Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
“Don’t follow me.” I throw it over my shoulder one more time and I don’t know if Davi hears it or not. I don’t look back to find out. Even though I want to, I don’t.
I move past the rooftop bar and around the far side of the terrace, where the city air hits me full in the face, and my legs give out on the bench against the railing where I plop down on the old metal.
Eyes forward, I chastise myself.
My dress still sits open in the back where I couldn’t reach to zip it. My heels lost and forgotten. The Penn closing in on midnight is a building I have walked since I was six, and tonight I don’t recognize a single corner of it.
Fear rumbles through my body. My lips are dry, and when I lick them I taste copper and lemon and something else, something dessert-sweet, and my stomach does a slow roll.
Three men. I can still taste three men.
My hand drifts to my throat. The punctures are still there. Of course they’re still there. He bit me less than an hour ago and I am acting like an hour ago is a long time.
I don’t look behind me.
What if they’re there?
I said no.
They offered me the world. I said no.
I can’t think about that right now. And I can’t think about them not being on the rooftop. Because there’s no footsteps. Nothing.
They left me alone.
Gave me the space I asked for. Begged for.
Yet I am ruined.
Ruined for the version of me I was supposed to be on Monday morning.
They aren’t even men. Are they?
A sob breathes from my lungs as the wind moves around me, and the city below me hums on like nothing has changed. I just need air. I need to breathe.
I can’t just go back to the event. And it has nothing to do with my lack of shoes.
Vampires.
They’re not just real. They walk beside us. Living beside us.
All thanks to the agreement they made with humans.
I bite my knuckle. Angela. The collector’s tea set. Five cubes of sugar. The bodyguard who watched her too closely on the last day. She was trying to tell me the whole time. She found me. She hired me.
And without my knowledge, she protected me. All those years.
I press my palms to my eyes, the blur of tears smearing my mascara before I can do anything about it.
But when I drop my hands, I see him. Leif Dagon. Just suddenly there in front of me.
“Hear me out.” He holds up his hands. His eyes drop to my throat and then drag back up to my face. And there in the slight tug of his lips I’m pretty sure he’s proud of those marks. Like he marked something that’s his.
I’m not his, I don’t belong to anyone.
“How?” I look around the very empty terrace. “Did you get up here?”
My hand goes to my throat again. I can’t stop it. They fucking bit me. And I allowed it, I wanted it. But hell I didn’t know what I was even agreeing to when I said just tonight.
I stand up and brush past him. My feet slapping on the cold ground. I steer clear of him.
He doesn’t answer my stupid question. We both know it’s a stupid question.
“Where’s Davi?”
“I sent him back down.” Leif doesn’t move. “This part is mine to own.” He pauses, his eyes pleading with me.
Never turn your back on them. Angela said it over tea one day. Not the last day.
I thought she was warning me about her board of investors.
Her board of vampires.
“The Viagra.” I release a laugh that isn’t at all humorous. “Valium. Vodka.”
Leif’s lips twitch. “He was asking me if I wanted help getting through the evening. Champagne does nothing for me.”
“He…” Oh my gods. “Wanted to get you drunk.”
“He asked for consent, Hadley,” he says. His white button-down is still ripped open, untucked. I did that. His suit jacket long gone. Love bites across his chest. Bites I gave him not even an hour ago.
Before I knew.
Before I knew exactly what he was. Is.
“My bites.” I toss a hand at my throat.
“I want to keep them.”
“So that’s a choice, like consent?”
“Consent is very important to us.”
“And I said no.” I take a cautious step back. But where would I go? Where would I run? He’s a vampire, I’m a human.
A human with the potential to feed a vampire for eternity.
I just have to say yes.
“I said no,” I repeat, taking another cautious step back.
“You did.” He doesn’t move. He stands there watching me. The sadness rolls off of him like heat waves on summer asphalt.
“I have my whole life. My career. I have everything.” I exhale on a shaky breath.
“I would never take that from you,” he says. But I have no idea if it’s a lie, or if it’s the truth.
“No?” I laugh and it comes out wrong, cracked and broken.
I try again. “You’d just what? Put me in a gilded cage?
” My throat closes on the next sentence, and I have to start it twice.
“Give me the last name Sanguine so every vampire knows I’m a—” the word she used was nun and I can’t find it for a second, I can’t find a lot of words tonight.
“A nun. The kind of Bride who said no, and no one else will ever touch me. That’s it, isn’t it?
So no one else can touch me and you can still control me. ”
“Nun,” he says it quietly. Almost to himself. Like he’s the one who just learned something. “We protected Angela.”
“You gave her a cage.”
“If we didn’t, she’d die.” He raises a hand and drops it. Later I’ll tell myself it was him reaching for me. That he couldn’t help himself. “She chose her life.”
“She regretted it,” I counter and I take no pleasure in his wince.
“Every day,” he says quietly. “I know.”
She tried to warn me.
“Callie?” I whisper. “You said she was out cold. What did you do to her, what did you do to my best friend?”
“I didn’t take her blood, none of us would dare take the blood of the unwilling.” His eyes are pleading. “We stole her memories.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know that was even an option. “Her memories.”
“When she wakes all she will know is the night was a success, she came home and crashed.” His voice is smooth, calm even. But he stole something precious to me.
“I should have gone right to her.” I swipe away a tear. “Instead I...” This guilt will eat me alive.
“We did not hurt her, Hadley, you have my word.” His eyes flicker between mine. “You don’t have to trust me as a man, or a vampire. But trust me as your boss.”
I snort. How can I differentiate between the three?
The man seduced me.
The vampire drank my blood. Then kidnapped my best friend.
And my boss? It’s true, he never lied. Never steered me wrong.
“Hadley.” My name is all the warning I have before he’s before me, pressing me against the wall. His hands are gentle against my face as he brushes his knuckles across my cheek. “Don’t run. Say no for tonight. Let me find you again.”
I swallow. There is a yes already half-built in my mouth. The me who just said no on a rooftop has not finished saying it. I need more information before I let either one win.
I need time.
“No.”
Leif sighs, his breath gusting over my lips before he presses his to mine one last time.
This? This is a goodbye kiss. I know it in the way he slowly presses his lips to mine. In the way his tongue savors my lips, tracing their outline before he presses gentle kisses along my jaw to my ear.
“Then I’ve no choice.”
His words are a warning. And still when the bite breaks my skin, I let it happen like an addict who already had her hit tonight and knows exactly what this is.
The lax sweeps through me. I know this feeling now. I knew it an hour ago. He has bitten me twice tonight and I am still letting it happen.
Later I’ll learn that’s the sedative in his bite.
Later I’ll figure that out and look back on this moment.
Later I’ll understand that when he looks at me again, he’s trying to take my memory of the night.
He pulls back, his lips drenched in my blood, my body arching toward him. And as those irises swirl once again, I promise myself the sadness in his eyes is just because he didn’t get what he wanted, which was my yes.
And isn’t that the crux of everything wrong about being a woman. Human. Vampire. They’re all the same. It’s all or nothing and in the end, I’d lose myself to a bond I wasn’t sure about to begin with.
I made a promise once that I’d never lose myself again. And then I made the same promise to Angela.
I intend to keep it now that I know more.
I feel him inside my head, sifting through my memories of tonight. That’s when I get it. He’s trying to change my memories. From the moment we tossed Davi out, to the moment I said yes for tonight. Just tonight.
And I won’t let him have it.
My memories. Before he can steal them, I put them in a box. Hide them in my mind.
Even as he attempts to replace them with laughter and a night of mingling and opportunities. None that include him. None that include Enzo. Barely any of Davi.
But I won’t let him.
I blink and he’s gone. Taking his warmth, his scent. Giving me exactly what I asked for.
So why does it ache like I just lost everything I ever wanted?
The cold glass of the rooftop access door holds me in pieces. Half-zipped dress. Hair down where it should have been up. And at my throat, two fresh punctures from him. Older ones lower on my throat, Enzo’s, still healing. A bruise blooming under my jaw the shape of a mouth.
He tried to take my memories. He left the proof on my body.
I am not sure I will ever be able to forgive him for either.