Chapter 17
Yasmine blinked. “Older than me?”
“First of all,” Yasmine said, crossing her arms. “You’re absolutely not older than me. Second, what the hell does your age have to do with your … fungal symptoms?”
“No, I’m really serious,” Bella said, with an almost pitying frown. The kind you’d get from a teacher who knew you were bad at math. “I am older than you, Yasmine.”
“Like hell you are. I’m thirty-six.”
Bella ran her tongue over her lip. It seemed like she was stalling something.
She didn’t seem majorly nervous—but at least minorly.
Yasmine was about to ask her to spit it out when Bella finally volunteered, “You were born in 829 AD. That would make you…” Bella began to count on her fingers, “1,197 years old.”
Yasmine blinked, her next words dying in her throat as the color drained from her face. The van jerked right, and she had to fight to stay upright, her hands clawing around the table at her back. Bella, meanwhile, maintained her balance just fine.
829 AD. That wasn’t some kind of loose guess one could excuse as a joke.
That was the exact year Yasmine was born.
Sometimes, a revelation is too baffling to comprehend all at once.
Yasmine learned this at a very young age, when she walked into her childhood living room one evening and saw the bodies of everyone she’d ever loved lying cold on the floor.
Faced with something like that, the brain turns everything into abstracts.
Bodies turn into ovals, the walls of the house become rectangles, the ceiling a trapezoid.
All ability to understand and classify runs out the door.
Strangely, she felt the same way now. Every time she’d tried to understand what Bella just said, her brain regurgitated it instead.
Don’t jump to conclusions, she reminded herself. This girl was smart, resourceful, and very good at making Yasmine feel like she was going insane.
Figuring out that Yasmine was a billionaire through some careful internet sleuthing was one thing–tracking her back that far through time, discerning her actual age: that was impossible.
There was no paper trail that went back that far.
No. What? No. There’s no fucking way.
But what other option was there?
To know her real birthday, you’d have to have been alive back then.
You’d have to be a vampire. Or a vampire’s thrall.
“We’re approaching your residence, Ms. Sokolov,” Rebecca shouted from the front, but her voice registered in Yasmine’s ears as a dull ringing.
The windowless van felt suddenly like a coffin. The air felt humid, chalky. Her hands became so clammy that they could barely hold on to the table.
But crawling out from beneath that fear, that shock and confusion, was anger. Before she knew what she was doing, she took Bella by the front of her turtleneck and jerked her head forward. She was seething, her fingertips trembling.
“Who do you belong to?” Yasmine spat, her voice cracking.
Yasmine had many enemies. Much fewer after Sylvia and Aster’s spontaneous slaughter of the council, but they still existed—nightwalkers who coveted her immense wealth, or, far more annoyingly, the ones who coveted the artifacts in her collection.
She had never considered a vampire who would be smart enough to covet her research.
But Bella was smart. And whoever owned her might be smarter.
“Belong to?” Bella said with a light, almost offended laugh, raising her hand to hold Yasmine’s curled, reddening fingers. “Do you seriously think I’m a thrall?”
A thrall. Hearing the words fall so easily out of Bella’s mouth solidified Yasmine’s horrible paranoia.
She could hardly breathe. Couldn’t think. She felt nauseous. Yasmine felt like a pirate who’d walked himself off the gangplank at the mere sight of a siren. She’d been tricked. She’d seen it coming from a hundred miles out, and yet.
“If you’re not a thrall…” Yasmine said, jerking Bella closer despite the tidal wave of bile in her throat.
The other woman let out a choked breath.
Yasmine tried not to care if she was hurting her, but she softened her grip even so, her voice breaking.
“Then why are you telling me this right now? You could have fooled me for another few months. You could have stolen my research and just left.”
“Oh, Yasmine, no offense, but…” Bella mumbled, even as she began to slowly asphyxiate under her turtleneck. “There was really nothing to steal, honey.”
That honey stung. To think that Yasmine had really believed Bella wanted them to be friends. How foolish and stupid and childish it felt now, that she’d wanted it, too.
A mirthless smile spread across Yasmine’s face. Her blood was pumping with a fury she had nothing to do with. She felt duped. She felt so very stupid.
“So funny.”
She used more strength than she meant to as she let go of Bella, propelling the gurney straight into the opposite wall. Yasmine winced when the gurney slammed into the side of the armored truck, causing the vehicle to veer.
“Christ! Watch it!” Rebecca shouted, cutting the wheel to compensate.
Dr. Larson’s face turned toward the commotion, the shadow of his head visible through the small window partition separating the two halves of the van.
“Ms. Sokolov?” he called out. “Do you need my assistance?”
“No, no, stay put,” Yasmine muttered. “Everything’s perfect back here.”
As she expected, Bella hadn’t been thrown off by even an inch. There were no new bruises on her collarbones where Yasmine had gripped her. No, she was completely fine; in fact, the blonde hopped off the now-misshapen gurney with all the nonchalance of someone rising out of a bus seat.
That push should have done something to her, Yasmine thought, with a small pulse of fear; and what was funny was that fear wasn’t new. She’d been irrationally afraid of Bella ever since she met her, only now she had a reason to be.
How quickly she’d gone from wanting to protect this woman to wanting to protect herself from her.
“I’m sorry, Yasmine. I really didn’t mean to upset you,” Bella said quietly. “I’m just nervous. I wasn’t sure you’d take the news well.”
Take the news well. As if this was Bella announcing that she was opening a fucking restaurant.
They met again in the middle, this time without a large metal obstruction between them.
Yasmine tried to look her straight in the eyes unflinchingly when she asked, “I don’t care what the hell you’re feeling. What clan are you from? Do you have a matriarch, a patriarch? Who am I dealing with here?”
Bella’s face fell, and she threw up a hand. “I plead the third.”
“It’s the fifth,” Yasmine sputtered.
“I’m not talking about this silly country’s constitutional amendments. I’m talking about our vastly more important agreement. Stipulation three. You can’t ask me anything about my condition outside the scope of the research.”
At that, Yasmine’s rage boiled down into pure astonishment.
“When I agreed to that, I had no idea your condition would be vampirism.”
“Well, then it’s your fault you made an agreement before you had the full picture. You can’t blame me for that.”
Yasmine pushed against Bella’s folded arms, this time without nearly as much force. “I can quite explicitly blame you for that!”
For the first time in many minutes, Bella laughed, and it sounded to Yasmine like someone was stabbing her with pretty little knives, like she was Caesar on the Ides of March.
Because this human woman, this brilliant scientist who’d been tormenting her for months, was a vampire. A vampire. The revelation simply wouldn’t digest. She felt it stuck in her throat; she was choking on it.
“I still don’t believe you,” Yasmine said. “I’ve never seen your eyes go red.”
“Of course you haven’t. I’ve never used my powers on you.”
“And those are?”
Bella poked her tongue into her cheek. “Not relevant.”
Yasmine’s mouth opened and closed, completely aghast. Angry. Pissed off. Furious. This woman gave her an inch, then made her work for a mile. It shouldn’t be like this. Yasmine was the one in control. Yasmine could have her killed on a dime.
No, she could do worse than that. Yasmine could make Bella relive the worst moments of her life over and over, for the rest of her questionably immortal existence. All it would take is a blink of her eyelashes, and Bella would be reduced to the little girl trapped in the closet.
And yet, God—God—Yasmine knew she couldn’t do that.
Bella had burrowed under her skin. Had that been her plan all along? To make Yasmine like her so much as a human, as some innocent non-offensive little mortal creature, that she’d be too enamored to kill her once she learned the truth?
“Bella,” Yasmine said quietly. “You could have told me you were a vampire the day we met. You obviously knew back then. You could have told me any day since. You haven’t.
You kissed me, fucked me—” Yasmine’s voice faltered.
That didn’t matter. Didn’t matter at all.
Why was she bringing it up? “You lied to my face.”
A shadow swept across Bella’s face. She swallowed, and for the first time, Yasmine saw a hint of real nervousness under the facade, peeking through.
“I wasn’t trying to play games with you,” she said softly.
“I really thought the only way I’d convince you to work with me was if you didn’t know.
Which—well—that was probably the correct instinct, seeing how you’re responding right now.
And I didn’t have sex with you as some sort of ploy. I did it because I find you….”
Yasmine’s mouth went dry, feeling speechless as Bella’s eyes lingered too long on her face. The blonde cleared her throat, not finishing her sentence.
“The only reason I’m telling you now is well, because…
” Bella studied her fingers for a moment, before fixing Yasmine with those gleaming blue eyes, always so focused.
“I have this foolish instinct that I can trust you. It’s probably just the near-death adrenaline, but too late now, cat’s out of the bag. You’re my confidant.”
Yasmine’s chest fluttered, but her disbelief overrode the feeling.
“I’m sorry,” she hesitated. “That you can trust me? I think you confused the order of pronouns there.”
Bella’s head cocked up. “No, I meant that. What makes you more trustworthy than me? What makes you less likely to betray me than I am to betray you?”
“Um, everything? I’ve been upfront about everything, for one.”
“No you haven’t. You didn’t tell me you were a vampire, either.”
“Well, I would have!” Yasmine all but hissed.
Yasmine’s distress brought a grin out of Bella. Yasmine hated that she was still delighted by the way her upper lip was slightly crooked on one side.
“Yes, of course,” Bella said. “And look, I’m sure you’ve been upfront with all the people you’ve eventually had maimed and killed.
That’s just how you are, Yasmine. You’re a blunt instrument.
It doesn’t make you inherently less dangerous.
I had to make sure who I was dealing with before I spilled my innards out to you. ”
That visual drew a rash laugh of disbelief out of Yasmine. But she couldn’t necessarily dispute Bella’s point, so she reached for something else.
“You won’t even tell me your real name,” she mumbled back.
“Bella Dragomir is my real name.”
“What?” Yasmine sputtered. “Dragomir? I don’t recognize it.” There wasn’t a vampire clan on Earth that she didn’t at least have a passing familiarity with.
“Yes, well,” Bella swallowed again, looking like she was on the verge of something. “We were a bit before your time. About a thousand years before your time.”
Yasmine’s mouth fell agape, stunned.
After a beat, Yasmine finally found the words, but as she was about to speak, the siren of a fire truck whizzed by them, blaring like hell.
It was immediately followed by another, then another.
A cacophony of screaming whistles drowning out every other sound.
Bella’s expression turned from thoughtful to scared.
Her eardrums splintering, Yasmine snapped her head toward the driver’s seat. “What the hell is going on out there?”
“Fire,” Rebecca said, but it didn’t contain her usual sassy apathy. “Ms. Sokolov, the entire block is burning.” She turned toward Yasmine. “Including your house.”