Page 46 of Caelum

THIRTEEN

DRE

“What are you doing here?”

The sight of Eve in my garden should have irritated me more than it actually did. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t head over to her, grab her, and haul her out… but when her fingers curled on her palms, I was reminded why.

She stroked her marks with the tips of her fingers and the sensation, though impossible, whispered over my flesh like a caress.

Having leaped to her feet at my words, she stood there, shoulders rounded, and her hands now clenched into fists after she’d seen me watching her caress her palms. “I wanted to think,” she muttered.

My jaw clenched at her words then tightened further when I saw the empty bag of blood on the ground where she’d been sitting before I’d come inside my safe haven. That she was still refusing to take blood from the vein irked me, just like everything else about her. She had a Pack of seven hovering around her and she was still shy about taking from the vein?

Jesus wept.

Tone sharp from my irritation, I ground out, “Go and think somewhere else. I’m going to be busy.” I hadn’t been looking after the cacti since Eve had made an appearance at Caelum, and there were weeds starting to grow—to my shame.

This was my heritage. The one link I had to my past and to my family.

I didn’t like thinking about what was going to happen to them when I left Caelum. If things had proceeded like normal, they’d have been ready to harvest just as I was due to graduate. I could have made some tequila for the rest of the student body, left it behind as a gift for them—the ‘only beer’ rule was a shit rule. Sometimes, after the stuff we did and saw, beer didn’t cut it.

But, because of this woman here, my plans had gone awry, and my cacti would probably be tossed on a scrap heap and burned. The thought alone triggered an acute pain deep inside me.

“I like it here,” she whispered, turning away so she looked over my cacti and toward the ocean, which blasted her with a gust of sea breeze. It rustled her hair, and Eren’s plaid shirt shifted against her body, revealing curves I didn’t want to find attractive but did.

“Tough. Fuck off, Eve,” I snarled. “I have shit to do and don’t have time to babysit you. Isn’t it time you fucked up one of the others’ lives?”

She stiffened at my words. “I didn’t mean to make you shift.”

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” I ground out, and because she wasn’t moving, I decided I needed to make her.

The bear roared inside my head, fucking with my thoughts just as it had been since she’d made him pop out like she’d whispered, “Abracadabra.” He didn’t like my intentions, knew this female was his to love and to protect, but the man? He didn’t fucking agree.

My feet connected with the soil as I stormed her way, and when I grabbed her arm and began hauling her out of the yard, the bear rebelled by shooting searing pain through my nerve endings. The headache splintered out of nowhere, then disappeared when my hands shot up to cup my head.

“Did you do that?” I growled at her. My bear had, but I knew she could do things to him. Knew she had some control over him.

Her eyes were wide, and she shook her head rapidly, side to side, swinging like she was utterly petrified of me.

I knew it made me a bastard that I liked it, and I loomed over her, wanting her fear because that I could handle. Her terror was easy to deal with, her dislike a boon. I didn’t need her to like me, didn’t even need her to Choose or Claim me, but she’d taken that away from me, and I was the only guy who seemed to mind that.

Males had no choice, but if I had, I’d never have picked someone like her. She was weak, too fragile. Ghouls could hurt her, and through her, I could be destroyed.

No.

I could never let someone hurt me like that again.

Never.

“Why do you hate me so much?” she rasped, the words emitted through chattering teeth.

My top lip curled, and though I was on the brink of telling her that I didn’t give enough of a fuck about her to hate her, the words that spilled from my mouth were different. They weren’t intended. It was like my brain was rebelling. “Because you make me feel,” I ground out.

Her eyes rounded at that, and her shoulders dropped with surprise. With those five words, the fear seemed to drift away from her, and that was the last thing I needed or wanted.

When she hurled herself at me, I anticipated her attack, but what I couldn’t have anticipated was her throwing herself into my chest as one hand came up to grip the back of my head. With a firm hold on my hair, she forced my head down, down until our faces were inches away from each other.

For a second, I froze. Everything inside me turned to ice, but when she bridged the gap, molten heat replaced the deep freeze.

I gasped, opening my mouth wide as the bizarre sensation coursed through me, and she took advantage.

Someone had taught her to kiss. Stefan? It figured.

She kissed like a dream. Making thoughts that didn’t belong in my head surge to life as my body conspired against me. My cock hardened as her tits rubbed against my chest, the taut nipples delicious buds I wanted to feel in the palms of my hands, between my lips.

I wanted nothing more than to thrust her to the ground, to fuck her in the soil. In the earth I’d claimed as mine when I came to Caelum, in the dirt I tended, where all that remained of my heritage lay.

Her tongue thrust into my mouth, rubbing against mine as she rubbed her body over my form. She taunted me, tempted me, tortured me with her lips, teeth, and tongue. Giving me what she wanted, not what I needed from her.

And even as the thought crossed my mind, I pulled back and yelled, “Get the fuck out of here. I don’t want you!”

Her pale cheeks blanched, and the promise of arousal in her body dampened as she tensed up, going from fluid and warm to cold and rigid. She stared at me, her eyes pleading with me to take it back, to accept her and everything she represented.

When I turned around, ignoring her, I heard her choked sob and the slam of the gate as she rushed out.

My teeth gritted as guilt filled me, but I didn’t need her. She was a complication, someone who had brought more problems into my world.

I was a soldier, and she’d just robbed me of my cause.

The second I forgot that, the second I forgot my purpose, she killed Alexandre and turned me into her puppet, just like all the others.