Page 51 of Lair

He did not like that.

“Yes?” Adrian says in the dining room of the Lair, his brow furrowed.

I force my voice steady, sweat gathering on the backs of my legs, making them stick to my chair. I’m trembling all over now. I feel as if I’m going to be sick. “Because I was with a man who was... who was...”

And there it is, my evil talisman—what I thought I’d forgotten. The memory of Josh at his sinister work. The look on his face when I woke later that night, and found him pulling my shorts to my knees...

My dark secret. The thing I hate about myself. The thing I thought I’d left behind in Oregon, come back to me.

Always trying to define me.

“And I can’t,” I half-gasp at last, having to remember how to speak, how to be a person again, the hot tears building behind my eyelids. “I can’t do that again.”

Adrian studies me with his blue-black eyes. He knows something momentous has just been shared, but does not know what. He looks as if he wants to rise out of his chair, perhaps to comfort me. But he forces himself still. “I can’t change what I am,” he says finally in a careful, haunted voice. “But I promise: I will never do anything to you that you don’t want me to.”

Something small and humbling flutters inside me. “So, you wish you weren’t”—I wave a hand—“what you are?”

His eyes drop in a grimace. “Yes.”

“Why?” I ask, hearing the test in my voice. I gesture at the wealth around us. “Why give all this up? Isn’t this life what everyone wants?”

He lets out a wry snort. “Is it? My feeding... it’s a need. I will not deny there is a... hideous ecstasy.” He studies his open hands, a murderer’s hands, his eyes glittering. “But that does not mean I love my violence. Or am ignorant to the fact that it does not bring me love.”

So he knows that, at least.

He closes his hands, a stoniness in his voice now. “This is not what I want. I have never wanted this.” The veins in his knuckles bulge. “I have tried to kill myself. Many times.”

Many times.

He’s never told anyone this. I can tell by the angry clenching of his jaw, the skittering of his eyes. And so I ask my next question, to rescue him from the terrible silence that’s fallen between us. “Can you be turned back?”

He thinks on it, his brow creasing. “Yes, if the vampire who turned me was killed. But Volok...” He shakes his head. An impossible notion. When he looks up, his eyes burn. “But I have you now. If you’ll have me.”

I suck in a long, measured breath. “What do you expect here? Do you want me to—”

“No. No, I would never ask that of you.”

“Good. Because I’d never become like you.”

He winces, nods. That had been expected.

The next question hovers in the back of my throat, waiting to be asked: When will he feed again? And how will I feel when he does?

But I push this away. I’m not ready to think about that.

“So, if we were to... I’d just grow old, and you’d never change...”

“Yes.”

I think on that. Would it be bearable? To fall prey to the harrowing indignities of age, while he remained perfect, unchanged and glistening with youth?

At least he’d been honest with me. There was that to hold to as we glided on—through these uncharted, perilous waters—into the next stage of our lives.

He hated his violence, after all. He was not Josh. I was not breaking my promise to myself. My promise to never let another man do violence against me.

I lift my eyes. “Okay, then.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” Cailee growls through the phone. “You actually did it. You seduced a yacht owner. And you haven’t called me in weeks because, what? You’ve been locked up in his suite as his plaything?”

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