress my cheek. I close my eyes and lean into it. “Tell me what it is you’re so afraid of.”
I knit my brows together as a physical pain shoots through my heart. “Everything,” I admit quietly, and my shoulders slump inward in defeat, because I’m in too deep now. The truth is there, and she’s going to pull it out of me, even if she breaks her own heart in the process.
“Tell me,” she begs.
I feel…ready to weep. Fractured. I sigh and lift her chin so she has to look at me. I want to see her let me go and watch the betrayal flash across her eyes. I want to watch her hate me all over again, however painful it will be for me.
“Adelasia, I haven’t felt my own heartbeat in centuries. It’s grown cold from all those years of loneliness. You’re the only thing in my life that makes me feel something other than despair. First, you gave mehope. Then you made me feel…alive, and in doing so stripped away that hope. I hate you for it.”
I sink to my knees and tangle my fingers with hers. “I want to be a human again,” I whisper. “I didn’t realize until last night when I kissed you that my stolen mortality has never been my true curse. It’syou,my sweet agony. We are bound by a cruel fate to fall in love, and you are bound by a cruel fate to end this curse of vampirism.”
A single tear falls from her eye and I reach up to catch it with my thumb. “The scar on my back…” she whimpers, finally understanding why I’ve tried so hard to keep this from her.
“Adelasia, I am so, so sorry,” I whisper up from my place on the floor. “I never intended for either of us to grow attached, and I didn’t know until last night what we truly meant to each other.”
“So that’s the truth then? That I was a means to an end for you?” She shoves my hands away from her.
“Adelasia, please,” I beg, finally standing and trapping her between my arms. “I wanted my mortality back so badly that I would have done anything to get it. But now–” I cup her cheek and turn her head to force her blue eyes to meet my red eyes. I sigh, my shoulders sinking in desperation at this impending heartbreak. “I’d live the rest of eternity as a vampire if it meant you got to experience the joy of a full human life that I never got to have.”
She turns her head away from me, tears flowing freely now. “Breaking the curse isn’t a ritual,” she whispers, and then finds enough bravery to look at me. “It’s a sacrifice.” Her voice breaks when she adds, “You were going to kill me.”
I shake my head. “Only in the beginning.”
“Is that supposed to make it better?!” she shouts, trying to wriggle free of my grasp. “All this time I knew you would kill me, and you were too much of a coward to admit it to my face when I asked.”
“I may be a coward, but there is no curse or cause that would lead me to harm you now. I swear it.”
“You already have,” she cries. Then, she attempts to shove me away. “Let me go. Kaius, let me go!”
When I don’t yield, she does something I never imagined she would. She conjures a stake into her hand.
