Chapter 15 #3
I laughed dryly. “That would be incredibly toxic. If I couldn’t trust you to control yourself, why would I want to be with you?
That sounds exhausting, and I’m already exhausted enough as it is.
If you tell me that you love me and don’t want anyone else, I will believe you, but you have to mean it.
If it ever turned out to be untrue…” I trailed off because I didn’t need to say what would happen.
It wasn’t a threat. It was the truth. If I trusted my fragile heart with Vale and he shattered it, that would be it for me.
“I will never betray you; I swear it.” Vale got down on one knee before me. “Since meeting you, I’ve seen only your face when I look at other people. I wonder how you’re doing, what you’re doing, and if you’re safe.”
“You sound obsessed,” I gave him a shy smile.
“I am. I’m a grumpy mess, and I’m utterly obsessed with you, Echo. I know what love is now. It’s not sappy songs and grand, empty gestures meant to impress the world. It’s you. It’s only you. I love you, and if you’ll have me, I will promise my life to you, I swear it.”
“Wow.” I blinked rapidly to fight back the tears tinging my eyes. “That’s… wow.”
“You don’t have to decide anything now,” Vale said. “I can wait.”
“You’re an idiot if you think I’m going to refuse you after that speech,” I said, rubbing my stinging eyes in case a tear had managed to break free.
“You’ll give me a chance?”
“I’m not giving you a chance, Vale. I’m giving you myself. Don’t make me regret it, okay? I’ve had enough loss in my life, and I can’t take any more.”
“I will spend the rest of my life making sure you only have good things in yours.”
I gave a sad smile because Vale’s life was likely to be far longer than mine. “You’re definitely obsessed.”
“You have no idea.”
“You sent me food, didn’t you?” That piece of the puzzle was obvious when I looked at it through a Vale-colored filter.
“I might have.”
“How did you know what I like?”
Vale rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. “I can see things about people when I drink from them. I get impressions, snippets of their lives, and random bits of information about them.”
I paled. “What did you see?”
“I saw your life, Echo. I saw what happened to your parents and to your foster parents.”
I gripped Vale’s hand tightly. I didn’t know how to feel about that, but it was a relief to know I wouldn’t have to tell him everything.
Plus, if he already knew me so intimately and still claimed to love me, then I wouldn’t feel like I needed to dumb down how bad things got for me to keep from seeming like too much work.
Actually, I did know how to feel about it.
Horny. I felt horny. Dicks are funny that way. The weirdest things will set them off.
Speaking of horny.
“Hold on a second. Baz and Vix fucked? I thought they were twins?”
Vale gave a dry chuckle. “A lot of people think that, but they’re not related at all as far as I know. Even if they were, I doubt it would have stopped them. Does that change how you think of them?”
“Hardly. Morality is overrated. You wouldn’t happen to have any photos or videos of you three hooking up, would you? Purely for research purposes, I assure you.”
Vale sputtered, and I nearly broke, but I kept going. “Actually, do you think there’s a chance Paris will let me, Vix, and Baz have a three-way? If you got to do it, I should get to do it at least once, right? It’s only fair.”
Vale’s eyes burned with orange fire, like, actually, for real lit up, and I realized I might have taken the joke a little too far.
Vale’s hand nearly crushed mine as he whispered, “Don’t. Just… don’t. I know you weren’t serious, and I know it’s not fair, but I can’t think about you being with someone else. It makes the monster difficult to contain.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll try to remember that.”
“Please do,” Vale said curtly.
“So…” I began, digging the toe of one shoe into the snow. “What happens when your monster gets out of control?”
“I eat someone.”
“Like literally, or do you drink their blood? You said the monster can be sated with blood. Does it make you fully eat people when you lose control?”
“Is there a difference? Feeding is feeding.”
“There might be a bit of a difference,” I said, trying to work around to what I really wanted to ask. “One has a higher survivability rate.”
“Not for me, it doesn’t.”
“And yet here I sit,” I pointed out. “You’ve lost it and fed from me twice, and I’m perfectly fine.”
“You’re an outlier,” Vale returned gruffly. “My monster seems to like you.”
“Is that so?” I asked, trying to be as nonchalant as possible.
Vale, not being stupid, lifted his head and gave me a measuring look before saying, “No. Absolutely not.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Is this a no because you don’t want to, or because you’re afraid of hurting me?”
Vale pursed his lips together and looked away, but his red ears told me what his answer was.
“You said your monster likes me. Does that mean it was hard for you to stop?”
“…No. My monster compelled me to bite you, but it had no interest in killing you. But that doesn’t mean—”
“You want to, though, don’t you?” I interrupted.
Maybe I should have stopped. A sane person would have dropped the matter entirely, but I couldn’t forget how it felt when Vale fed from me.
How I’d felt when he’d threatened to stalk me through the darkness.
Even if he’d been fucking with me, he’d been oddly specific with his words. Like he’d actually thought about it.
“You want to chase me down, don’t you? Deep inside, there’s a part of you, Vale, not the monster, who wants to hunt me down, to bite me, to claim me. You want to do terrible things to me, don’t you?”
Vale sucked in a sharp breath, and his eyes glowed once more with an unholy light.
“You’ve healed me before,” I pressed. “You can heal me again, can’t you? If you got a little too rough?”
Vale’s eyes burned as he nodded slowly. The clever mind of the man I was falling in love with seemed to be losing ground fast as something dark inside him took over.
“Tell me you want it,” I said, echoing what he’d said to me when he took me on top of his desk.
Vale snarled, an inhuman sound that had my dick take notice.
I stood up, took a few steps away, and repeated softly, “Tell me you want it.”
“I want it.” Vale’s voice was barely recognizable, and his body language shifted to that of a cat who’d just noticed a mouse.
My eyes darted to the magically lit woods around me. I quickly mapped out a path and said, “Then come and get it.”