Page 85 of Broken Souls

“When did we bond?”

She looks at me like I’m crazy, and it’s the most beautiful look in the world. She’s coming back to me. Has a bit more fire in her veins. “When you asked me to bond with you,” she says.

“No, we didn’t. It didn’t work.” The words hurt like hel, but I’m fucking glad of that truth if it means she won’t try to kill herself to try to remove it.

She blinks at me. And there’s no mistaking the fire in her eyes now. “Oh, is that what you’re going for now? Pretend like you couldn’t fucking feel what I was going through as you tortured me? Or when you raped me last night? Did you not just focus on the pleasure so you could –”

My skin feels tight across my chest. “When did I rape –”

“When I said no and you didn’t stop!” she screams before she clenches her fists and gets her anger back under control, shoved down in a deep dark depth where nothing can touch her. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” she says flatly.

“Micha, I swear to you, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I came home last night, you said no, and I stopped. Then we went to bed.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“Micha,” I say, stepping closer to her, lifting her chin up to look at me. But her eyes are blank, not focused on me at all. A sickness pooling in my stomach, I look down at my chest. There’s a hole and bloodstain right over my heart, and I stagger back as the realization of what happened hits me.

She fucking killed me.

My little monster.

She’s nothing but a traitor like all the others.

My hands curl into fists as I am consumed with a need to hit something. To break it. To fuckingdestroyit like she’s done to me. I’ve never thrown a tantrum before, never lost control even as a child. I’ve always thought people who did were weak and pathetic, but I fucking get it now. I get why her room looked how it did last night – how she just needed to get what was insideout.

Pivoting to the side, I grab hold of the dresser full of toys that I bought for us so we could experience all the firsts together, and I launch it across the room, straight through the door of the ensuite. She doesn’t move, doesn’t react, her assassin training keeping her poised, but I can smell her fear. Hear the rapid beat of her heart.

And I hate it.

I hate that I’ve made her scared of me.

But I can’t stop the rage inside. Can’t control it this time. If she was anyone else, she’d be dead on the floor already, bleeding out for her sins.

But she is mine.

Even in her fucking betrayal, she.

Is.

Mine.

Grabbing the top of the dresser, sticking my hands where the drawer no longer is, I lift the entire thing and throw that too. Then I grab the top of her dress and rip it down the middle before she can even gasp.

“Get off me!” she screams, and there is panic there that cuts me down to my soul. Is this how she yelled at me last night? Frantic and terrified and helpless to stop me?

I can’t fucking remember.

I can’t remember an event that hurt her so deeply, and I am so pissed off at myself for that and at Mother for making that damn clause in the first place. I don’t even know if it’s me when the vampirism hits, or if I am fully consumed by a hunger I can’t contain. If I black out and a primal beast remains, a vampire who’s starving and living off the crumbs of life he gets to experience, or if I am aware the whole time. I want to believe that it’s the former, that I didn’t fuckingchooseto hurt what’s mine, but I can’t remember a godsdamn thing about it.

And in the end, it doesn’t matter.

Becausesheremembers all of it. I can see it in her eyes. I can smell it in the pheromones coming off her, and it makes me want to destroy more shit.

But I can’t right now because I need to check her over.

If I’m alive, then I must have fed from her. Micha’s a strong witch; her magic must have healed me faster than that woman in the alley did – the first person I killed when my vampirism was activated.

I tear her dress from her and step back. Her arms go up to cover herself, but I’m looking at her neck, her arms, her chest, anywhere I might have bit her or simply grabbed her too hard in my desperation to feed. There are bruises. A lot of them. In the shape of my fingers.