“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m hurting you. I don’t want to hurt you. It’s the last thing I want…”
She swallowed and closed her eyes.
“Kyla. I don’t know how to do this.”
“How to do what?” she asked angrily, feeling totally pissed.
“How to feel all of this. It’s my job to protect you and I keep fucking failing. And now I’m hurting you because I don’t know how to make it better.”
Her anger crested and she sighed. He looked so sad, so lost.
“How can I be the one destined to lead? I can’t protect the most important thing in the world to me and yet I’m supposed to be some protector and leader of my race?”
“Maybe all this is what’ll help you learn to lead.”
“But what if I lose you in the process? I’m scared to death, Kyla. So goddamn scared.” He flopped on the bed beside her and stared at the ceiling, covering his eyes with his palms.
She leaned over and lifted one of his hands and kissed his eyelid. He let out a heavy sigh and grabbed her and pulled her on top of him and squeezed and then flipped so he was on top. He held her head and buried his face into her hair, kissing behind her earlobe and squeezing.
“I’m not scared anymore,” she told him, feeling new emotion well up inside of her. She ran her palms up the length of his back.
“No?” He went up on an elbow and looked her in the eye and it was as if a cloud lifted and hope floated high up above them.
“Nope.”
“Then you really are crazy, baby, because you’re right, my track record fucking sucks. Dog cages, elephant tranquilizers, scaring you thousands of miles away, fucked up road trips where I almost drain you, leaving you alone and you get attacked by the Toronto Mangler. Then bringing you to Adrian’s compound of fucked up medical experiments...”
“But it’s gonna be okay,” she touched his chin cleft.
“Okay?” he looked at her like she’d grown another head.
“We’re gonna be okay,”
“How do you know that? Because I wanna believe that but…”
“‘Cuz you’re what I’ve been waiting my whole life for. My prince who’ll swim through the molten lava moat and slay the dragons and free me. I know this in my soul. In. My. Soul. I keep having all these dreams that sort of come true and when I was a little girl I dreamt about a prince with blue eyes rescuing me so I know that’s what you’ll do. You’ll rescue me and you’ll cook me beautiful breakfasts and chocolate brownies and we’ll go skinny dipping and you’ll give me beautiful blue-eyed babies some day and we will raise them together. Both of us.”
“I’m the luckiest kidnapping, bloodsucking monster on the planet, you know that?” He put his arms around her.
“I love you,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that all this happened. That they took something so precious from us. I’m just fucked right now. You need me and I’m lost. What they took… I didn’t know how much it meant until I felt it. I sensed it almost right away and…”
“Shhh. Don’t. I can’t go there.”
He swallowed.
“I felt your pain, Kyla. I was in a pit. They had to put me in a concrete pit in the ground because I kept breaking the locks they tried to use to contain me and in that pit your pain almost killed me. While I was daggered I wasn’t out, I was paralyzed but feeling everything. Every. Fucking. Thing. God!”
“Oh baby,” she said but then there was a frantic-sounding knock on the bedroom door.
“Come,” Tristan answered.
The door burst open and it was Sam, he was breathless, “Liam, Tris. He’s been spotted. Just outside the perimeter of the property.”
“Be down in a minute.”
Sam nodded and backed out, shutting the door.
“I want this dagger so you’ve got it to keep you safe from me whenever you bleed or when you’re fertile you can use it against anyone else who’s a threat and I want to get us outta here and home, but if he’s close I’m thinking maybe we wait and I eliminate that threat. But that leaves Adrian, too, and I want you away from that maniac. What do you think we should do?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “I wish I knew.”
“I’m gonna go talk to Sam. Stay here. I’ll be back,” he kissed her.
She put her fingers into his hair and sank into the kiss.
He caressed her face, moved off the bed, and then left the room.
~~~It was the following day. He hadn’t come to bed the night before but had slipped in around dawn and pulled her close and passed out for just a few hours. In the late afternoon, Tristan and Kyla were in bed together, again. He’d come in, interrupting her from her boredom, put a small laptop-sized box on the dresser, said “Hey,” and then moved in and his teeth were on her throat, piercing. Her eyes rolled back and her hands were in his soft hair.