“I heard,” she says. “Eli, who is he?”
“He is no one you need to know.”
She twists out of my arms and puts space between us before she whirls around and says, “In my books the main vampire, The Maker, the leader, is Marcus. What is this? How do I know him? How do we—are we—God, how is any of this what it seems?” She dives fingers into her hair. “I’m losing my mind. I’ve been in an accident. I’m in a coma and I’m dreaming all of this. The fiction writer in me is going wild.” She drops her hands. “And I’d say I want to wake up, but you’d be gone. I don’t want you to be gone, Eli. You will, won’t you? You’ll be gone?”
She knows Marcus.
What the hell is going on?
I close the space between me and her and catch her arms again, dragging her to me. “I don’t want to leave you, Ivy. I don’t want to leave you.”
“But you’re going to? Please, don’t.”
When I’d wanted her to say please for all kinds of dirty naked reasons, right now, I want her to stop saying it. “Tell me what you know about Marcus. Have you met him?”
“He’s a fictional character in my books. I imagined him.”
“Describe him.”
“Blond. Long hair. He likes long coats. His eyes are striking and hard to look away from.”
My jaw sets. “He’s not your imagination,” I say, and I know then that she was never going to be able to walk away from this hell I live in. I don’t know why, but Marcus does. “He’s real. And, baby, you are not in a coma or dreaming.”
I sit down on the high-back chair in the corner, dragging her onto my lap to straddle me. My hand closes around the ring around her neck. “Close your eyes. I’m going to show you.”
“Don’t you need to look into my eyes or something like that?”
“Not with this ring in my hand and you on my lap. Close your eyes, Ivy. Trust me. I will never hurt you. Ever.”
“If I can see Marcus, you think I don’t know that? You think I can’t feel that?” she asks, but she doesn’t wait for an answer. She closes her eyes and now it’s time for me to show her everything, including her own murder. But the problem with that is that when I show her the monsters that killed her, I show her who I have become. And I can barely breathe with the idea of what might come from this. I have no way of knowing if she’ll run away from the truth. And from me.
THE END…FOR NOW