Chapter 4
Alice
"What time is your flight?"
David watched me with folded arms as I searched my carry-on bag, double-checking that I had my passport and travel documents. His demeanor betrayed his emotions, and when I caught his eye, he gave me a sad smile, his brown eyes missing that little crinkle in the corner that I adored.
"Why do you look so glum?" I asked. "I'll be back before you know it."
"Until the next time," he muttered.
I placed my hands on my hips and cocked a brow at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"
He sighed, running his hand through his short hair. "Al, you've spent most of our lives running away."
I frowned in confusion. "What do you mean?"
He slashed a hand through the air as he stepped toward me. "You've bounced around from city to city. Job to job. You have enough experience now to open your own interior design business, but you refuse to put roots anywhere." His eyes were desperate as he held a hand out to me.
"When you decided to stay in Kansas, I was going to move to be close to you. But then a year later, you moved to Wyoming, then to Colorado, and then to Florida. And then Whistler! You moved to a new country."
"It was only for four months." I had landed a position joining the team of a prestigious designer who had a contract to redesign rooms at a five-star hotel at the Whistler Blackcomb ski resort.
"And now you're leaving for a three-month vacation around Europe." His shoulders slump. "It just feels like you're running away again."
I sighed, smiling softly at him, reaching out to take his hand and squeeze it. I didn't want to admit that there was some truth in his words.
Okay, a lot of truth.
"I don't know how to explain it to you. I just…haven't found home."
His eyes blazed with a familiar emotion as he took a step closer. "Maybe you're so busy looking for home that you haven't realized it's standing right in front of you."
A sense of foreboding washed over me as the look on his face changed to determination. "Wha—?"
He snatched up my other hand, gripping them tightly in his.
"Every time I see you, it's getting harder and harder to keep my feelings to myself. I don't want you to go before I tell you this."
"David"
"I love you, Alice."
I took a deep breath, my eyes dropping from his. A heavy silence fell, the bombshell of his words hanging between us.
There were moments when I suspected his feelings for me ran deeper than brotherly, but I purposely ignored the heated looks and the casual touches that lingered.
I was never 100 percent sure because he always seemed to have a girlfriend: some short-term and a couple of long-term girls.
I dreaded the day he would tell me he was engaged to one of them.
The ones I did meet were never nice to me, seeing me as a threat, no matter how friendly I tried to be.
If push came to shove, I was sure David would drop his friendship with me if the girl he wanted to marry insisted upon it.
I had deep affection and love for David—friendly love—but I was also a little possessive of him, fearing that I'd lose the only person who'd stayed by my side.
"Alice, I'm in love with you," he reiterated in case I misinterpreted. He whirled away in frustration. "I have been since we were kids."
"David…" I said weakly.
"I don't think I can do this anymore."
My stomach bottomed out at his words, and panic started to kick in. "What do you mean?"
He turned back to me, his eyes taking on a glassy sheen. "I've loved you for years, and you've never seen me as anything more than a friend. That's not on you. I should've told you how I felt years ago. But I can't just be a friend to you anymore. It's too much."
I could feel my breathing start to grow shallow, and my heart kicked into a fast rhythm. "David…you've never… I've never given you the impression that I wanted more."
"I know. But I'm thirty now. I want to settle down and start a family. I can't keep waiting around for you to see me."
He stepped forward, cupping my cheeks and rubbing the tears that fell from my eyes.
"I want to be with you when you come back. I want us to try. If you still feel nothing more than friendship, we can end it. But please give us a chance."
His eyes were begging me as he implored me to say yes. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him if he would still cut off our friendship if I agreed to try but still didn't feel the same way. I was too scared his answer would be yes.
"I'll…think about it."
The excitement I'd carried for my European adventure slowly dissipated after David's confession and ultimatum.
I visited amazing sites—the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the French Riviera, the Palace of Versailles, the Spanish Steps, the Colosseum, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and the Statue of David.
I indulged in the regional cuisine, interacted with the locals, joined tourist groups, and even hired a car to take me deep into the vineyards of Tuscany.
But no matter how busy I kept myself, my anxiety became worse.
David's words repeated in my head like a warning bell of doom.
I felt a sense of dread as my vacation dwindled, knowing that he expected an answer when I returned.
But more than that, knowing the repercussions that would occur if I didn't give him the answer he wanted to hear. It made my stomach twist in knots.
It didn't help that my dreams became worse. I took sleeping pills most days, but they didn't seem to work anymore. I wondered if it was my body clock still adjusting to the time zone changes.
Although that possibility seemed less likely, the longer I was in Europe. My dreams became so vivid and frequent; I would wake up and burst into tears of misery and tiredness.
When my vacation ended, and I was back in the States, I finally allowed myself to decompress David's words. Did I love David? Of course. Was I in love with him…?
Maybe the reason I felt adrift was because David was my home. He was my safe space.
I was thirty. I couldn't spend my whole life looking for the next thing. I couldn't spend my entire life running, chasing after something that I couldn't find. Something I wasn't sure even existed.
Could that something be a life with my best friend? Setting down roots with him and starting a family? How could I know if I didn't try?
I did find him attractive. He had those golden-boy good looks that made him popular at school and popular with women.
He had a good, stable job. He was kind and funny; I'd never heard him say anything cruel to or about anyone.
I got along well enough with his family; after all, I used to live with them.
In time, I could see myself falling for him.
So, with my heart in my throat, I headed over to David's. His face broke into a smile when he saw me, but I could also see a sliver of trepidation in his eyes.
Before he opened his mouth to welcome me, I blurted out, "Let's be together."
His mouth dropped open as he stared at me with wide eyes. A look of joy crossed his face. "Are you sure?"
He looked so overwhelmingly happy; I couldn't let him down. I couldn't lose him.
"Yes." I lifted my head and gave him an encouraging smile. My mouth felt stiff with the effort.
He exhaled a breath before cupping my face. The look in his eyes was so intense and heavy with love that it took everything for me not to drop my gaze.
He slowly leaned forward and covered my lips with his. My first reaction was to recoil in shock. David was kissing me: David, my best friend.
Instead, I forced myself to stand ramrod straight, my hands tightly clasped at my sides. As his mouth moved gently against mine, my body slowly relaxed. My hands unclenched, and I released the nervous breath I was holding.
I opened my mouth and felt the soft slide of his tongue against mine.
It was…nice. Pleasant. Although I was relieved when he ended it.
Still, out of all the kisses I'd had, David's was the most…tolerable. I could work with that.
David pressed his forehead against mine. "I love you, Alice."
I swallowed past the lump in my throat and took a shaky breath.
"I love you too."
***
Acheron
"Nothing?" Von inquired. His voice was calm, but I could feel the heavily implied anticipation in his tone.
I shook my head, too dejected to speak. Waves of Von's disappointment touched me, and I instantly turned my sensor off. I already felt enough failure and frustration for both of us.
Last month, I finally discovered my first clue about my bonded mate's whereabouts.
She was standing with her back to me.
Always with her back to me.
I stared at the beautiful curve of her spine, the gentle slope of her high, firm ass, and her smooth, delicate, high neck…perfect for my mark. I knew her stature like the back of my hand. I could pick her out of a crowd, even though I'd yet to see her face.
She was wearing tiny shorts, her long legs on display. Jealous rage ripped through me at the thought of other men seeing what was mine. But I tamped it down and concentrated on searching for clues.
The blond man at her graduation had disappeared as the years passed, much to my relief. My visions of her were sporadic. Sometimes I would get a vision twice a month and then nothing for a year, sometimes longer. So whenever they hit me, I scoured the scene shrewdly for any sign of familiarity.
She looked to be alone with a small backpack strapped to her shoulders. Her head was bent, observing something in her hands. Suddenly, a gust of wind blew her hair forward, and with it, the paper she held nearly flew out of her hand. But she held firm, gathering it back against her chest.
The vision faded, but that didn't matter. I had what I needed. The paper she held was a map, one of those hop-on hop-off tourist buses that frequented sightseeing hot spots. Various pictures of famous attractions were dotted around the map, but the one that caught my eye was the Piazza San Pietro.
She was in Italy. Rome, to be exact. So close to me.
I immediately reached out to King Remus for permission to enter his Territory. He was a good friend, and once he heard that my fated mate could possibly be in his Territory, he immediately granted me permission to enter for an open-ended length of time.
I turned Rome inside out, touching base with my contacts in the area and recruiting trackers. But without a physical description or a scent, it appeared futile. I could feel…something though. A lingering energy or essence, as if she were a ghost whose spirit was adrift.
After thoroughly searching four times without luck, I expanded my area to the rest of Italy. However, the longer I looked and failed, the more disheartened I became.
I couldn't determine the time lapse between my vision and when it actually occurred. She could be anywhere by now.
Knowing that she was no longer in Italy, I moved my search to France. As I stood at the Trocadéro, my eyes zipping past at superhuman speed, zooming in and out, and dismissing each female, I felt an overwhelming sense of helplessness. I was looking for a needle in a haystack.
She could be anywhere in modern Europe or Asia or anywhere in the Americas. Hell, she could be living in a tiny shack at the bottom of the world for all I knew.
I didn't want to admit defeat, but I heard back from Von that Vladimir had been spotted in our Territory again.
Human killings had started to escalate over the last few years.
In a twist of sick fate, the human media had dubbed the killer "Vampire Slayer" after finding puncture wounds on the victims’ necks and their bodies drained of blood.
They touched on similar killings that had occurred over the last few decades, but I knew they had records of killings going back centuries.
I was not surprised that they failed to mention them, no doubt sticking to a reemergence of a serial killer or a copycat.
Their tiny minds would not allow them to consider a supernatural element. That literal monsters walked among them.
After the murders of King Artemis and Queen Sarai, the Kings joined forces and retaliated, killing most members of the BloodKin.
Vladimir, a powerful, old Vampire and the most vocal opposition to the Treaty of ManKind, had been fingered as the leader and creator of their group.
He had escaped and hid underground before popping up now and then with a new army of followers in an attempt to overthrow the Treaty.
This was the longest he had re-surfaced, and it was hard not to wonder if his reemergence had anything to do with a King finding his fated mate.
So with great reluctance, I returned home, my beating heart torn in two.