by Anna Santos
“I know.”
“I hate you!”
“I’m sorry!”
“You pretended to love me! Do you have any idea how twisted and sick that is?” I asked out of breath, wanting him to let go of me so I could just run away from him.
“I didn’t pretend,” he refuted, raising his head to stare at me. I saw the tears in his eyes. “I do love you.” I heard every beat of my heart and felt every inch of my skin shivering. My stomach dropped and I gulped. I didn’t know what to believe. “I didn’t plan to fall in love with you. But I did, and I don’t want you to go back to him. I want you for myself. He doesn’t deserve you, Violet.”
“Fuck you,” I cussed and tried to pull him away from me. “You just don’t want me to run away from the Organization. You are a fucking liar, and I hate you!”
“Violet,” he begged, holding me tighter and making me fall over him.
It was becoming ridiculous. I didn’t want to hurt him, and I was trying to get free from his hold. But I found myself fighting against him and stumbling to the ground. He didn’t let me fall on the floor. He used his body to cushion my fall, but when I tried to crawl my way out, he grabbed me and made me stay under his body, caught between his arms and with his face hovering over mine.
“I love you,” he said, staring deep into my eyes. I turned my face away from his. I didn’t want to listen to his lies.
“You lied to me,” I argued, feeling the rage being replaced by sadness. I was about to start crying, and I didn’t want that. Not while he could see me crying.
“Just once,” he retorted. “Just one little lie. You were willing to die for that creep. We needed you. I had begged for your life to the elders. I knew that there was only one way for you to want to join us and live.”
“Revenge,” I whispered, listening to his words.
“He loves no one, Violet. He may not have planned your death, but he’s a killer and a heartless bastard. He was screwing your supposed daughter under your own roof. Anastasia confirmed it, didn’t she?” I nodded, keeping my eyes away from his and staying quietly underneath him. “What kind of life was that?” The tears itched in my eyes. “He’s a liar and a cheater. You deserve much more than him.”
“You’re also a liar,” I told him.
“You have no idea how much it tormented me seeing you suffer, because of my lie and because of him. These past weeks have been even worse. I wanted to tell you, I knew you would eventually find out.”
I turned my head to face him, trying to conceal my emotions. He looked miserable, and his eyes shone with unshed tears. My heart started beating faster and I lost my voice momentarily.
“He loves me,” I told him, gauging his reaction.
He growled, his face becoming enraged. “I love you more,” he retorted. I evaded his stare and sighed deeply. “Fuck, Violet. Why do you have to be like this?”
“Like what?”
“Stubborn and blind! Can’t you see the monster that he is?”
“And you’re so much better, aren’t you?”
“I’ve never killed innocent children, or cheated and lied to the woman I love. I’ve never used women. I’m not a pimp or a gigolo!”
“You’ve used me.”
“I didn’t use you,” he denied next to my mouth. I tried to pull away, but he didn’t budge. “I love you. I worship the floor you walk on. I can barely function when I’m away from you. I do everything you ask of me,” he reasoned, voice laced with pain.
I stared at him with angry eyes. “Then get off of me, you are crushing me!”
I sighed, losing my patience, and he finally moved and got up. Then he bent down and straightened me up. I dusted my clothes, ignoring his presence next to me. Ignoring his pleading eyes.
“Will you forgive me?” he asked, voice laced with velvet to crush my defenses.
“I do not know,” I said, trying to stay brave and think about everything that happened. “You’ve lied for more than a century,” I reasoned with him. “You can’t possibly think that you’ll get away that easily!” I folded my arms under my breasts.
“Violet,” he protested.
“I just want to slap you right now!” I growled, unfolding my arms and screaming at him. “I thought I could trust you! And it turns out that you’ve lied to me and you kept lying, even when you knew that I would eventually find out the truth!”
“Then you lied to me too!”
“How come?” I asked him, narrowing my eyes at his accusation.
“All that talk about being over him. It was a lie! You just wanted an excuse to go back to him. Now that you’ve found one, you are going to run back to that piece of shit. And you’ll forgive all his lies and betrayals.” I slapped him across the face, annoyed by his nerve. He looked at me with his hand over his reddened face and hurting expression. “Vi!”
“You are an idiot.” I accused him, pointing a finger to his chest and making him walk backward as I screamed at him. “Ewan has nothing to do with this. He could fucking auto-combust for all I care! This is about you lying to me. I have no intention of going back to that creep. He’s a fucking psycho, and Anastasia is a fucking twisted bitch! I just wasn’t expecting you to be a liar, too!”
“I just lied to you once,” he claimed, grabbing my fingers and holding his ground. It seemed that I had wounded his pride, but he had done worst, he had wounded my heart. “Ewan lied to you all your life together.”
“I still hate you,” I retorted, even if I really didn’t hate him, but I wanted him to understand that he had wounded me and apologizing was just an easy way out.
“Please don’t say that.” He kneeled in front of me.
I gasped, stepping back. “Stop doing that!”
“Please, Violet.” He kept pleading, walking on his knees to get near me again. “I’ll die if you leave me. I will,” he sobbed.
My heart stopped beating inside my chest. His words felt like tiny knives hurting my skin. They were enough to make me break down and cry. I fell on the floor, sitting on my legs when my sobs erupted from my chest, quivering my whole body. Why it’s so hard to live, to love?
Galvin put his arms around me, and I hid my face against his chest. He smelled nice and his warmth was helping me calm down. The two of us crying like babies. Picture of the year!
“One hundred years of lies,” I mumbled, fisting my hands to his shirt and pulling it slightly.
“I have all eternity to make up for it,” he reasoned. I slammed my fist against his chest, wanting to hurt him like he had hurt me. “I’m not lying, Violet. I love you and I swear to you that I didn’t plan this. This isn’t my way to get revenge on Ewan. I didn’t want you to go after him in the first place.”
“Because you didn’t want me to find out that you’ve lied.”
“Because I didn’t want to lose you. He was your first love and I knew that you still had feelings for him. I love you and I wanted you to love me back. If you saw him again…I knew…”
I raised my head to face him. “You idiot, you shouldn’t have waited so long to tell me you love me!”
“I know! But I was afraid that you would reject me.” I swallowed my tears and twisted my fingers on the fabric of his sweater. “I’ll do anything you want. Please, what can I do to make you feel better? I really want you to forgive me.”
“Just forgive you?” I asked, wondering if it wasn’t just a scheme to make me stay in the Organization. “Why? Because you are afraid that I might leave and ruin your stupid plans of having a new Eylone super baby?” He looked taken aback by my words. “It’s extremely providential, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You had never demonstrated any type of interest towards me before my final transformation. Then suddenly I get pinned against a fucking door and you fuck me right there. No warning or anything. It’s a little odd, isn’t it? If you claim that you were afraid of being rejected when I first approached Ewan that fear was gone and you made your move. Claiming that
it was to help me focus.”
“You’re overthinking things.”
I noticed how his heartbeat increased. “Are you sure?”
“I didn’t fuck you against a door. I made love to you against a door. And I really don’t remember you complaining much,” he added at the end because I was going to complain about his reasoning. “If I well recall it, you enjoyed it a lot,” he mumbled huskily, making me gulp as my cheeks burned with the memories. The nerve he had! “And you let me kiss you and make love to you again, and again,” he added, hovering his lips over mine. “It was so damn bad that the next night, you came to me and you let me have you again. And don’t even make me talk about the times you took advantage of me in your bed.”
“Shut up,” I ordered, annoyed by his cocky speech. He had to rub it in my face. “Do you want me to slap you again?”
“No,” he shook his head. I almost laughed. But I was mad at him. “I want you to stop being so stubborn. I want you to forgive me. I want you to say you love me. Please,” he begged. It confused me. One moment he was teasing and the next he was pleading. “Come on, Violet. You can say anything you want about the lie I used to make you join us. But you can’t believe that I was so malicious to the point to fake my love for you. We’ve shared our minds. You’ve seen that I love you, and I’ve seen that you have feelings for me, too. You can punish me all you want. If it will make you feel better. But don’t leave us. Give me another chance.”
I sighed. There was something wrong with the men of his family because women couldn’t stay mad at them for long. I didn’t want to think that I could be falling for another trap. I didn’t want to have another ‘Ewan experience’. I didn’t want to have another lying man in my life. And I sure didn’t want to act crazy with jealousy like Anastasia. I wanted a normal relationship. I wanted to be loved and love him without any secrets and insecurities between us. I wanted to be able to trust him blindly as I did before I knew he had lied to me. How can I do that now? If I forgive him, will I regret it later?
I placed my hands over his face, making him look at me. Then I brushed my lips against his, closing my eyes momentarily. “If you lie to me again, I’ll cut your damn head off and serve it to the dogs,” I muttered, making him open his eyes wide, surprised or shocked by my words. It was a serious threat, though. I had enough of cheating and lying men in my life.
To my surprise, Galvin just nodded his head and then he pulled me to kiss him again. It was a hungry kiss that stole my breath away and made my body relax against him. His tongue swirled inside my mouth, sending sparks of heat down my body. I should be punching him, not kissing him. I knew that, but I also knew that it was absurd to prolong the sobbing and the pain. I loved him to madness. Even if I had thought that his love wasn’t real, his words and his attitudes made me rethink that.
“You broke my heart,” I complained when his lips trailed kisses on my cheeks and my eyes.
“I didn’t mean to.” He caressed my face and kissed my forehead and temples. “I tried to make you forget about your revenge. I tried to be patient so you could understand what your feelings for Ewan were. It was extremely hard for me, Violet.”
“You know you can’t cure this with sex, don’t you?” I asked, hoping he wasn’t going to try that move to make me stop complaining and be an obedient and cute enchantress in his hand.
“Of course not,” he said, apparently outraged. “I just want you to calm yourself down and understand that I love you. You are my whole world.”
I smiled at his words, leaning my head against his shoulder and putting my arms around his torso to hug him tight. That was what was different in our relationship, there was more than lust. More than a crazy obsession for one another. There was also peace and silence when we were together. And those overly romantic declarations of love, so sappy and at the same time endearing.
“You aren’t going to leave me, are you?” he asked, still unsure.
“I love you,” I said so he calmed down. He placed a kiss on the top of my head. His heart was erratic. “I promise you that I’m not going to run after Ewan. I’m not Enora. I’m over that prick.”
“It always feels like I’m in a dream when I listen to you say you love me. And I’m afraid of waking up and realizing that nothing of this was true.”
“That would be extremely cruel.”
“Baby,” he whispered and I sensed the stress in his voice. “I need to tell you something else.”
I raised my head to look at him and became anxious myself. What more can he possibly have to tell me?
“Is it something bad?”
“Not bad. It’s a secret about the Eylones. Now that you are one of us, you need to know about it.”
“Okay. Then tell me.”
“Well, what keeps us immortal isn’t the food, but the fact that we also feed of vampire’s blood. It’s our curse. We crave their blood as they crave human blood.”
“That explains a lot,” I declared, relief. I thought I was going crazy.
“And Ebony never looked like you,” he added as an aftershock. I blinked faster, processing his words. “I made that up because…I wanted you to hate Ewan even more.”
I let him go, pulling him away while anger possessed me again.
* * *
“Do you have some death wish?” I growled, getting up from the floor and facing him. Anger flickered in my eyes because of the lies he had told me.
“No, but if we are going to stay together, I have to come clean and erase any secrets or lies between us.”
“God! How could you be so sneaky! You really had me fooled with your angel face and mask of good intentions to save mankind from monsters!”
“One lie just led to another,” he explained with sad puppy dog eyes.
“So why did he save my life?” I asked, realizing that if I looked nothing like Ebony, then there must be another reason for Ewan keeping me alive and killing the others. It was a good question. Why save me and kill the other children?
“Does it matter?”
Galvin believed that my question was pointless. But he wasn’t me, he didn’t find out that he could have been killed, when he was ten years old, by a vicious and heartless vampire. Instead, he had spared my life. Ewan could be a monster, but for some centuries we were in love. He could be a cheating liar, but we had a connection. He was my first love-slash-obsession. And even if he was twisted, he loved me back. He said it a million times. Yet, he had no idea of what real love was, but he made me happy while I was blind to all his flaws and deranged behaviors.
“Fuck it, Violet! You are not going to pursue another witch hunt,” he said. I arched an eyebrow at him because of the bad choice of words. He sighed deeply, not in the mood to appreciate the sarcasm. “I’m serious! You aren’t going to talk to that prick and expose yourself to his vicious manipulation. He’ll say anything that can save him from dying.”
I pointed a finger at him. “I have the right to know. You owe me that.”
“I don’t owe you anything. I put my life at stake to save yours. I took care of you and I gave you my blood to cure you. I would fucking give my life for you. But I don’t want you near him again!”
“Tough luck,” I growled at him, moved by his words, but too annoyed by his wish of submitting me to his will to care.
“Fuck!” He got up and grabbed my face between his hands. “Why do you have to be so damn stubborn?”
“Why do you have to be such a dick?” I retorted.
“Because I love you and I don’t want him to make you change your mind.”
“The only thing he’ll change on me is my patience. I’m over him. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you this, but I’m over him and if you don’t let me do things my way, I will be over you rather fast, too! You won’t manipulate me just because I’m in love with you! Do I make myself clear?” I asked, pushing him back and standing my ground.
“I’m your superior.”
“Well, then I quit!” I snapped.
“You will not quit!”
“Then stop being stubborn.” I folded my arms.
“I’m not being stubborn. I just don’t want you near that prick!”
Huffing, I fisted my hands along my body. “You’re being extremely irrational! And you aren’t trusting me!”
“He’s a twisted being! I don’t know what lies he will tell you. I’m trying to protect you.”
I placed my hands on my hips. “I want and I need to know the truth!”
Galvin stepped forward and put his hands on my shoulders. “Violet, please understand, honey.”
“If you don’t let me do this, we are over!” I told him, angered by his stubbornness and lack of trust in me.
What does he think I am going to do? Let Ewan escape? Fall for his charming words?
He stepped back in shock with my words. I was expecting that he would at least refute them like he did when I said I would quit. But he looked hurt. Fucking great!
He wasn’t just hurt, he was disturbed by my menace. “You aren’t serious, are you?”
I mentally cursed and tried to remedy my stupid threat. I stepped forward, grabbed his face, and trailed kisses along his cheeks and mouth. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. Of course, I’m not serious. I was just mad and it was a stupid threat and I’m really sorry,” I blurted, making him bend over me so I could keep kissing his face and pouting lips.
“You’re extremely cruel sometimes,” he complained, stepping back and trying to grab my face so I would stop. “And you aren’t going to use sex to convince me,” he declared.
“Convince you of what, that I love you?”
“Nice try, but I know you.”
“You clearly don’t,” I retorted, putting my hands on my hips, annoyed by his words.
He narrowed his eyes, trying to read my mind, or at least my face because my mind had the barriers up, and I wasn’t going to let him in. “Why do you want to keep living in the past? We have a whole new future ahead of us. I love you to madness. I’ll do anything you want, but I can’t, Violet, I can’t watch you suffer anymore. It’s really painful.”