Chapter 37
Chapter thirty-seven
Tressa
“He stopped moving,” Baylin announced, and Tressa nearly fell on her face as she lurched out of the chair she’d been half draped over.
For hours, she’d done nothing but stare at the ceiling and hold back the river of tears that would drown her if she cracked that dam even an inch.
The anguish of her mate leaving had all but dropped her like a rock, and there wasn’t a single thing she could do to distract herself from the pain.
That look on Ethan’s face before he left was firmly locked inside her mind, forcing her to revisit that moment over and over, refusing to allow her a second of peace.
No, peace was not in the cards for her. Not after how badly she’d fucked up, and not when her mate was dragging her heart alongside the freeway as he raced farther and farther away from her.
“You’re sure it’s not a pitstop?” she asked, trying not to get her hopes up again. They’d been tracking the McLaren ever since Ethan drove it out of the compound at a speed that would make even Saiden sweat. It had killed her, letting him leave instead of locking down the gates to keep him inside.
But she knew it wouldn’t have ended well. She would never make a prisoner of her mate. No matter how much she wanted to. No matter how much the mate bond screamed at her to chase after him. No matter how much her soul ached the farther away he got.
And no matter how pissed Saiden was that yet another person “borrowed” his favorite ride.
“Yeah,” Baylin said, pulling up a map on his computer. His hands flew over the keyboard at inhuman speed, and the screen zoomed in on a blinking red dot. “According to GPS, he stopped near a city park in his hometown on the Oregon Coast. He hasn’t moved for almost half an hour.”
“A park?” she asked, climbing out of her chair to move over to the computer even though she could see perfectly fine from across the room. It wasn’t like getting closer to the red dot took her any closer to her mate.
“Looks like,” Baylin said, pointing to the map. “Either that or the cemetery across the street, but I don’t know why he’d go there.”
Tressa scanned the screen, noting the information on the GPS tag—Seacliff Cemetery—and the conversation they had in the garden came back to her. “He went to the cemetery,” she said, her voice wilting.
Baylin arched an eyebrow. “Why?”
Melancholy poured off Tressa, her heart breaking for her mate that was so far away. “My guess? He was feeling confused and scared, so he sought out the one person he could always rely on. His mom.”
Baylin frowned. “I looked into him, though. Isn’t his mom—”
“Dead?” Tressa supplied. “Yeah. I imagine she’s buried there.”
Baylin eyed her curiously. “So why…?”
“Come on, Baylin. Haven’t you ever felt so lost that you just wanted the comfort of your family and would take that in any form you could get?”
“Honestly?” he asked, turning back to the computer, his voice and body tight. “No. The only family I care about lives under this roof.”
Tressa rested her hand on his arm, a small gesture to let him know she wouldn’t pry.
After a moment, his shoulders relaxed. When he glanced back up at her, he was smiling again, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Besides, they always come to me.” He winked. “Even when I don’t want them to.”
Tressa pulled her hand back and smacked him with it. “Stop acting like you don’t love it, and maybe we’ll stop barging in all the time, Baylicious.”
“A vampire can only dream,” he grumbled, then sat back in his chair. “So what, you think Ethan went to the cemetery to visit his mom’s grave?”
Tressa’s finger drifted over to the monitor, brushing against the red dot that was her mate. “I know he did. She meant everything to him. You might not understand, but I know what it’s like to miss your mom so much that even a cold stone with their name on it would be a small comfort.”
“Oh,” Baylin said, and the word lingered in the air between them for a long moment before he cleared his throat. “What are you planning? Are you going to leave him be or…”
Perching on the edge of the table, Tressa picked at her cuticles. “I don’t know, Bay. I’m out of my depths here. My heart is screaming at me to take the next fastest car and get to him as quickly as I can.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
Tressa sighed and tucked her hands under her butt so she could focus. “The problem is that my brain doesn’t know if showing up right after he asked for time and space is the best plan of action. It could end up being the final stake in the coffin of our relationship.”
Baylin groaned. “Did you just make a really awful vampire joke?”
“Little bit,” she replied with a forced grin. “I’m doing everything I can to not fall apart here, Bay. Let me have my bad puns.”
He huffed out a short laugh. “Fair enough. But slightly offensive joking aside, I can’t tell you what to do, Tress.
He’s leaving himself wide open to an attack, and we both know he can’t take on Renata by himself.
But I hear what you’re saying about not wanting to push things so hard they snap.
Shit, Saiden is lucky that Cora even speaks to him after the crap he pulled. ”
“You’re not wrong there,” Tressa agreed dryly. “Why is it that most vampires are shit at telling their mates the truth?”
Baylin shrugged. “Maybe because people these days freak out when romantic things move too fast? Telling a modern-day human that a cosmic power believes you’re destined to be together after your first handshake is unlikely to get you anything other than a restraining order.”
“Ugh,” Tressa griped. “It makes no sense. Their lives are so short, you would think they would jump at the chance to skip the dating game and go straight to happily ever after.”
“You can’t expedite love, Tressa. It takes time.”
Love.
Maybe that was the problem. She’d never told him she loved him.
And maybe it was crazy since they’d barely known each other a couple weeks, but she’d been falling since the first moment she looked into his slate gray eyes.
Three hundred years meant she had encountered a lot of men, and not a single one even gave her stomach a flutter.
Ethan, on the hand, made her feel like she had a belfry full of bats inside her.
She couldn’t lose that feeling.
She couldn’t lose him.
Tressa slid her ass off the table and went over to the silver cooler in the corner of Baylin’s room. Snagging a blood bag, she sank her fangs in and sipped it slowly as she mulled over her options.
Really there weren’t that many. She either gave him space or she didn’t. But really, what she kept hearing was, she either risked her mate’s life to potentially save her relationship, or…
She tossed the empty pouch in the trash. “Call Derrick,” she told her cousin as she grabbed a few more bags from the cooler.
“Come again?” Baylin asked, narrowing his eyes at her pilfered supplies. “Why do you need Derrick, and why are you guys always stealing my blood bags? Can’t you go to the cellar and get your own?”
“Nope,” she said. “I have a plane to catch.”
Maybe she was about to make the biggest mistake of her life. Maybe she was about to ensure her mate never spoke to her again. Maybe she shouldn’t have been such a dumbass by preventing Saiden from going after Ethan when he initially offered…
So many maybes, and she was definitely questioning the insane logic that led to that last one.
She made a lot of bad calls when it came to her mate, but one thing was for certain: if she left him alone, he was a sitting duck for Renata.
And Tressa wasn’t about to wait around in the safety of the compound to see if he survived or not.
Pausing in the doorway, she tossed a glance over her shoulder at Baylin.
“I don’t care if Ethan ends up hating me for the next five centuries.
He’s my mate, Bay. I won’t risk his life.
If he needs space to decide how he feels about me, I’ll give it to him.
I’ll give him space for the rest of eternity.
But not until after that bitch is dead and I know he’s safe. ”
“You know,” Derrick said through the plane’s headset, “I don’t mind that you guys basically use me as your own personal air Uber, but could you look a little less mopey about it?”
“You’re one to talk,” Tressa pointed out, and Saiden snorted at her side.
“She’s not wrong, cousin,” Saiden said. “Being away from Cora always sets me on edge, and Tressa may or may not have fucked things up with her mate forever. What’s your excuse, huh?
Why have you been such a sourpuss lately?
I spilled blood on your Armani jacket yesterday, and you didn’t even blink. ”
The sigh that came through the headset was loud even without vampiric hearing. “It was a Tom Ford, actually, and I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Do you need a little pick me up?” Tressa asked, moving from the back seat to the co-pilot chair.
“Nah,” Derrick said. “Appreciate the offer, but I don’t need your mood mojo to make me feel better. I sort of deserve to feel like shit right now.”
Tressa studied her cousin, taking in his tense face and the laser focus he maintained on the controls.
It was strange, considering Derrick could fly a plane in his sleep.
In fact, if she believed his story, he’d once spent a week in Milan with a supermodel and had passed out at thirty thousand feet after testing just how much liquor a vampire needed to get truly smashed.
He said he’d woken up to a half-naked woman screaming as the plane was nosediving through the clouds, but it hadn’t phased him for a second.
Granted, not all of Derrick’s stories were real—or at least she hoped they weren’t—but his ease in the cockpit was not an exaggeration.
“If you say so,” she muttered. “As long as you’re on your game when Renata shows up.”
He scoffed. “Oh, I’ll be on my game. I might not have Saiden’s super special spidey sense, but—”
“Do not call it that,” Saiden snarled.
“Why?” Derrick asked, glancing back at him with a genuine look of confusion. “You let Cora use that term.”
“That’s because Cora is my mate.”
Derrick thumped his chest. “And I’m family.”
“You’re a jackass that I can’t seem to escape.”
“A jackass who has saved your life how many times now?”
“And you never let me forget it.”
“Admit it, Saiden. You love me.”
“If it gets you to shut up, then sure. Think whatever you want.”
Tressa leaned back in the chair, enjoying the exchange between the guys.
Despite what Saiden would never admit, she knew he really did love his cousin.
And Derrick had lightened up a bit at the bantering, so Tressa had no intention of interfering in their little squabble.
She would wheedle his problem out of him after she solved her own.
Checking her watch, she saw they would be landing at the airstrip just outside of Seacliff in the next fifteen minutes. Which meant she was running out of time to figure out what she was going to say.
Please Lilith, don’t let him hate me, she thought, keeping her eyes locked on the blinking dot on her phone.
He hadn’t moved from the cemetery for the past two hours, and she didn’t know what to make of that.
A not-so-small part of her was terrified they were too late and Renata had already gotten to him.
If they arrived at the cemetery only to find his permanently dead body draped over his mother’s headstone, Tressa didn’t think she would survive it.
She wouldn’t want to survive it.
“Hey, Derrick?” she called out.
“Yeah?” he asked, glancing over at her.
“Fly faster.”