Chapter 41
Nicholas
“I’ve gotta go.”
Mateo stepped in front of him. “Will you wait a second? What the fuck is going on? Why was Gabriel here?”
“I-I don’t know, but he saw.” Nicholas tried to get around him, but Mateo blocked him again.
“Saw what?”
“Damn it! Get out of my way, Mateo.”
“Not until you talk to me. What did Gabriel see?”
Nicholas drew his shoulders back, prepared to go through his best friend if he had to. The man he loved more than anything was hurting, and he had to get to him. Had to explain that what he saw wasn’t… He jerked his head toward the club.
“Sean,” he breathed.
“He’s okay. A little banged up, but the hangover’s what’s going to kill him. Now, please, tell me what’s going on.”
Nicholas swallowed, digging into Gabriel’s jacket for his lighter, crushing it between his fist.
“Sean kissed me. H-he must have seen Sean kiss me.”
Mateo sagged. “Fuck.”
“Yes, fuck. And now I have to find him.”
Nicholas tasked Mateo with making sure the others got home okay while he took off for Gabriel’s place. He wasn’t sure if he’d find him there, but he didn’t know where else to look.
In the interest of Gabriel’s privacy and safety, he had the Uber driver drop him off a couple miles away, then ran the remaining distance at top speed. He was a blur passing in the night, a stiff wind rustling the trees.
A snarl of fury came from inside the house, rippling through the night as Nicholas hit the bottom of the drive.
He stood motionless, terrified to go in.
Glass shattered, yanking his gaze to the upstairs windows as the dogs barked from somewhere downstairs.
Opting for the coward’s way out, he kept low and rounded the side of the house.
A door slammed, and Gabriel’s normally light footsteps pounded down the foyer steps. The dogs’ distress intensified as he charged through the living room. Nicholas couldn’t see it, but he heard it all, felt the intensity of Gabriel’s rage through the soles of his feet.
A loud crack sounded from the patio, and Nicholas peeked around the corner to see Gabriel pitch both halves of the loveseat into the water. He broke the low table over his knee, tossing the pieces over the cliff too. He was shirtless, heaving, and glowed gold.
Zeke and Kai stood near the open wall, barking at him. Maxim nipped and tugged at the hem of his pants in an effort to drag him into the house.
Gabriel shut them inside before falling to his knees in front of the ocean. He lowered his head, and Nicholas nearly stepped out into the open, his instinct to take Gabriel’s pain away a honed blade sinking deep. He waited and watched instead.
Moments later, Gabriel fell forward onto his palms, his head snapping back audibly. The sound akin to a tree branch struck by lightning.
His claws bit into the rocky surface, small chunks chipping away as his skin rippled and stretched against bulging bones. Nicholas watched on, mouth agape.
Gabriel’s skin lightened, bronze against gold. The seams of his pants tore apart, and his shoes split and fell away as his feet grew.
Nicholas covered his mouth with a shaky palm as Muharib broke free. His fangs were startling, twice the size of Gabriel’s, and they dripped blood as the mangled flesh of his bottom lip stitched together.
He widened his legs with a hiss to accommodate the slow expansion of his cock, and the markings along his massive limbs opened like tiny lava-filled fissures. The amber liquid shimmered iridescently.
Gabriel let out a bloodcurdling sound as his nose twisted with a snap, and his hair now curtained his face.
The transference of Gabriel’s emotional pain had been physically excruciating for Nicholas. He could still feel the remnants of it, the weakening in his bones. What Gabriel went through now seemed far worse in comparison. Why would he want to do that to himself?
Nicholas’s gaze widened as Muharib stood. The dogs went silent, and even the ocean seemed to still.
As quickly as he got his bearings, Muharib fell to the ground, growling as his bones snapped like twigs. Nicholas leaned into the stone facade of the house, watching Muharib break and shrink until Gabriel reemerged.
Nicholas stepped away from the house, but swiftly hid again as Gabriel restarted the process, again and again.
Each time left him weaker, barely able to stand, feeling around as if the dark existed for their kind.
Nicholas struggled to find reasoning behind his self-torture, to understand what could make Gabriel want to suffer this viscerally.
He thought about his own pain over the years, the most harrowing of it taking place after his transition. He contemplated the ache of being without Gabriel, the way it cut through his body as if he were chained to a bed of knives.
Then realization hit, crystal clear. Gabriel was in search of a distraction, and what better way to forget the gut-wrenching pain of seeing Nicholas with someone else than to inflict a different type of pain upon himself, to debilitate and exhaust himself with it.
But it was more than that…
Nicholas focused on the sharp line of Gabriel’s jaw, on the way his head jutted from his neck, the way his shoulders and lips curled back. He wanted to strike. He wanted to kill. He wanted to kill Sean.
He must have been driven to at the club but couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Because he’d given Nicholas his word.
Nicholas put himself in Gabriel’s shoes and knew he wouldn’t survive seeing him with someone else. He’d rather take the pain of a thousand suns bearing down, or be banished to eternal darkness. He’d rather face the final-death.
This was Gabriel’s thousand suns. This was his pit of darkness. This was his alternative.
“Don’t!” Nicholas cried out, eyes squeezed shut. He had no idea who he was stopping, whether he’d saved Gabriel or Muharib from further pain, and he was scared to find out.
Nicholas opened his eyes, and the monster from his dreams stared back at him. The rage behind his gilded gaze held evil Nicholas had never encountered before, not even during his teachings of the Lord’s great adversary.
“Muharib,” he whispered.
The muted embers along his limbs were now contained flames, and his golden eyes glimmered threateningly. He bared his saber-like teeth, sweat steaming down his chest. Nicholas was held captive by the impression he made, by the sheer force of him.
Muharib’s cock hardened to a lethal length. Some part of Nicholas knew the primal reaction was in response to what happened at the club, that if he himself could still smell Sean on him, then maybe Muharib did as well.
His expression went beyond anger and even jealousy, beyond a need to claim, beyond possession. The monster in front of him was murderous.
He took a step toward Nicholas, and then another. His flames billowed behind him, and Nicholas turned to run. He was captured in seconds, no match for the two-century-old vampire with an ax to grind.
Nicholas’s back slammed into the stone exterior of the house, his feet dangling in the air as Muharib pinned him by the throat. Fire leapt from his body, engulfing the wall, locking them in a prison of flames.
Nicholas panicked, eyes bulging as he waited for the inferno to melt his skin. He didn’t burn, though, and neither did the house. Nicholas didn’t even feel the heat and hadn’t needed to call on his ice.
Did Muharib have that much control over his gift? Did he get to decide whether his flame incinerated? Nicholas’s terror made room for awe.
Muharib leaned in, inhaling, before recoiling with a hiss.
“He didn’t kiss me,” Nicholas breathed. “I mean, it didn’t land on my mouth. I turned away. I didn’t want it. I don’t… want him.”
Muharib vibrated with fury, and heartache swirled amongst the gilded light of his pupils.
“I don’t want him,” Nicholas repeated, voice steady this time.
“Who do you want?” His voice sounded charred.
“It’s… complicated.”
Muharib made a chuffing sound, angling his head. He pressed the weapon between his legs against Nicholas, sniffing when he whimpered helplessly. His arousal choked the air, and Muharib’s gaze seemed to say: You want me.
Some of the heat banked in his eyes, a lifetime of exhaustion taking its place. He swiped his flattened tongue up Nicholas’s cheek, marking him, replacing Sean’s scent with his own.
He rested his forehead against Nicholas’s, his flames quietly dying out.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the bond?” Nicholas whispered.
“Why embarrass you with the truth when being apart would set you free?”
If only he knew. Nicholas hadn’t stood a chance.
“But I’m not free.”
“I didn’t know. I was too afraid to ask. I never meant to hurt you.”
Nicholas had been too afraid to ask about Gabriel as well. Too ashamed to admit that he couldn’t get over him.
Muharib swayed, taking Nicholas with him.
“Whoa. Muharib, you’re tired. Put me down.”
He ignored Nicholas, carrying him toward the patio. He needed sleep and likely blood, but he held Nicholas to him, refusing to let go.
The dogs whined when they entered the house, crowding Muharib’s legs as he stumbled for the stairs.
“Where are you taking me?”
Muharib nearly tripped, tightening his grip on Nicholas. His eyelids drooped, a slight tremble taking over his body.
“Please, put me down. Let me get you some blood.”
Muharib made it up two steps before faltering and falling backward, hitting the floor, with Nicholas sprawled over his wide chest. Muharib held him so tight he thought his ribs would break, but his arms loosened as he slowly drifted to sleep.
Scrambling back, Nicholas stared at him, at a loss for what to do next.
Where did this moment leave them? Where did it leave him?
He looked around the home he missed, then back to the man he missed more than anything—even if he wore a different face.
His heart wanted to leave the past behind him, to move on by his side and in his bed.
Yet there was something holding him back.
A resistance he couldn’t explain, although he could clearly feel it signaling for him to run and never look back.
Was it a subconscious inability to forgive? Was it sheer stubbornness?
Nicholas closed his eyes, slowing his breathing in an attempt to dig deep, to see past the obvious. Everything fell away, and he found himself on an eerie coast where dead trees stood splintered like broken matchsticks, and where the inky waters ate up the blackened shoreline.
It was the same haunting beach that possessed his dreams, but what was it doing here, in a moment like this?
The water rippled up the murky sand, converging on him as if commanded to, as though wanting to infect him. Too afraid to get his feet wet, Nicholas jolted back to the foyer, sweat-slicked and gasping for air.
The dogs licked at him, whimpering.
“I’m fine. I’m okay.” He smiled for their benefit before staggering to his feet.
He needed to leave, couldn’t be there when Muharib—or Gabriel—woke up.
Nicholas hurried to the basement, grabbing bags of blood before hesitating in the doorway leading back to the stairs.
He peered at the door on the opposite side of the blood room, his beach flashing before his eyes. The poisoned water nipped at his heels, leaving him no choice but to run for Gabriel’s arsenal room to escape its touch.
Nicholas rushed through the door, locking himself inside.
He was met with a sensation of wrongness and yearning, like he shouldn’t be there but missed it all the same.
What’s happening to me?
His legs moved of their own accord, carrying him toward the shimmer of jade beckoning him. The precious stones anchoring it twinkled under the overhead light.
The dogs barked, and Nicholas sucked in a lungful of air, nearly dropping the bags of blood.
Readjusting his grip, he fumbled with the doorknob, then raced through the labyrinth of halls and up the stairs.
Bursting into the foyer, he came to a stumbling halt at finding Gabriel on the floor, sound asleep.
Nicholas placed the blood bags next to him and backed away, his attention caught by the open glass wall.
Not wanting the dogs to venture outside alone, he went to close it.
His finger hovered over the switch when he noticed something peeking from the pocket of Gabriel’s tattered pants.
He stepped onto the patio, ordering the dogs to stay inside.
Crouching, he reached unsteady fingers toward the green ribbon, pulling on the end and watching it unspool. He’d been looking all over for it.
Slipping a hand into the pocket of the jacket he wore, Nicholas withdrew Gabriel’s gold lighter. Seemed he wasn’t the only one with a keepsake.
Back inside, he tied the ribbon around Gabriel’s wrist before turning to the dogs.
“Keep him safe until he wakes up.”
Zeke and Kai panted, shifting on their paws. Maxim barked, trotting over to Gabriel’s side.
Nicholas knew where he needed to go. He needed to get advice from someone who was good at giving it, the only person who could help make sense of the situation he was in.