Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 65066 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65066 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
Shame.
My anger washes away.
“Shh, it’s okay. I know he marked you. It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” she says in a small voice that kills me.
I scoot to her, and when she shrinks away, I straddle her small body between my heavy thighs, enclosing her. My arm goes around her middle just in time for me to feel her give a dry sob.
Oh fuck.
“Hey,” I say, desperate. “Hey, it’s okay. I didn’t mean to react like that. It’s just…” I search for words to describe the rage brewing in my chest. “The thought of you getting hurt like that…makes me want to destroy worlds.”
“It’s my fault,” she says.
“Jordy, no. No way it’s your fault.”
She keeps her head bowed.
“What happened? You want to talk about it?”
She shakes her head.
“Okay, you don’t have to talk about it.” Fates, what do I say? I thrust my forearm in front of her. “See this?”
She nods.
“What do you see?”
“Tattoos. Lots of them.”
“A whole sleeve.”
“Yes.”
“Feel it, Jordy. Touch it.”
She does and I grit my teeth. Her touch still has me hard. I wait until she reaches my favorite part of the tattoo, a giant redwood. She runs her finger up the trunk and pauses. There.
“You feel that?” I ask, burrowing my face into her hair. Even her scent is perfect. “You know what that is?”
“A scar.”
“Yep. Big one. Got caught with a knife.”
“But how—” she stops. She knows what scars a shifter.
“Vampire blood. I tried to stake the fucker. Got hit with blood, and it made the knife wound scar.”
She turns in my lap, eyes wide at my declaration. “You fought a vampire.”
More than one, but she doesn’t need to know that. She looks absolutely shocked and I get it. Because I fought a vampire, and I’m still breathing.
“It’s not possible,” she whispers.
“Feel my arm.”
She does, more hesitantly. The weal runs through the heart of the redwood tattoo and becomes a wave on an ocean, the Great Wave by Hokusai. Further around my arm, on more placid water, a ship sails into the horizon. “How did you get away?
“Luck.” It’s a partial truth. “I can’t tell you much.”
“You don’t remember?”
I shrug. Something in her eyes makes me ask, “Do you remember?” I touch her scar again, gently, but she flinches.
“No.” Her face shutters again. “Not completely.”
“He’d have to spill vampire blood on you to make it scar. Lots of it.”
“I know,” she says softly.
I don’t want to ask. What sick fuck vampire tears into his victim, and soaks her in his own blood just so she’ll scar?
No wonder Jordy has nightmares.
“So how’d you scar, then?” she asks.
I don’t want to go down this road, but if it draws her away from her dark path, I will. “Same way you did. Vampire blood. Lots of it.”
“He bled on you?’
“Not by choice. It burned like a mother, but I got him, in the end.”
She’s silent, contemplating, her fingers still working down my arm. Her touch falls away, and she turns to the subject I absolutely do not want her thinking about. “You fight like a vampire. I know you do. I saw you.”
“Jordy—”
“How do you do it? How is it possible?”
I shake my head. Pressing my lips together. We cannot go there.
“Declan and Parker were talking about it. Vampires are bigger, faster, strong. Shifters are all those things, but head to head, vampires beat shifters every time.”
“He’s right. As far as I know, I’m the only shifter to ever beat a vampire. There’s a way to do it, but only I know how.” Fates, why am I telling her this? If any vampire finds out what she knows, her life is forfeit. Not to mention mine.
“How?”
“It’s a secret. I can’t tell you.”
Her hand drops to her own chest. “I dream about him, sometimes. The vampire who did this.”
“I know, Kit.” I’ve held her through those nightmares. “I’ll kill him.”
“No. I wish I was bigger, stronger, faster. So I could defend myself. But I’m not. I’ll always be small.” She sounds so sad. I want to comfort her and have no idea how. “And now I’m scarred. Ugly. Augustine was so mad after…he saw me. He never treated me the same after that.”
“He should’ve protected you,” I growl. “It wasn’t your fault.”
She closes her eyes, tears spilling, magnifying the freckles.
“Kit, sweetness,” I shift her closer in my arms. “Don’t cry. You’re breaking my heart. If I had been there, I would’ve protected you.”
“I know.”
“I’m here now. No vampire will ever touch you again.”
She shakes her head. “I’ve got to go back. You know that. You can’t take from a vampire.”
“He’s not getting his hands on you again,” I growl.
Her eyes slide to the door.
I grip her hair. “No. No running. We’re in this now, together. If you think you’re going back to him after this—”
“Grizz, please.”
“No, Jordy.” I tip her face up. “He doesn’t get to have you.”