Her hands slipped into his hair as she met his kiss, unconsciously writhing subtly against the hardening contours of his body. There was a low groan in his throat as he gave in to the moment, but just as quickly he pulled away, trying to regain composure. Something inside him was threatening to break free, but he fought hard to suppress it. “I wanted to give you this before, but now it seems like the wrong time.” He produced a red velvet box from his jacket.
She opened it slowly to reveal a diamond tiara like the one she had worn in her dream. She gasped. “I cannot accept this,” she murmured.
“You must,” he insisted. “It was made for you. Only you should wear it.”
She glanced at him. His expression was so hopeful that she could not resist the gift. “Where on earth would I wear it?”
He knelt down on one knee in front of her. “When you marry me.”
She toppled headlong in the dark intensity of his eyes. She wanted to protest. She wanted to outline all the reasons why she could never marry, much less marry him. She wanted to say so much. But all she could say was, “Oh, Nicholas.”
He knelt on his knees, his arms wrapped around her waist as he held her close. Tears ran freely down her cheeks as she stared at the tiara. He was offering her a happily ever after when her life was anything but a fairy tale. She was starring in a horror story and nothing, not even the unexpected love of an unpredictable man, could pull her back from the brink.
“You don’t have to give me an answer tonight,” he said, as if reading her mind. “I want you to think about the life you want, the life you deserve, the life I can give to you. Then you’ll see that we were meant to be together. We are tied together by an invisible string that cannot break. Look in your heart, Adele. You’ll see that I’m a part of you.”
If he had kissed her again, in that moment she might have screamed “Yes,” to the treetops. But he opted instead to release her and rise to a standing position in order to douse the lantern. They were silent as he led the way back to the car. Even as he held her close as they road back to her apartment, they didn’t speak.
It was as if he knew he had said too much already.
Everything was happening so fast while everything else in her life was falling apart. How could she think about marrying this man she’d known for mere weeks? Everyone in her life needed her more. Her mother, her brother, Dani… it was all too much.
He didn’t pressure her as he kissed her goodnight, but his parting kiss was firm. It was like he didn’t want her to forget.
How could she? With every heartbeat she relived their brief time together. Her body was aflame with her own unfulfilled desire. It was like she had waited a thousand years for him, too. That night when she finally did fall asleep, she dreamt once more about the hallway of doors, only instead of being locked, each and every door opened and slammed shut over and over again.
“If you love him,” the voice whispered, “you will do it.”
She was up by dawn, sitting cross-legged in her bed, staring at the way the diamonds caught the dawning sun, cutting shards of light across the walls of her apartment.
The phone made her jump. It was Michael. He instructed her to turn on the news, and she saw the angry mobs as they crowded Vincent’s bookstore. Chanting punctuated the sounds of glass breaking as people threw things through the various windows, preceding loud explosions. Each sound cut into her heart like a whip and all she could do was cry for the brother she had barely met but loved all the same.
It was that same brother Nicholas asked her never to see again. It was the first of many promises she knew she couldn’t make to the man who had entered her life like a bolt of lightning.
She may have loved him, inexplicably and unexpectedly. But there were things that she could not do.
She had another soul to save. If they were bound by the red string of fate, like he said, then time could not be their enemy. If Nicholas truly cared about her, he would be there when she was ready.
In her heart of hearts, she found herself hoping that he would. If anyone needed a fairy tale ending right now, it was Adele.
She tucked the tiara in her jacket, headed out the door and hoped for the best.
Max was at the desk when she arrived. “You’re getting to be a familiar face around here,” he teased with a big grin.
“What can I say? I am relentless in search of the truth.” They both laughed. “If you’ll call the guys and let them know I’m on my way up, they won’t have to send anyone.”
Max looked a little taken off guard. “You mean they didn’t tell you?”
Her brow creased. “Tell me what?”
“They don’t take visitors during the day.”
The phone rang and Max excused himself. No, she thought to herself. They hadn’t told her that. In fact, she concluded suddenly, she’d never seen any of them during the day since the day they met. It was always at night. Always. How had that been possible? And why hadn’t she noticed before? More curious now, Adele ducked into the elevator when Max wasn’t looking.
The top floor was empty except for the housekeeping staff that cleaned some of the rooms nearby. A couple of the rooms had privacy signs dangling from the doorknob – Nicholas’s was one of them. Adele waited until one of the housekeepers had gone into a nearby room before she grabbed a room key card from the cart and quickly inserted it into Nicholas’s door. She disappeared before anyone could tell she was there at all.
The air was still in the darkened apartment. It was quiet. Way too quiet. Nothing made sound. Not clocks, not air conditioners or heaters, no phones or televisions, it was entirely and completely still. Deathly still. Her shallow breath escaped in tiny misty puffs, like it would on a very cold morning. Her heartbeat began to thunder in the silence, thumping in her ears.
Because all the drapes were drawn, it was hard to find her way around. She reached out to touch the wall to guide her along, and the surface felt ice cold to the touch. She snatched her hand back and turned right into a table, bumping her knee. She had to stifle a curse as she limped over to where she remembered the desk to be.
She parted the drapes just slightly to get a good look. She sifted through the paperwork, trying to find the one envelope with the name she did not recognize. It was gone. She sighed as she stood, glancing off toward the room Nicholas had pulled her away from. The door was tightly shut. There was something in that room he hadn’t wanted her to see, and in that moment the fearless reporter wasn’t too sure she wanted to see it, either.
Instead she prowled through his desk drawers, through the business papers and other things she couldn’t have cared less about. Who gave a rat’s ass about a logging company in a sleepy woodland town? It was old news by now. Even the protestors had found other causes to champion, though the wolf carcasses had increased in recent weeks. Adele’s instincts kicked in, letting her know there was something more going on here. To get to the real story, she had to look deeper.
There had been something magical that had happened between her and Nicholas from the moment they met, but magic was an illusion. Many of the feelings stemmed from her visions and dreams, like she had picked up in some alternate reality that skipped over all the time normal couples would have spent falling in love. It was like she had stepped into the dance halfway in progress.
“I have waited a thousand lifetimes for you,” he had told her only the night before. It was a romantic thing to say, but now that Adele entertained the thoughts of reincarnation she couldn’t help but wonder if he had been speaking literally rather than figuratively. How else could he have fallen in love with her so fast, as though he’d simply been waiting for her, and only her, to come along?
Had every vision and dream actually been a memory?
And if that was possible, then who could he have been in her past life? What if Vincent was right, and she had been a vampire, a cursed soul, in a former life? Who had Nicholas been to her then?
When Max had said they never saw anyone during dayl
ight hours, something just seemed to click. She had never seen Nicholas in the daytime. Ever. Her mind raced over all the information she had soaked in by all the books Vincent made her read. It was a cheesy, cliché vampire myth, but she couldn’t escape the fact that she had fallen in love with someone she’d only seen when the sun was absent.
But surely her heart could not have fooled her this badly. Surely her heart would never fall in love with a man who could not only kill a child, but be the man who raped her mother.
And that’s what being a vampire made him. A killer. A rapist. Her father.
She shuddered then, and not just from the intensely cold room. She could not have wanted her father. The thought made her ill.
It had to be a coincidence, she told herself. She wasn’t ready to heave herself headlong into the paranormal just yet. They were still living in the real world, after all. And aside from a few coincidences, there was no evidence to support such an insane, unthinkable hypothesis.
She ransacked the next drawer, and the next. It was only when she withdrew the plastic bag with the bloody handkerchief that a panicked scream lodged in her throat. “Roman,” she whispered, her throat so constricted the sound came out as a squeak.
She turned back toward the first room in the hall. After a deep breath, she willed her feet to walk over to the door, where she ever so gently turned the knob until the latch gave way with a deafening click that echoed through the empty space.
Dirt scraped against the marble as she slowly opened the door and peeked inside. In the darkness she could barely make anything out of the shadows any more than she could the night before. Her hand shook as she reached for her phone. She cast the light into a tiny corner of the room, where she could clearly see someone’s bare, gray, dirty feet sticking out of a dirty pine box.
At that moment her phone rang in her hand and Adele nearly jumped right out of her skin. She slammed the door and got the hell out of that penthouse, out of that hotel, out of Nicholas’s life.
It couldn’t have been true, and yet it was.
The love of her life was a killer. And no one she loved was safe unless she could kill him.
“And only we can stop him,” Vincent had told her. “Dhampirs are hunters. This is what we were born for. And what you were reborn for.”
She didn’t stop running until she reached her apartment.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Michael pounded on Adele’s door around dusk. The light was on, he knew she was awake, but she was not answering. She didn’t want to see him; she didn’t want to see anyone. She let the world go on around her, all noises blended together into a dull, annoying hum. She didn’t even pay attention to the voices. There was nothing they could do to hurt her more. Inside she was devastated. She wanted to stay holed up inside her apartment where it was safe, where she didn’t have to choose.
She understood her mother a whole lot better now.
Michael, however, would not be deterred. He continued to knock, undaunted by her refusal to answer the door. There were times when he’d allow her to mope her way through a situation, but this was not one of those times. Her life, and Dani’s, depended on it.
When she finally opened the door she looked like she hadn’t slept in days. “You never should have left the hospital,” Michael chastised at once. “Your mother bawled me out when I told her.”
“At least she’s talking to you,” Adele mumbled and then returned to the sofa where she’d spent every anguishing waking moment since her horrifying revelation that morning.
Michael followed her to the sofa. “I saw Vincent,” he told her as he sat opposite of her. Her blank eyes met his. “We have to do something. We have to find out who it is and stop them, Adele. Otherwise he’s going to kill you.”
She snorted. She felt like she already had. “You’re going to have to raise the stakes a little more than that, Michael,” she said, blowing her stuffy nose in a battered tissue.
He didn’t like the sound of that. “How about Dani? Does that raise the stakes enough for you?”
She looked decidedly shaken. “Is that what Vincent said?”
Michael nodded. “You’re both in danger. And I’m not about to let anyone hurt either one of you.” He paused only for a moment. “Especially you.”
She hopped up from the sofa, trying to run from his words. He couldn’t do this to her now. Her emotional plate was filled to overflowing. A feather would have knocked her over the brink. “Michael, you don’t know what you’re saying.”
Michael was on her heals, refusing to let her run from him again. He grabbed her by the elbow. “I know exactly what I’m saying. But more importantly, I know what I’m doing.” Reluctantly she allowed their eyes to meet. “I love you, Adele,” he finally admitted in a hoarse whisper. “I’ve always loved you.”
He had both her arms in his hands at this time, refusing to let her turn away from him again. “Don’t you see? You are the reason I breathe, Addie. I would fight the devil himself to save you.”
“You might have to,” she whispered back. “You don’t get it, Michael. What we’re fighting isn’t flesh and blood. It’s a monster. A real monster. And…” She gulped hard. “And I love him,” she finally eked out.
Michael released his hold on her and stumbled backward. She could see his heart shatter right before her eyes.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she tried to explain, only this time he turned away. “I can’t explain it.”
“Explain it to Dani,” he bit out between clenched teeth as he turned on her with an anger she had never before seen in her dearest friend. “This thing you claim to love nearly killed her once and will try to do it again. Can you honestly tell me that’s someone you can love? Adele, listen to yourself!”
“I know it doesn’t make sense,” she screamed back. “I tell myself I should hate him, despise him, wish him dead or even kill him myself. But my heart refuses to let him go. This is bigger than me, Michael.”
“It’s not bigger than me,” he growled, yanking off the gold crucifix that had hung around his neck since the day his mother died. It was her necklace, it was his promise, and now he was breaking both of them.
She rushed to him but he brushed her off as he turned to leave. “Michael, no! You can’t do this. You’re a priest!”
He turned around with a grimace, and then grabbed her to him and pinned her to the wall with his deceptively muscular body. Before she could catch her breath his head descended towards hers. His kiss was hard and unapologetic as his tongue invaded her mouth with a passion a decade in the making. His strong hands molded her against his body, which at the moment felt like anything but holy.
She was speechless when he finally released her. She stumbled a bit, staring at him in shock. “No, Adele,” he corrected in a low but firm voice. “I am a man.”
A tear escaped her eye and trailed down her face. “If you love me, then go back to the church. Don’t risk your life for me.”
“There is no life without you,” he said, and then he was gone.
By the time night had fallen again, Adele thought she’d cried a lifetime’s worth of tears. How could fate be so cruel? Had she not known the truth about herself, she and Michael would have probably been married by now, with a half dozen of their own kids. She never would have become a reporter, never would have been exposed to Nicholas, never would have met Isabel or experienced the dreams or saw Lily or nearly lost Dani…
But then again she’d have probably never met Dani, and then where would Dani be?
“Destiny links people who are supposed to find each other, help each other, and even love each other,” Nicholas had told her. “It knows no distance, no time, no circumstance. No matter what happens, this string will never break.”
Her throat closed as she remembered what Nicholas had told her. He had foreshadowed it all. If Vincent was right, and she had no reason to doubt that he was, Nicholas would have found his way to her door anyway. It was meant to happen.
And for one bright, shining moment it had been worth it. Stepping into his arms had felt like coming home. How could she now separate those feelings and the thought of that Creature with the bright yellow eyes? How could she remember the warmth of Nicholas’s kiss and see those old cracked lips, sharp fanged and snake like tongue licking her blood from his long, sharp claws?
She shivered at the thought of it. How could this man be the man who raped her mother? How could the man who had held her in his arms be the monster who fathered her and stole her brother? How could they feel like two entirely different people in the times she’d come face to face with both?
One she feared, and one she loved. God help her she did. She dissolved in more tears.
She barely heard the knock at the door around midnight. She thought for a moment it was Michael, but as she walked closer to the door her heart revealed who really stood on the other side. She didn’t even need to hear his voice. Even through two inches of wood his hold on her was undeniable.
“Adele? It’s Nicholas.”
She gasped, unsure of what to do. Her first impulse was to fling the door open and fly into his arms, but at the same moment she wanted to get as far away from him as possible. She needed to keep her head, and there was no doing it the moment that she looked into his eyes. She shook as she stammered, “You know, I’m really not feeling all that well, Nicholas. I think it may be a bug. I’m just going to get some sleep. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
There was a pause. She held her breath, hoping that he would not see through her feeble lie. “What’s wrong, Adele?”
Her heart broke at the question. “Nothing's wrong.”
“I’ll feel better if I could see you,” he said, and she could hear the longing in his voice. It was the same longing she felt and subsequently cursed.
“I’d feel better if you didn’t,” she finally said. A long moment stretched on and she started to think he had gone.
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