Page 45 of Born Wicked

It’s savage and wild as he tears into the bags, spilling half of it onto the blue sheets. He guzzles it down, his breath coming in and out in ragged grunts. When the first is gone, he grabs the second one, but his new strength is more than he anticipated, and he pops it, spilling all over the bed and himself. Not hesitating even half a second more, he grabs the third, and sinks his newfound fangs into it.

I turn, collecting four more bags.

“More!” Mason bellows. I turn to see him scrambling to leave the bed, his eyes fixed on the door.

“Not so fast, little prince,” Jay says as he and Patrick each catch one of his arms. “I can only imagine the guilt trip you’d never get off of if you went out there and did what your instincts are telling you to do right now.”

“I can smell them,” he growls, again trying to surge forward and, thankfully, failing. “How… how can you just stand there when you can smell them like this?”

“Imagine how it was kissing you, now that you know you smelled like that,” I tease, walking to the end of the bed again and tossing another bag to him.

He immediately rips into it, dribbling blood all over his chin as he downs the cold liquid.

Jay arches a white eyebrow at me, and I just shrug at the look on his face.

“Seriously, how the hell did you not kill me a hundred times?” Mason says, and his throat sounds raw as he speaks. I toss him another bag, and he dives right in.

“Trust me, it wasn’t easy,” I say, recalling how difficult it was. I’ve tasted Mason’s blood dozens of times. I’m not proud of it. What went on between Mason and I was extremely physical. No, we never had sex because I didn’t trust myself that much. But he’d freely offered, and I had poor enough self-control, I went for it. If I could go back and do it over, I would.

“How does this taste so good and so disgusting at the same time?” Mason growls, tossing the bag to the floor with a disapproving look in its direction.

“Trust me, fresh tastes much better,” Patrick says.

“Not helpful,” I say with a scowl as Mason roars and tries again to get off the bed, aimed for the door.

“Never said I was a Resurrection specialist,” he says with a simple shrug. He pins Mason back against the bed, Jay effortlessly doing the same on the other side.

Mason takes a deep, ragged breath. Knowing exactly how that breath feels, I toss him another bag of blood. He looks down at it with a suppressed look of disgust, but he still bites into it four seconds later.

“Gotta say, this all feels kind of… anticlimactic,” I say. “When I Resurrected, you and Elena had a hell of a lot of stuff to explain. So, to not have to tell you any dramatic, life-changing news… It feels like you’re getting off in this too easy.”

And it’s really nice to see it when Mason chuckles and smiles. He shakes his head, looking down at the mess he’s made, though I don’t think he’s really seeing it. “How about we go with what the hell happened? I remember heading to the bank with Patrick, but then there’s nothing.”

There’s a little noise in the back of Patrick’s throat, something between regret and dread. “It was a semi-truck,” he says. His words come out almost timid. “We were stopped at a light. There was a semi-truck behind us. It was a mechanical failure, supposedly. It rear-ended us going forty.”

Shit. I didn’t know that part. Going forty in the middle of downtown is like going one-hundred-fifty on the freeway.

“You were in the back seat,” Patrick continues, not meeting Mason’s eyes. “But the back of the limo…”

Gone. Totaled. I never even saw the scene, but if that big of a truck was going that fast…

It’s a wonder Mason even made it to the hospital before dying. He should have been killed instantly.

“You died in the emergency room,” I fill in the rest. “We tried fixing what we could. We did CPR for twenty minutes. But…” I shake my head.

Maybe I should have tried harder, longer. Surely there was something else I could have done.

“It’s okay, Juliet,” Mason’s voice comes through, filled with compassion. My eyes rise to meet his. “There isn’t a particle of me that doubts you did everything you could have. I mean, it’s okay. I still had a second shot coming.”

“I’m sorry,” I still say in a rough, quiet voice.

“Sorry for dying on your table,” he says, trying to lighten the mood. “Sorry for putting that weight on your shoulders.”

“Shit, you two are saps,” Jay chimes in, rolling his eyes hard.

“Shut up,” I say, annoyed, as I throw a blood bag at him, hard. But Mason’s new, vampiric instincts kick in, and he catches it in the air before it can hit its intended target.

CHAPTERFOURTEEN

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