Chapter Seventeen
Alexandra
“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
- Pablo Neruda
Pain, shame, despair, and rage warred for supremacy within me. I couldn’t believe that after hearing him admit that he didn’t want me as a mate, and that he only claimed me because he was forced to do it, that I still made love with him with absolute surrender.
Yes, made love. Because as hard as it was for me to accept that I, an independent and confident woman, would ever allow any man to treat me this way, I understood it.
I love him.
And then I realized that this was precisely what I used to roll my eyes at when the human women around me at the hospital and at school used that term to justify their emotionally abusive relationships.
I love him.
Like that was the cure of all ailments or the absolution of all sins. How sadly pathetic did I have to be to say that? To accept that?
I love him.
Yes, yes, I knew that it was all kinds of wrong that I had allowed him to have me any way and every way he wanted. I surrendered my dignity and my body to him. The sex was so damn good, though. Every time he touched me was like I was being injected with a powerful drug. His kisses. His sweet caresses. His taste. Hell, it was even that magnum cock. Yes, I had been a virgin, but I couldn’t imagine a cock as magnificent as his. Everything seemed to conspire against my good intentions and turned me into a sex-starved idiot. I couldn’t let that happen again.
I love him.
His smile. His gorgeous face. His amazing body. His love and loyalty to his family, no matter how much he tried to hide it. His care of those around him. Even his honesty in telling me what he had to know I didn’t want to hear.
I loved all of those things about him.
I forced myself to remember the parts of him that I didn’t love so much.
While I bared my soul to him in giving my body without reservation, in letting him make love to me and me make love to him, he had been thinking that the sex would save my life. That was his motive, his objective. The fact that the sex was earth-shatteringly amazing was just a by-product as far as he was concerned.
I knew I should be grateful to him for saving my life, but I was too pissed that he didn’t love me. Being a fated-mate was a bitch, but the pain of unrequited love was even worse. So, any pain I was going to feel from being away from Xander was nothing compared to what it felt like to want him so damn much, while he cared nothing for me, except lust.
It sucked that the first time I went against my resolve to never, ever date outside my race or color I got hurt like I knew I would.
For sure, Xander wasn’t sadistic like my family was, but I wasn’t going to wait around for him to hurt me further.
I had to keep reminding myself of the incredible wrong he had done me. He tied me into a relationship for eternity with someone who would never love me. Someone who, by his own admission, didn’t even want me.
How could he do that? How could he deliberately take away my will?
My new sisters-in-law… Wait, scratch that. Xander and I were not legally married, even though we were mortally bonded. Anyway, as I was saying, Luna and Danika explained the implications of Xander claiming me. Not only were we irrevocably psychically linked but I also couldn’t have children with any other male, nor could I feed from anyone except my mate. If we fed from anyone else, we would be violently sick.
Son of a—!
Despite knowing not only the physical impediment I would endure but also the increased danger from the Petrovs’ enemies, I refused to stay another moment under my mate’s roof. I refused to be reminded repeatedly of what a weak fool I was. I refused to remain where I was not wanted.
I learned of my ability to cloak myself when my father used to visit my mother in Haiti, something he did at least once a month. She was only one of his many mistresses around the world. My mother was different however, because she was the only woman who had ever gotten pregnant by my father, much less had a baby. Knowing what I knew now about fated-mates, I understood why.
Despite my mother’s uniqueness, every time my father came for a visit, he would hurt her with his sadistic sexual preferences. As a child, I hadn’t understood what was happening between them, but even then, my senses were strong. I could hear every word, every tortured sound from my mother’s lips. I could smell her blood, smell her fear.
As a dhampir, I didn’t remain a child for long. At six human years, I looked like a human eighteen-year-old, already five-foot-eight with young feminine curves. My father’s thoughts when he saw me for the first time in more than three years were lurid. He hadn’t seen me in three years because I had hidden from him every time he came by our one-bedroom house. He never stayed longer than a few hours, and his visit was almost exclusively in the bedroom.
But this time his visit had been unexpected, and he saw me before I could do my usual disappearing act. With his eyes glued on me as though he had won the lottery and not uttering a word, while his mind raced with ideas, dark ideas, he terrified me rigid.
It was then that I read his mind more fully, wanting to know his history and who this man was, besides being my father. He thought of himself as a dhampir. That was where I first heard the term. In his mind, he was a dhampir because his father was part vampire, part demon, and human. The fact that his mother was human barely impacted his gene pool. I learned then that he had the usual dhampir powers of acute senses of sight and hearing, regenerative abilities, near immortality, and the powers of a vampire, but he could walk in sunlight as a human, unlike a vampire. However, he also had my powers of teleportation and the sick ability to suck the blood from a person’s body by simply kissing them.
Given my father’s thoughts, I hid then and instinctively cloaked the link I had with him to ensure he couldn’t find me. I hadn’t quite understood what I was at that point, but I knew that I was different from my mother and grandmother. My inexplicable accelerated growth and my heightened senses, which my mother and grandmother shamelessly exploited, were hard clues that I wasn’t only human. My blood cravings cemented it.
By threatening to have me committed to the crazy house for being sick enough to drink blood, my mother and grandmother got me to use my gifts to steal things or hurt people into giving them what they wanted.
I should have stayed hidden, but I had grown hungry after an entire day in hiding, and besides, my father was usually long gone from the house. I didn’t even think to try to sense who was in our house before entering. As soon as I crossed the threshold, my mother was waiting for me with the fakest smile on her face that I’d ever seen. But I didn’t need to read her smile, because I could read her mind loud and clear.
“You sold me?!” the six-year-old me had exclaimed.
My father laughed. “No need to be upset, chérie. I will take really good care of you.”
So, I knew what would happen when he turned and kissed my mother. I didn’t react fast enough to stop him. Not because I wasn’t fast enough, but because part of me thought that my mother deserved some kind of punishment for what she did to me and for the life she was sentencing me to.
Her charred body had given me nightmares until Alexi removed my memory when he rescued me. My grandmother tried to run, but her frail human body was no match for his dhampir speed and strength. She was dead within seconds because he pulled her throat out.
My father took me to his home in Paris, where we lived in a vampire coven, and I was surrounded and terrified daily for my safety in such a volatile living environment. No one approached me, however. Not only were they afraid of my father but I also later realized that they were afraid of me. I was even more of an oddity than my father with my maternal parentage adding witches to my gene pool, which meant that I had the potential for greater strength. I guess they didn’t want to chance making an enemy of a powerful being.
Seeing what my father had done with my mother and grandmother, and finally seeing the full picture in his mind of what he planned for me, I had been cautious around him, expecting his oily suggestions at any moment. We had been in Paris for almost three months before my father started thinking about implementing his sick plans for me. He wanted to mate me with some of the more gifted vampires and breed some super beings who could potentially be under his control.
I frantically altered his thoughts, and he forgot what he intended to do. Back then, I didn’t have complete control of my gift to make the changes to my father’s mind more permanent, and he would usually remember his intent toward me within days.
When he finally realized what I was doing to him and that I could read his mind, he became hostile, only then realizing that if he succeeded in breeding me that I would have more control over my offspring than he ever could.
He first tried to hurt me by using his telekinesis power, but my telekinesis power was stronger. He tried getting closer to me to do his blood-sucking thing, but I was too fast, and he could never catch me. It was then that he realized that not only was I different from him but, also, I was more powerful. He became desperate to get rid of me.
I ran from him then because if he ever realized just how powerful I really was, he might try turning the inhabitants of the coven against me.
I lasted months moving from one vampire coven to another all over Europe, and eventually having to run again when a vampire got it in his head to either mate with me or drink from me or when the leader of the coven realized that I was stronger and didn’t have their greatest weakness. Sunlight.
I learned a lot about other immortals in that time. I obviously knew vampires because I lived among them, but I also learned about demons, witches, and warlocks from their visits to whatever vampire coven I was in. It was through reading the minds of our visitors that I learned about the immortal world: about their human prey, their blood clubs, their continuous in-fighting, and the different versions of each species dispersed throughout the world.
Demons, although as powerful as vampires, could walk in sunlight like dhampirs, and their gifts usually involved manipulation of elements. However, they were more powerful in their inner demon form than in their human form. They were usually in their human form to live seamlessly in the human world. However, if humans ever saw their inner demons, they would never be able to hide their darker powers, which were significantly more violent in their grotesque demon forms.
Witches and warlocks had only become immortals in the past two centuries. They had to renew their spells every few centuries to continue their immortality. Through magick, they had the powers of energy orbs and telekinesis.
It made no sense that eventually they all feared me, at least not to me anyway.
The one time that I had to join a coven and stay long past my usual triggers, I woke up on an auction block in Bangkok. Apparently, the leader was a friend of my father, and together, they trapped me in my sleep with some powerful magick. I slept for an entire day, waking only when frigid ice water was thrown on me on the auction block.
It was from the auctioneers that I learned that my father hadn’t wanted me killed. NO, he wanted me to suffer in the worst way a woman could suffer. He even ensured that there were demons and vampires in the audience, who were supposed to purchase me for their sex and blood clubs. I learned most of that when my father came to kill me years later.
The bastard thought I was paying my penance in some sick immortal whorehouse.
As I got older, I learned that just as I could reach into a person’s mind and change it indefinitely, or into their soul and repair it, I could also tap into any psychic link and block it for as long as I wanted. My cloak could block my mate’s link to me and could hide what I was from other immortals. With my cloak in place, I would seem like any other human female to immortals.
It took me several days, but eventually I made my way to the house I owned in Bermuda. I wasn’t concerned that Alexi or Xander would find me since the house was in the name of a company incorporated in the Cayman Islands as part of my portfolio. Alexi knew nothing about it.
While in principle I understood that I couldn’t feed from anyone else other than Xander, I didn’t realize that it would affect me immediately on leaving Xander. Nor did I consider that the psychic energy I was using to cloak my mate’s link, and to also shield me from being sensed by other immortals, would cause such a depletion of my powers and increase my desperate need to feed so rapidly. The farther I traveled physically from him, the worse my symptoms became.
The first day, the small bit of discomfort I felt at our separation seemed like a mild irritant. I felt nausea and a slight cramping in my stomach as though I hadn’t eaten in hours. And despite my eating human food until I was almost busting at the seams, that feeling never dissipated. In fact, both conditions only worsened by the second day.
It gave new meaning to the concept of feeling empty and bereaved. Apparently, my body was intent on grieving the loss of my mate.
After two weeks on the island, I wasn’t able to keep any food or liquid down that I consumed. My flawless pecan skin was ashen and looked a dull gray, not the healthy brown it usually was.
This all seemed surreal. As a dhampir, I didn’t usually need to drink blood more than once a week because human food usually sustained me. It would usually take months for me to be in this condition of wanting blood so desperately, even using my powers full force. Maintaining the cloak was in no way a full-force use of my powers. It usually took little to no effort to maintain it.
Being a claimed fated-mate was a pain in the ass. And then I felt a tiny flutter in my stomach and heard a faint heartbeat. Yeah, being a claimed fated-mate was a bitch.