Page 48 of Midnight Serenade
Sleep and heal, two of the most beautiful words in the English language.
I drifted off to sleep feeling the most peaceful and the most safe I’d ever felt in my life.
Chapter 18
Grace
Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke to a sharp pain in my arm, a rush of liquid entering my body beneath my skin, and a deep sense of wrongness and danger. I bolted upright in bed, already swinging my fists to fight off whoever was above me. But they hit nothing. Even though I could feel someone in the room with me, there was no one within reach of my bed. I glanced down at my arm and panicked when I saw a needle sticking out of my it. I jerked it out quickly, but I knew it was already too late. I could feel whatever I’d been injected with start to affect me.
“Sebastian!” I cried, terrified, as I started to lose feeling in my hands, and then my arms. I couldn’t raise them anymore to fight off my attacker. I started gasping for breath. My lungs felt like they were going to collapse. My heartbeat slowed.
“He’s not here,” a female voice said.
“Who are you? Why are you doing this!?”
A figure stepped into the sliver of moonlight coming in through the window, and all I could do was stare.
It was the woman from the zipline.
I also recognized her now as the girlfriend of one of the two guys that had gotten kicked off the ship after they’d laid theirhands on me. She’d had blonde hair at the zipline place, but it had obviously been a wig because her hair was dark brown now.
But… hadn’t she broken up with that guy? Hadn’t she called him and told him what a scumbag he was, and that she never wanted to see him again?
She watched me like a beetle beneath a microscope as my breath started growing more shallow, as I lost all strength and couldn’t support the weight of my body sitting up anymore. I fell back against the pillows, gasping for breath, fighting to keep my eyes open.
“The love of my life tossed me aside once he laid his eyes on you,” she whispered.
So, blame the guy, not the girl, you psycho!
All the sudden, my door was ripped open and off its hinges. Sebastian stood in the opening in a full, terrorizing fury, his crimson eyes blazing. Faster than I could blink, he ripped the woman away from me. I managed to keep my eyelids open long enough to see Gray leading the woman away in cuffs. She didn’t fight him. She went calmly.
Sebastian picked up a vial off the floor, cursed when he read the label, and tossed it away from him before bellowing for Micaela to radio the doctor. It shattered against the wall. Micaela, who stood in the broken doorway looking completely ashen, immediately got on her radio and ducked into the hallway. More people flooded the space outside my missing door, their backs facing our room, all of them looking like they were ship’s security.
Sebastian dragged me onto his lap, and bent over me protectively, tears running down his face. He listened to my heart, and my gasping breaths, and felt the cold of my body.
He knew what it all meant just as well as I did.
I was dying.
He cupped my face with his hands. “Open your eyes, angel,” he demanded.
I tried several times but couldn’t. They were so heavy.
“Grace, open your eyes.”
This time, his words were layered with power. So much power that I could feel a hush all around us, and without me being aware, my body opened my eyes. I wasn’t in control. Rather than being angry that he’d neglected to tell me he could take control of my body as a master vampire, I was instead relieved that I would get to see his beautiful face one more time. I catalogued his features, though my eyes kept blurring on me. The shape of his lips. The love in his eyes.
“Grace, I have to change you, or you won’t survive. Do you understand me?”
Oh! Yes!
I could vaguely feel tears run down my numb cheeks in relief. I had forgotten that Sebastian could change me, that he could save me.
All I wanted in that moment was tolive. To live a long, happy life with Sebastian, with Kazi and my friends. And I vowed to myself that if I made it out of this alive, I would be like Sebastian. I would make every moment of the rest of my life count.
My head jerked like I was a broken automaton, but it was enough. The guards put the door back in place, blocking us from prying eyes, and Sebastian kissed my mouth. “I’m sorry I can’t make this more pleasurable this time,” he whispered. “Next time I will, I promise.”
I started seizing, and my eyes rolled up in my head. Distantly, I heard Sebastian curse, and then there was a sharp prick of pain in my neck. I lost consciousness after that and remembered nothing more.
