Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Beckham!” Reyna cried. She lifted his chin and stared into his eyes. “What’s happening? Why aren’t you healing?”
“Slow. It’s…slow.”
“Why? Has this happened before?”
“When I healed you.”
Reyna’s heart was torn asunder. Using his healing abilities to save her made him weaker. It changed something in his vampire processes that slowed things down. Made him more human.
“You didn’t heal me tonight,” she whispered in fear.
He shook his head once and then coughed as pain shot through him. What the hell could have happened that would make him equally as weak as when he healed her at Graves’s place?
Then it hit her.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “I moved fast. Like vampire super speed fast. Penelope’s escort even thought I was a vampire.” Reyna’s hand went to her mouth. “You gave me your speed.” He nodded. “You need to heal. Drink from me.”
She held her wrist out to him. He glanced at it. She watched him swallow once harshly. His fangs exposed over his bottom lip. She expected him to refuse, for them to argue about it.
Instead, he grabbed her wrist, sank in those fangs, and drank deeply.
“Oh,” she gasped.
The blood flowed from her body into his. And like winter snows thawed into spring streams, the wounds began knitting together. Blood stopped flowing. It still coated his chest but was already drying against him. He looked strong, sturdy, and not at all like he was in danger of bleeding out.
Then the endorphins hit her from the bite.
A freight train straight to her heart. The immediate rush a tidal wave as flight or fight kicked in.
Even as she felt it, all she wanted to do was curl up into Beckham’s lap and never leave.
Never see him like that again. One death was enough for her for a lifetime.
Abruptly, Beckham wrenched back. Her blood lingered on his lips, dripped down his fangs. His black eyes were ringed with light as power radiated from his very being. Their blood sang as like responded to like.
Despite the carnage around them, all she could think was that she wanted to fuck him right here in this dirty convenience store bathroom. Life-or-death situations sure put things in perspective.
“You could have died,” she accused.
“Unlikely.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Your wounds weren’t healing.”
“They would have.”
“Why do you have to argue with me?”
“I wouldn’t have died. Something as simple as a bullet couldn’t take me down. The sooner you realize that the better.”
Reyna crossed her arms over her chest. “Well, since you’re doing so well, why don’t we talk about you ghosting me? Then you protect me with your life against Penelope. Say I’m yours.”
“You are.”
“I am,” she said with a sigh. “I really am. I always have been and I always will be. But I cannot function with you leaving me out of the loop or taking your anger out on me with your silence.”
So of course he was silent.
“I didn’t like seeing you with her tonight,” Reyna said, unable to speak Penny’s name right after Becks killed her. “I hated it. But I’m not running away from you because I’m jealous and uncomfortable.”
Beckham’s nostrils flared at the insinuation. He stood, his immense height eclipsing the tiny bathroom. Suddenly he was towering over her, taking back the upper hand. Still, she refused to back down just because he was half-naked, covered in blood, and looked like a scary fucking vampire.
But when his eyes caught hers, something in them softened.
“When I’m with you, I feel. Intensely,” Beckham explained. Reyna smiled at that. “The only time I have ever felt that intensely was when I killed.”
Her smile dropped.
“Even when I was human, I didn’t have this same passion.
I was empty. You have more humanity in your pinky finger than I’ve ever had in my whole body.
It’s why I have protected you and coddled you and tried to keep you alive.
I never wanted to see that light go out.
I never wanted you to become the ruthless killer that I was.
To lose the optimism that only someone so young and human could ever feel. ”
Tears pricked at Reyna’s eyes, and she tried to tamp them down.
“It’s hard to explain without telling you my whole past. My parents were young and came from nothing and I had my eyes on the stars.
I left everything behind to become something great, but instead of going to space I ended up in business.
I found that I was good at building things, destroying things.
” He looked at his bloody hands. “At dismantling the world and having people rally behind me as I did it. Except my parents. They never saw value in me. And in the end they were right.”
“Becks,” she whispered.
“No, Reyna, I became a vampire by choice. I thought it was the next great bid for power. The next step in taking over the world, which I did efficiently for years afterward.” He met her gaze head-on.
“And when I became a vampire, I wanted to bring pain to those who hurt me, who refused to believe in me. So how did I repay my parents? I tortured Bronwyn. She was young and innocent, and I was a sadistic vampire. I took everything from her that she loved, put her through immense physical pain, and shattered her mind. Then I fed her madness with brutality, taught her the ways of war, shaping her into a proper soldier. When she could take no more, right before her whole spirit would be broken, I turned her. Then I tested her loyalty by unleashing her on our parents. I thought their misery would be worse if she did it. I loaded the gun and pulled the trigger. She was the bullet that snuffed out their existence. She passed. I made her my own unfeeling second-in-command and gave her an army to feast on.” He tilted his chin up.
“And I enjoyed it. Reveled in it. It was all I was ever good at.”
“That’s not true,” Reyna whispered.
“Oh no. It’s as true as could be. Until you. You made me want to be better, but the truth is that I am not better.”
Something cracked within Beckham. A chasm that was more than sixty years in the making. He was broken. He’d finally broken. He couldn’t keep going with the crushing weight of his kills on his shoulders. And there were so many.
“You are,” Reyna said. She put a gentle hand on his arm. “You are better, Becks. The fact that you feel this way shows that you’re a different man.”
“Did you not see what I saw tonight? I killed Penelope with my own two hands.” He looked down at them covered in blood. “And I felt nothing.”
“She was going to hurt me. Or you. And she had turned us in to Harrington. It was a trap, Becks.”
“It could have been you,” he said in a barely audible voice.
“Me?” she whispered. “You’d never hurt me.”
“I would!” he roared. It exploded out of him as if he’d been holding on to it for so long. “I have.”
“No. You have always been there and protected me and saved me. Even when I didn’t want to be saved.”
“Reyna, the only thing that I am is a killer. The night we saw that fucking bastard, I’d never felt so strongly in my life. All I could think the entire time driving back to the house was how to control my rage. I was so deep in it, I could’ve hurt you.”
Reyna stared at him, stunned. “But I felt your emotions that night. I didn’t feel anything like that.”
“It was after the healing,” he explained. “I was jealous and pissed, but I worried that if I stayed with all those emotions roiling through me, the only outlet I had was the only thing I was good at. So I left. I left to keep you alive.”
“Oh Becks,” she whispered, stepping into his space again. She put her hand on his cheek. “All this time I thought that you were mad at me. But really you were protecting me. Again.”
“I’m not a hero.”
“You’re so very wrong.”
Then she pressed her lips against his. His hands landed on her waist tentatively and grasped her with vigor as the kiss deepened.
Beckham was broken. He feared himself so much that he’d disappeared to protect her.
And he couldn’t even see it. He couldn’t even fathom that he was the good guy in this.
So shattered by his past that a moment of vulnerability wrecked him and made him think he would revert into the only thing he believed he was capable of.
“You’re not just a killer,” she whispered against his lips. “You have subdued the monster and the reason you feel like this is because you are embracing the man.”
He responded by picking her up, sliding her legs around his waist, and putting her ass down on the sink. Her hands went to his pants, jerking free the remaining tattered material. His cock lengthening in her hand.
“We are connected by more than our blood. We are united through our souls. You would sooner die than harm me. I believe that beyond words.”
“I never doubted us. Just me.”
Reyna sighed at the words. “No more doubts.”
He stripped her from the waist down and plunged deep inside her body. Their souls connecting as all barriers disintegrated around them. Together they embraced the moon and landed among the stars.
Killer, savior, monster, man.
None of it mattered as long as he was hers.
…
After the sounds of the last foot soldiers disappeared from around the convenience store and Beckham had fully returned to health, they slipped outside and hoofed it back to the SUV. After Beckham checked it for a tracer, they left the city far behind.
Beckham threaded their fingers together. The stress of the evening evaporated. She leaned her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. She listened to the rhythm of his heart and forgot the rest of the world. She’d deal with it tomorrow. Right now, she wanted this ounce of solace.
It was after midnight when they finally made it back.
Her eyes were drooping and sleep was calling out to her.
Had it only been a few hours ago that she’d gotten the call about Everett?
When Beckham had returned and she’d convinced him to let her go with him to see Penny? Every day felt like a lifetime.
Beckham parked the SUV and they moved together into the kitchen. The light was on and Genevieve was humming to herself as she busied herself about the stove.
“Hey,” Reyna said.
“Reyna.”
“Who’s with Brian?”
“Philippé took over for a while. I can go up there to check on him if you’d like.”
Reyna nodded. “Please.”
Beckham pressed a kiss into her hair as Genevieve disappeared. “Your heart breaks for him.”
“He never wanted this. I don’t know how he’ll live with himself.”
“The strong survive.”
Reyna was surprised to find that her friends and much of Beckham’s inner circle were congregated in the dining room. She and Beckham exchanged a glance.
“What’s going on?” Reyna asked.
Meghan’s eyes were wide with terror. They darted between Reyna and Beckham and back to the computer in front of her.
Jodie chewed on her bottom lip. Katarina had been playing with Jodie’s hair.
Gabe had his arms crossed over his chest. Zoya was seated before the computer.
Gerard was across the room, motionless as always, reading a book.
Meghan threw her arms around Reyna. “You scared the shit out of us.”
“I did?”
“You’re all over the news. The entire city was in an uproar looking for you.”
“For me?” she asked.
“And Beckham,” Jodie clarified.
“They’re looking for the mayor’s murderer,” Meghan added. “We saw the video.”
“Video?” Reyna asked, glancing at Beckham.
“You don’t want to see it,” Meghan told her. “It shows her neck twisted. You two running out of the room. It’s being played on repeat despite the graphic material.”
Gabe’s eyes hit the ceiling. “Want to share with the class what happened before or after you, I don’t know, lost your shirt?”
“No,” Beckham said. “Any other questions?”
The room was silent. Not because no one had questions, but because Beckham was shirtless, still partially covered in blood, and prowling like an animal.
Doors burst open across the room. “I have it,” Washington cried.
Reyna whipped around. She’d hadn’t noticed that he wasn’t among the rest of the crowd. He’d been locked up in his laboratory so long that sometimes it was easy to forget he was even there.
“Have what?” she asked.
He held up a tube of gold liquid and stared at it with a look in his eyes said that he’d just changed the world. What was to come next would raze to the ground everything they’d ever known. A cataclysmic event beyond which mere mortals could hardly comprehend.
“Golden Blood,” Washington whispered.
“Come again?” Gabe said.
“What exactly is Golden Blood?” Jodie chimed in. “It looks like something I would not want to drink.”
“The more I thought about it. The more I knew. The more you told me,” he said to Reyna and Beckham, “the more I thought, how could two perfectly matched people possess such talents? How could the mixing of vampire and human blood like this heal? Or sense? Or produce such evocative shared emotions?”
Reyna shrugged. She had no answer to that. She’d just been rolling with it.
“How could he make you a little more vampire?” Washington mused, lost to his own epiphany. “How could she make you a little more human?”
Reyna’s hand went to her mouth as she thought back to their time in the bathroom. How for just a moment Beckham was more human.
The stunned silence in the room only echoed her belief.
“I think I’ve done it…”
He passed Reyna the gold liquid, his newly deemed Golden Blood.
“A cure for vampirism.”