Page 41 of Resurrecting His Soul
“Apparently you were just her rebound, and she’s finally got the man back she really wanted.”
He shook his head. “No. She doesn’t want anything to do with him.”
“That’s just what she wanted you to think.”
He closed the slight gap he had left between them and snapped at her. “There is no way she would go with that bastard. If she did go anywhere with him without a fight, it was to keep Allison safe. She would do anything to keep her friend safe.”
Melina rolled her eyes. “I’m beginning to think I seriously misjudged you. She wrapped you around her finger so easily.”
“Watch yourself,” he said. His jaw clenched almost as tightly as his fists were hanging at his sides. The urge to slam one into her head was almost overpowering. The old him would have killed her without stopping to think she might lead him to finding Lisandra. “I will not listen to you speak poorly about Lisandra. Especially when you should be thanking her.”
“Ha!” Melina laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding. She falls into our life, and you essentially kick me to the curb for her without so much as a goodbye hug after two years together, and I’m supposed to thank her. Shit. You’ve got the blinders pulled down so far, I don’t know how you saw to tie your shoes this morning.”
Slamming his fist into the wall next to her face, he felt little shame when he took some pleasure when she flinched. “She is the only reason you are still breathing. So, when I suggest you watch your mouth, you should heed my words.”
Melina’s eyes went hard, turning nearly black with anger. She put both hands on his chest and shoved him back. He allowed her this because he wanted to keep her talking in the hopes she would slip up and eventually share some clue that would lead to Lisandra because there was no way he believed she had lost Jameson.
“She is the only reason you want to kill me!” she yelled. “We were fine. Happy! Then she came along, and her blood smelled sweeter to you than others. And suddenly we are supposed to turn into these pathetic saints. Vampires afraid to even feed on our only possible food source.”
Ricardo turned away from her and ran his hands through his hair, ready to pull the shit out. He might not be a visionary who could predict the future, but there was one thing he knew would be true for the remainder of his immortal life. No matter what might come at him in the future, not killing Melina in that moment would be the most difficult thing he ever had to refrain from doing.
He had to find a way to tamper down his anger before he went too far and couldn’t pull back the reins and wound up hurting or killing her. Even if Lisandra didn’t believe it, he knew that there was a very real part of himself that was an absolute monster. He might have become a killer because of what Emily said to him right after his change, but he cannot blame centuries of human life taken at his hands on one woman he used to believe he loved. If he kept feeding into his anger, he would kill Melina and then he might never find Lisandra.
He decided to bring things back to something real. Something he had never expected to share with anyone, especially Melina. Hell, until he fell for Lisandra, he had tried to hide it from himself. He turned back to her, met her eyes, and sighed. Quietly he said, “I wasn’t happy.”
Her face scrunched. “What are you talking about?”
He let out a deep breath. “You said we were happy before. I wasn’t. I wasn’t happy. Before meeting Lisandra, I had never been happy as a vampire.”
“You sure could have fooled me,” she said.
He offered her a small smile. “That was the point.”
Melina walked back over to the couch and plopped down on it like a spoiled teenager who had just found out they couldn’t go to the Friday night football game.
“If you were so unhappy, why didn’t you do anything about it?”
He lowered his head and looked at her over his eyebrows. “I did do something.”
“Must not have been anything good since you were so unhappy,” she said. She sounded like a child whining, but he let it go.
“What I did was, indeed, not a good thing.” He paused, bracing himself for her reaction after his next words. “I made you.”
He watched her, waiting for it to come. The explosion when she realized the implication of his words. He waited for her to jump up, scream, yell, hit him, break the furniture, any sign of anger. What she did was so unexpected he nearly fell back onto the couch himself in shock. Melina slumped further back into the cushions on the couch, her body slouching, and let her head fall so that her eyes were downcast on her own lap. He was still able to see them, however, and he watched while her eyes grew wide and began to well up with tears. Then, her shoulders began to shake and soon there were tears falling down her cheeks. She held her hands in her lap, nervously rubbing her fingers together like it was her job, and kept her eyes trained on her hands, never looking up.
It hit him in that moment. Lisandra had been right about her. Melina herself had tried to tell him the truth, but he had not wanted to hear it. Before Lisandra, he had convinced himself love was nothing more than fiction, and something he did not deserve even if it were real. When Melina had said it to him only days earlier, he’d ignored it as nothing more than a young vampire clinging to a crush on her maker. When he saw her reaction to his words, to him saying creating her was not a good thing, it became all too clear. Melina was in fact in love with him. Yet another thing on the list of many things that were his fault. Had he not been so blind, he would have seen her feelings for him, and maybe he could have navigated things with her better, somehow. No, what he should have done was left her alive. Not taken her human life from her in the first place.
He was torn between his guilt from making her a vampire, and his new understanding that she was innately bad to her core. Maybe it was because he saw that she loved him, or believed she did, but her tears did not make up for her actions. No matter how much he wanted to blame himself for the monster she was, she had chosen her current path, and his anger and need to avenge Lisandra was stronger than his guilt, but he had to try to get her to take him to Lisandra. He could deal with her betrayal after he had Lisandra safely back in his arms.
He took a seat on the opposite end of the couch and tried to look at her without sneering. “Melina,” he spoke softly. “I am sorry.”
She sniffed and wiped her tears with the back of her hand, but didn’t look at him. “Yeah. You’re sorry you made me. I get it.”
He took a deep breath. “Well, yes,” he said. She looked at him then—or glared at him was a more apt perception. “I am sorry that I took away the rest of your life.”
She started shaking her head. “You didn’t take my life. You gave me an immortal one.”
“No,” he said. “I took away the life you should have had. You should have lived a normal human life. One where you would have had the opportunity to fall in love with a man capable of loving you back. Someone who would love you so much they could not live without you. Where you would have married that person and had kids. Lived a full life together, and died knowing you had a good, full life. I took the possibility of that life away from you. I gave you an eternity of blood, and to make it worse, I taught you the only way to live this life as a vampire was to become evil. To become a monster.”
