Page 12 of Resurrecting His Soul
“Oh my god! What’ve I done?”
“Shh, shh, my love. It’s going to be okay.”
Lisandra shook her head vigorously. “No! I killed her. Ricardo, I killed…”
He put his finger over her lips to stop her. “No, love. You didn’t. You just broke her neck. She’ll be fine. It takes far more than a simple broken neck to kill a vampire.”
Tears ran down her face before she even realized she was crying. Then she felt another set of hands on her shoulders and turned to see Allison. Even in that moment it occurred to her that her friend had some serious self-preservation deficits coming so close to her after she had just watched her break another vampire’s neck.
“I’ve got her,” Allison said to Ricardo. Then she nodded to the woman on the ground. “You take care of that. I will take care of Lisandra.”
She felt Ricardo hesitate, and part of her wanted him to tell Allison no because as much as she didn’t want him to coddle her and tell her that what she’d done was okay, her desire for him to hold her was stronger. When he finally nodded to Allison, he let her go and said, “Okay,” she dropped her head and let more tears fall.
Lisandra felt like she was outside of her body watching everything unfold when Allison directed her with her arm around her waist to go inside, and she watched Ricardo pick up the woman’s lifeless body from the busted patio. Allison helped her into the main house and to her room. As soon as she heard the bedroom door close behind her, she dropped to her knees and sobbed into her hands. Allison was there a moment later, wrapping her in a hug just like she’d done so many times after she found Lisandra bruised and beaten down. It was like nothing had changed and everything had changed all at the same time. She believed Ricardo; believed that the woman would be okay because in their time together she’d learned that he was anything but a liar. Still, she had not known that breaking Melina’s neck would not kill her when she’d done it. She had meant for her to die, and that knowledge scared her and made her understand Ricardo’s past even more. It only took seeing Melina and hearing her crass words to send her on a murderous spiral, so how could anyone fueled by the emotions of being a vampire make it through a millennium without killing again and again. Keeping her hands clean as a vampire was going to be a lot harder than she had realized. She needed Ricardo more than she had realized before, and now he was probably going to throw her to the curb because she’d attacked his progeny.
ChapterEight
Melina
When Melina woke up in the field outside the deserted carnival where she and Ricardo had stopped for a night of fun, she had been pissed but confused. Why had Ricardo snapped her neck? She’d even considered not going to find Ricardo, but who was she kidding. She’d been in love with him as long as she’d been a vampire, despite the fact that he’d shown no interest in her as anything more than a distraction from his eternity of loneliness. She was a glutton for punishment. Still, she’d never known anger like that which flooded her when she walked into his backyard and saw him wrapped around that woman, his tongue down her throat in a kiss that rivaled anything she’d ever seen in all the romance movies she had ever watched. Then she realized what that familiar scent had been when she’d first walked onto the property. She knew she had smelled that enticing scent before, but something about it had been off. Yeah, it had been off because that asshole had broken her neck and discarded her, then turned her last meal into a fucking vampire and brought her home!
Her rage hadn’t made her fast enough. The second that bitch heard her voice she’d attacked, and once again Melina woke up with a kink in her neck. But this time she had blood matted to the back of her head. She rubbed the back of her head and felt the stickiness on her hand. “What the fuck?” She tried to remember how that had… oh yeah, the bitch had used her head to bust up the patio concrete just before breaking her neck. Melina jumped out of the bed someone had put her in and ran to the door to snatch it open. That bitch was going to die.
The door was locked. She yanked on it again, harder, but it didn’t move. The problem with being trapped in the home of another vampire is they knew what it took to keep others like themselves locked down.
“Dammit!” She slammed her fists against the door. “Ricardo! Open this door or I’m coming through it.”
The door opened quickly, but before she could react, she was shoved back and fell onto the bed she’d just vacated. Before she could blink, she found a snarling Ricardo in her face, his fangs fully descended in all their killing glory. His usually bright blue eyes were nearly black with rage. She was unable to stop the shiver that ran through her. For the first time since he created her, she was truly afraid. He’d killed plenty of humans in front of her, but she’d never seen the kind of rage that was radiating off of him in that moment.
He got right in her face, so close she could hear his teeth grinding together. “You lay one finger on her and I will rip your head off and feed it to the werewolves in the next town. Do you understand?”
“Ricardo, she attacked me.” There was a shakiness to her words, and she hated herself for it. “What the hell’s she even doing here? And why is she a vampire?”
“You are lucky I didn’t let her kill you for what you did to her. Lucky I haven’t killed you, yet. She almost died!”
Melina blinked a few times then she pinched her arm trying to wake herself up, but it hurt so she wasn’t dreaming. Who was this man… this vampire in front of her? “Of course I almost killed her. She is… was food. That’s what we do!”
Ricardo growled and moved away from her. She jumped when he slammed his fist into the wall, cracking the sheetrock from floor to ceiling. “Not her,” he said without turning around.
“What?” She was so confused.
He turned to face her and drove his hands through his inky hair. She hated how much she wished it were her hands, even in that moment. “Not anyone,” he said. “Not anymore.”
Melina’s eyes grew wide, and she pushed herself off the bed and narrowed her eyes at Ricardo. “What do you mean we don’t kill anyone? We’re vampires. We have to feed.”
“Yes, but we don’t have to kill to survive.”
“That’s half the fun.”
Ricardo ran his hands down his face, and she could tell he was grinding his teeth by the hard set of his jaw. “Killing isn’t something you should see as fun. I know it’s my fault you feel that way. I taught you wrong. I’ve just been angry for so long I let my anger change me. But things are different now.”
It was her turn to be angry, and she moved to get in his face, but when he narrowed his eyes at her, she stopped with a couple feet still between them. “What, you got some little plaything and suddenly you don’t want to kill anymore?”
Ricardo shook his head. “I always knew killing was wrong; I just didn’t see any reason to fight that side of my vampire nature. No one ever gave me a reason—until now. I shouldn’t have allowed someone else’s fear to shape the man I became, but I did, and I drug you down with me. I’m sorry for that. We can both be better. Our survival doesn’t depend on taking the lives of others.”
Melina backed up to the bed and slowly sat back down. This chick had brainwashed Ricardo in a matter of days. It was like she had woken up in a damn twilight zone; a nightmare she couldn’t wake herself from.
“I already enjoyed our life together,” she said quietly, but she knew he could hear her.
