Page 26 of Twice Bitten
I could sense him.
Jack was within about twenty feet of me, I knew it. To the left.
Fuck. I hadn’t consumed that much of his blood, had I? And he hadn’t had any of mine. Had he gotten some in his mouth somehow? I’d certainly lost enough for it to go absolutely everywhere.
We couldn’t possibly have what amounted to a partial blood bond any other way…and we couldn’t possibly have that to begin with, since last I checked we both had other mates.
A pipe clanked under the floor as water ran in a nearby room, and a moment later the door to the bedroom opened quietly. Jack stepped through and stopped, frozen in the doorway as he saw me propped on my elbows and looking at him.
“I felt you wake up,” he said, his voice very flat. “I think there’s a…” He trailed off, not even needing to say it. Or maybe not able to say it out loud.
Well, double fuck.
“That’s not possible. We both have mate bonds!” I blurted out, and then realized my mistake as he stared at me, eyes starting to glow. “I mean, you have a mate. It’s not possible.”
Too late. I knew it, and my heart sank down through the saggy mattress beneath me.
“You’re mated.” His tone had gone even flatter, and so low that it nearly went subsonic. “You didn’t say—fuck!” He stepped in and shut the door, turning away from me and running his hands through his hair. His shoulders heaved as he sucked in a couple of deep breaths. And then I heard him mutter, “You should have told me.”
I couldn’t move, and my mouth had gone dry.Hehad a mate. A mate I’d helped him find, whom I’d had tied up in the back seat of my car. AndIshould have told him aboutmine? After knowing him for a day, I should have spilled my secrets, made myself available—or not, as the case might be—so that he could, what…I didn’t even know what. Break the glass in case of emergency? Fuck that.
Jack turned around at last, his jaw clenched tight and his eyes still glowing. He opened his mouth, and that was it. I couldn’t. Whatever he had to say, it didn’t matter and I didn’t fucking want to hear it.
Anger and searing regret and deep, years-old shame welled up, burning the back of my throat and making my heart pound in a sick, uneven rhythm.
“Should have told you what, exactly?” I spat, the words tasting like bile. “That I ran away from my mate eleven years ago after he betrayed me and beat me half to death and tried to keep me chained to his bed? Was that any of your fucking business?”
A heavy silence fell. My panting breaths echoed too loudly within it.
“No,” Jack said, his voice hollow. “It’s not any of my fucking business. And that’s what I was going to say a second ago. That if you had someone waiting at home for you, and that bothered me, it was hypocritical and my problem, not yours.”
He took a step forward, and then another, looking not like a predator stalking his prey but like a predator trying to assure something skittish that he wouldn’t hurt him. I still couldn’t move. If I did, I thought I might do something so embarrassing I’d need to jump out the window, like start crying.
Jack settled carefully on the edge of the bed by my hip, the heat of him seeping into me instantly—and his proximity soothing a ragged edge in me that I hadn’t even realized I had, among all my other ragged edges.
We had some kind of a bond. I couldn’t deny it.
And it terrified me even more than the intent look in his glowing eyes as he leaned in and gazed into mine.
“But you don’t have someone waiting at home for you. And hearing that—I’m not so selfish that I don’t wish you did, instead of—that. It’s none of my business,” he repeated. “I know that. But I want it to be.” He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I want to fucking kill him.”
He sounded completely, murderously sincere, and I wanted to kiss him so badly I vibrated with it.
“If it was that easy, I’d have done it a long time ago,” I whispered. My anger had bled out of me as quickly as it had welled up; all I had left were sadness and longing for a life I’d never gotten to have and almost certainly never would.
Jack reached over and picked up one of my hands, gently extracting it from the sheets I’d been clenching in my fist. He stroked his thumb over my knuckles, feather light, staring down at my hand in his.
I had larger hands than one might expect from the size of the rest of me, but his still dwarfed mine, and his strong, callused fingers wrapped around my cold, slender hand felt like security, like safety, a tiny connection that made me ache for more. I could’ve crushed his hand as easily as the other way around given my vampiric strength.
But it didn’t matter. He wanted to protect me. The desire to take care of me mattered far more than whether I really needed it or not.
“They’re going to do the bond-breaking ritual tonight,” Jack said abruptly into the quiet. His thumb kept moving, back and forth, each pass of it sending shivers up my arm.
Tonight. And after tonight, he’d be going back to Idaho to see to his brother. Using their artifact to save his life, in all likelihood. Hadn’t he told me every generation always had a personal reason to use it? That said something about his family, that they’d always used this immense power to care for their own instead of trying to turn a profit or take over the world. Something that reminded me of my own little sanctum of a house, with my cat and my books and my cozy pillows. Something personal, and small—in a good way. Intimate. The prioritization of what truly mattered: love.
What I wished my life could truly be, and not just simulated with the trappings I’d bought from stores to try to convince myself it was real.
“Time to say goodbye, then,” I said, hoping the hitch in my voice wasn’t too obvious. “I’ll be on my way as soon as I make nice with the Armitages on Fenwick’s behalf.”
