“No, thank you,” she said.
He wasn’t surprised when she didn’t take what he offered. On his side, he was both hungry and nauseated, a one/two punch to the gut that should have been incompatible. Maybe eating something would help. Probably not.
Putting the section into his own mouth, he switched the paring knife back to his dominant hand and cleaved off another wedge. As he chewed the crisp, sweet flesh, the silence in the living quarters was as heavy as a solid object, and he wondered if—
“It was an arranged mating,” she said roughly.
He’d intended to play it cool if she spoke. He failed at that miserably. His head shot up and around so quickly he felt the strain in his neck.
She cleared her throat. “I come from nothing, and his family—they were more prosperous than we were so it was a step up for me and my parents. Or it was supposed to have been.” She shook her head, her unusually colored eyes focused on the mid-distance in front of her. “He never let me forget that, either. He was a male on the rise, he used to say. He was really going places. I was supposed to be grateful, go along for the ride, and keep my mouth shut.”
Kane knew versions of this story very well, and he thought of his aunt. He thought of Cordelhia. He thought of his own parents’ beliefs. Nadya might not have been in theglymera, but the fundamentals were the same, females leveraged as assets to bolster a family’s fortunes, real and imagined.
“No one asked me what I thought or what I wanted.” She looked at him directly. “Mymahmenand sire were not bad people. They did honestly believe they were doing the right thing, and I went along with it even though I was screaming inside because their expectations became my priorities. The male did not love me. I did not love him. And in the back of my mind, I wondered what exactly he was getting out of it. I was not a beauty of note and we had no money. Why would he bother?”
There was a pause. “But I was not supposed to find out the basis of it all. That was supposed to be a secret.”
Kane sliced another piece off the red apple, and he was surprised as she reached forward and took it directly from the blade. There was a cracking sound as she bit into what he had cleaved off the whole—and he was struck by an urgent need to feed her everything in that refrigerator.
He wanted to hunt for her. Provide for her. Fill her belly and have her take from his vein—
“This is good,” she said. And as he just stared at her, she held up what was left of the slice, like she thought she’d confused him. “The apple?”
“There’s another.” He pointed to the icebox with the knife. “If you want more after we finish this.”
Preparing another slice, he offered it, hoping she would take it as well. Instead, she sat there and stared at what she had bitten into, the semicircles of her teeth a pattern through the sweet flesh.
She continued in a steady voice, as if she were girding her courage to get through the story. “It turned out my father knew that my intended’s sire had been having an affair. That was not unusual, but the assignation was with another male. I believe the term is blackmail? So, yes, my mating was arranged, and there is, built into that concept, a certain lack of free will. In my case, however, there was straight-out coercion to get thehellrento show up.”
Kane shook his head. “How did you find out?”
Nadya put the rest of the slice in her mouth. “I overheard my father arguing with my intended’s sire. It was right before the ceremony. My intended had disappeared the previous night, and his sire was making excuses for the delay in his son’s appearance. But my father… well, he was determined his daughter was going to make a good match and he went through his scheming all over again.” She shook her head once more. “I heard the whole thing… how my father, who was a builder, went to get his tools at the detached garage he’d been working on and saw the sire together with the male. My dad had been prepared to go to the young male’s bloodline, and he was sure he’d be believed because he was an honest male of worth who had a reputation for fair and upright dealing. He told the sire that no one was going to be surprised, but everybody was going to talk about it, and that the male’sshellanwould surely leave him.
“And that was when I realized that my father hated the male for his infidelity. In addition to giving our family a leg up by association, the mating was a punishment because every time the sire saw me, he would think about what he did—and there would be no way of avoiding me. I was due to move in with their family.” She took a deep breath. “I wasn’t a blessing, I was a curse on both my prospective mate and the sire. The former was being forced, the latter was being coerced.”
You aren’t a curse, he thought.Not at all.
“What happened next?” He held out another slice. “Did your intended show up?”
Kane was relieved when she accepted the piece.
“Not that night, no.” She shifted herself around. “But he came and found me a week later. I don’t know if he’d learned the truth about why the mating was happening or whether he decided he was just going to get out of the arrangement any way he could.”
“What did he do,” Kane said—and mostly kept the growl out of his voice.
“I, ah… it was in the nineteen eighties. I was volunteering at a human library because I had access to all those books about medicine I couldn’t afford to buy. I’d always wanted to be a nurse, you see, and I just wanted to learn. I was in charge of the last shift, and that meant I did the sweep of all the floors and locked up everything at midnight. I always left through the back door because I could dematerialize out of the shadows from there and he knew that. He was waiting for me.”
Kane closed his eyes. “What happened.”
“As I locked the dead bolt, I turned around and he stepped out next to me. I was so surprised to see him, I just froze. And that meant, when he threw the acid at me, he had good aim—”
“Goddamnit—”
“—and it was as I put my hands up to my face and started to scream… that he threw the salt at me.”
Which was why the scarring was permanent, Kane thought grimly. Vampires could heal back to their original state under most circumstances, provided that they were otherwise healthy and well-fed, and that the injuries were not as severe as his burns had been. Surgical scars, puncture wounds, gunshots… all of it could regenerate.
Unless there was salt involved. Salt sealed up the imperfections, making them permanent.