4. Chapter 4 #3
Grace’s eyes focused on me again, and the fury returned because grief without fury would have swallowed her.
“Then Lucian Devereux found me. Or I found him. I don’t even know anymore.”
Finally, a name. Lucian Devereux. He thinks he’s untouchable. He will soon learn how touchable he is.
She continued. “Two years. Two years of being food. Two years of being punished for surviving. Two years of learning exactly what vampires are.”
“Some vampires,” I said quietly.
She pointed at me. “Do not.”
I closed my mouth.
“Not yet,” she said. “You don’t get that correction yet.”
Fair.
She pushed damp hair back from her face with a shaking hand. “And now you’re telling me that after all of that, some mythical goddess looked down at the smoking ruin of my life and decided, you know what Gracelyn Marlow needs? A vampire mate.”
She laughed again, but it broke before it finished.
“Not just a vampire. A king. Because apparently regular nightmares weren’t ambitious enough.”
“Grace—”
“I sound insane.” Her voice dropped, and for the first time the anger faltered into something more frightening. “I can hear myself. I sound like I’ve lost my mind.”
“No.”
“Yes.” She looked around the room—the stone, the silk, the old furniture, the decanter full of blood wine catching light like something ceremonial and obscene.
“I’m sitting in a palace after being turned into a vampire by a man who says I’m his mate because a goddess chose me.
That is not a sentence a sane woman says. ”
“You are sane.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know shock. I know trauma. I know the mind can fracture around impossible things and still remain itself.”
I reached across the table. It was a mistake.
Not because I moved quickly. I did not. Not because I meant harm. I meant comfort, which was sometimes only another name for selfishness if offered to someone who had not asked. My hand covered hers for the briefest moment.
She snatched it back.
Her whole body followed. Shoulder, spine, breath. A flinch so deep it had no relation to thought. Reflex dragged her away before choice could speak. The chair legs rasped beneath her. Her hand folded against her chest as if burned.
I withdrew at once. The bond snarled. I silenced it.
“I am sorry,” I said.
She stared at my hand where it had retreated to my side of the table.
“I will not reach again unless you ask,” I said.
Her breathing trembled. It took several seconds before she nodded, and even then the nod looked less like forgiveness than acknowledgment of a rule written down.
“I will never hurt you,” I said.
She looked at me then, and I wished I had chosen different words. Promises were cheap in the mouths of monsters. I had killed enough oath-breakers to know how easily language could dress rot in silk.
So I added, “I do not expect you to believe that because I say it. I will prove it, or I will be nothing but another man who wanted credit for words.”
Her expression shifted by a fraction.
“We will take this one day at a time,” I continued. “One hour, if necessary. You will be taught what you are. You will be fed. Protected. Given answers.”
“And if I want to leave?”
Outside the door, Taras’s heartbeat did not change. But his stance adjusted.
I held Grace’s eyes. “You cannot leave the estate.”
Her face hardened instantly.
I lifted one hand, palm open, then lowered it again before the gesture could become too much.
“Not as punishment. Not as ownership. Lucian will be searching for you. If he does not already know you came to me, he will soon. He held you for two years. He brought you to Vegas. He will have people, watchers, debts owed. If you leave these wards before I understand the scope of his reach, I cannot guarantee your safety.”
“Your guarantee isn’t the measure of my freedom.”
“No,” I said. “But his intention to reclaim you is the measure of immediate danger.”
Her jaw flexed.
I watched the lawyer return, wounded but present. She did not like my answer. She searched it for locks, hidden claims, legal traps disguised as concern.
“And if I decide later that I want to go?”
“Then we will discuss later when later exists.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is the only honest one I can give tonight.” I leaned back, forcing distance into my posture. “If you ask me whether I would let you walk out this door and into Lucian’s hands, the answer is no.”
Her eyes flashed.
“If you ask me whether I intend to keep you as a prisoner,” I said, “the answer is also no.”
“How convenient that you get to define the difference.”
“You may define it too.”
She gave me a look of open disbelief. I wanted to smile. Not because any part of this was amusing, but because there she was again, blade-bright in the ruins.
“I am not stupid,” she said.
“No. You are not.”
“I have no desire to press my luck outside these walls. I barely know what happened to me. I don’t know what I can do, or what I need, or whether I’m going to wake up tomorrow craving the nearest pulse.
” She swallowed, and the disgust that crossed her face was turned inward.
“I’m not running into the desert to prove a point. ”
Relief moved through me so swiftly I had to keep it from showing too plainly.
“But don’t confuse that with trust,” she said.
“I will not.”
Her gaze dropped to the plate. The steak remained untouched, cut into neat pieces that had begun to cool at the edges. The decanter stood between us, red catching the lamplight, patient as temptation and necessity.
I wanted to tell her to eat. I wanted to order it, which was precisely why I did not.
Grace sat across from me with one hand still held close to her chest, the other resting near the fork but not yet eating. She picked up the glass and slowly took her first drink, and I sighed, inwardly satisfied that she at least trusted enough to do that.