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CHAPTER 30

Mercy

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I awoke to the potent stench of cooking meat. Bacon, to be exact. I had to swallow back the nausea climbing to my throat as I entered the kitchen. The curtains were drawn tight, blocking out the sunlight. The kitchen was lit with soft gold overhead lights hanging from the ceiling.

“Good morning, beautiful,” Maurice said, placing three strips of bacon on my plate. “I’ll make you more if that’s not enough.” His black, tousled hair fell over one side of his face, and his eyes looked darker, covered in shadows as if he hadn’t slept.

Of course, he didn’t sleep. He’s a vampire.

As Maurice leaned back against the counter by the stove with his arms folded loosely over his chest, I sat, staring at the food he placed in front of me.

“What’s wrong, darling?” he asked when I didn’t immediately dive into my plate. “Is there a problem with what I made?” I blinked, looking up at him. His expression was worrisome, as if my reaction to not eating what he had cooked for me had offended him. “That bacon is only for you, Mercy. Vampires are a little more selective when it comes to our appetite.” A touch of a smile on his lips lasted a few seconds before his mouth flattened into a frown. “Fine. Is there something else you wanted me to make you?”

My eyes glanced down at the plate again. “Not this,” I admitted. “Sorry, Maurice, I don’t think I ate things like this.”

“Meat?” He paused before walking to my side and looking down at me. “Mercy, of course you ate meat. This must be from the attack. Perhaps you’re not feeling well this morning.”

I slid the plate further from me so I didn’t have to smell it so close. “Yeah,” I said, unconvinced. “Maybe.”

Maurice stepped behind me and placed his palms on my shoulders, his long fingers wrapping around until they rested on my chest. His lips touched my ear. “I can draw you a bath if you’d like,” he said. “We still have an hour before we need to leave.”

I shook my head as the pressure from his hands squeezed at my shoulders, causing an uneasy feeling in my chest as pain itched at my skin. Maurice was squeezing me too hard.

“I can make you something else,” he said. “How about a smoothie?”

The breath I held slowly left my mouth when he eased up the pressure. I looked up, meeting his eyes, before nodding. That hint of a frown was back, but when I smiled, his mood shifted, becoming less intense than before. It was as if everything he did had an agenda, and every reaction that went against that would immediately set him off. It was like walking on eggshells, and everything about him felt fucking wrong.

He pulled frozen strawberries from the freezer, grabbed a glass jar of orange juice from the fridge, and poured them all into a blender.

“Bon appetite,” he said as he handed me my smoothie.

“Thank you.” I smiled and sipped slowly. It was good. The strawberry blended with orange juice was the perfect combination I had been craving.

“I have a few friends stopping by here this morning, then a moving company is coming over to help us pack the rest of our things.”

“What are we taking?” I asked. “That’s quite a trip to take all this stuff.”

“Most of it is being sold and I’ll donate the rest. We’ll ship a few things to Huntington Beach. We only need to pack our clothes and some personal items.”

Maurice’s phone rang, and he answered on the second ring.

He flashed me a small smile before he excused himself from the kitchen.

After I finished my smoothie, I stepped outside and took a deep breath, taking in the air around me. I looked over the balcony and saw a few deer running through the nearby clearing.

Where were we exactly? All I saw was a forest surrounding us. No other houses, not even a road.

I turned around, and Maurice stood near the sliding door, watching me, but he didn’t step outside. I walked up to him and slid the door back open. “It’s nice today. Maybe we can have breakfast out here.”

He shook his head. “I can’t.”

“You can’t come outside?”

I looked up. Rays from the morning sunrise shone onto the deck. “Oh, God. I’m such an idiot. Vampires can’t go in the sun, right?”

He nodded.

But then I thought about where we were moving. “But aren’t we moving to California? It’s sunny like three hundred times a year there. Seems a vampire would avoid a place like that.”

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