Chapter 13
Chapter thirteen
Saiden
It was such an innocuous thing—the light brush of her skin against his own—yet it changed his entire world. The second her fingers grazed his arm, he felt it.
The Spark.
In the warehouse he thought he’d touched her skin at some point, but now he realized her sweater must have always been in the way. How could he be so smart and so fucking stupid at the same time? His honed senses kept him alive for three hundred years but failed him the second his mate showed up.
He should have embraced the one thing he craved more than life itself, but instead he fell into firm denial mode. He couldn’t compel her, but that could have been her illness. And yeah, she smelled delicious, but only after you worked past that acerbic medicinal tang.
He’d lived for so long that he’d just given up and dismissed everything as coincidence.
He couldn’t deny the Spark though. It was like a bolt of lightning to the soul. A connection snapping into place. The universe screaming at him, ‘She is the one.’
His mate.
She was his mate.
The one thing he wanted his entire life and assumed he simply wasn’t worthy of having. She existed. He found her. And she was…
A messy, quarrelsome human who only cared about making movies and didn’t even want to be turned.
Damn, Lilith could be a real bitch sometimes.
Cora yanked her hand back as if she’d been bitten, and the action only cemented things further. She’d felt the Spark too. Only she had no idea what it meant.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
What the hell was he supposed to say now?
He’d been nothing but a dick to her. How was he supposed to convince her that they were meant to spend the rest of their lives together?
He didn’t know much about human women, but he’d seen enough movies to know they tended to freak out if a guy went too fast. There was no way she would understand that even though they just met, the universe knew they would be a perfect match, and she was the only one he would be able to love for an eternity.
A concept that would probably go over the heads of the Tinder and TikTok generation. Though, she had said she didn’t care for social media, so maybe she wasn’t like the others.
Play it cool. That’s what he’d do. He’d play it casual, like nothing had changed.
Even if the truth was that everything had changed. He felt even more awful now that she’d never get to make her movie. Once she became one of them, making any kind of vampire flick was out of the question.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
There was also the tiny, insignificant fact that she didn’t want to be turned.
Well, that was going to have to change and fast. He’d given up on ever finding his mate over a hundred years ago.
Convinced himself that hunting rogues was all his existence would ever entail.
And he was fine with that. He had a purpose in protecting the people he cared about. He didn’t need a mate.
It was easy to pretend you didn’t want something when you thought you’d never have it, but now that she was sitting next to him…
he’d just have to convince her. There was no other option.
Vampires only ever got one mate. If Lilith finally got off her ass and brought them together, he couldn’t go back to his previous lonely existence.
Not when he saw how Marquin and Eliana were together.
The level of happiness that a mate could bring was not to be dismissed.
He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and saw her rubbing her hand absently. Probably blaming the Spark on static electricity.
“So,” he began, suddenly unsure how to even speak to her. “Why don’t you want to live forever? Just curious because in the warehouse you made it seem like a bad thing.”
He hadn’t meant to sound quite so awkward, but he really needed to know what kind of opposition he was up against.
“I just don’t want to,” she answered quietly. “It’s not really something I can explain to you, so just accept that some people don’t see your immortality as a gift. Some see it as a curse.”
Okay, so he was up against a mountain of opposition. He thought the religious zealots that viewed vampires as ‘cursed beings’ died out ages ago. She didn’t seem overly devout, what with making horror films for a living, but anything was possible.
He needed to know more about her, which meant he needed to keep her talking.
“Have you thought of your third question yet?”
Hell, he’d answer a thousand questions if that’s what it took to convince her that becoming a vampire was not the tragedy she viewed it as.
Cora brushed her braid over her shoulder, and he tried not to smile at the nervous action. He liked that the question was important to her. Liked that learning about his kind seemed to matter so much to her that she put value on asking the right thing.
“I’m not sure yet,” she replied, sounding considerably more tired than she had a moment ago. “Give me some time to think.”
He nodded and focused his eyes back on the road. If she didn’t want to talk then he wouldn’t push. For now, anyway.
Glancing at the speedometer, he pulled his foot off the pedal and let his speed drop to something more reasonable. Her pulse had slowed when she heard about his Gift, and he would gladly drive like a nearsighted grandma if it increased her comfort level even the slightest bit.
Something had changed in the last few minutes and not just for him. She’d been so excited to learn about vampires just moments ago, but now? Her shoulders drooped, and she stared listlessly out the window.
He didn’t know what caused this new sadness in her, and it was making him depressed by proxy. He racked his brain, but the only thing that happened was her touching him. Had he jerked away? He didn’t think he did. Maybe she had seen the look of shock on his face and misinterpreted it?
Shit. Shit. Shit.
He’d know about his mate for less than five minutes, and he’d already upset her. His teeth clenched as he struggled with his urge to say something that might fix the situation.
Before his brain could provide anything insightful, he registered the soft rise and fall of Cora’s breath that told him she had drifted off to sleep. As much as he wanted to talk to her, she looked so peaceful that he would bite off his own tongue before he would wake her up.
It was probably for the best since he needed time to figure out a game plan.
He would have to break out the kid gloves that were so foreign to him and handle the next few days very carefully.
Whatever he’d done just now to upset her was nothing compared to how pissed she would be when she found out she wasn’t ever going home.
He didn’t care what it took; he was never letting her go.