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True to his word, Lucas was sitting on the floor eating cereal when I came out of my room the next morning. He’d forgotten the milk and was eating the dry cereal with chopsticks. Knight was lounging on the couch playing a game on his phone, and Galen was in the kitchen sipping coffee while reading a French paper.
Knight saw me first and looked up with a smile. He turned his phone to me to show me the game he was playing. “Look, I infected the entire world with vampires.” I raised an eyebrow and walked over to Galen to get a cup of coffee.
“Are you okay?” I asked him quietly.
“I’m fine, cheri.” I noticed his bags packed and next to the door. I knew he’d have to leave, but I didn’t want him to.
“You going?” Nodding, he finished his cup of coffee and we moved over to the front door. I opened it, took his bags, and shut it after we’d gone into the hallway. “I didn’t umm...” I had to blink before tears came.
He kissed me on the forehead and wrapped me in his arms. “I hope we meet again soon. When Renard comes home, tell him I miss him. I expect an invitation when he and Olivier become bonded.” He kissed my hair again and we stood there for a few minutes, not wanting to let go.
“I wanted more time,” I said with a sniff.
“You are welcome at my home, always. Knight too, but...not the other one.” I laughed and felt a tear escape. “Until we meet again. And Lisbeth.” I pulled away to look up at him. “You deserve to be happy, too.”
One last kiss and he was gone down the hallway. My heart sank, and I couldn’t help but fear that I would never see him again. I shuffled back into the hotel room and finished my coffee.
“Bonded?” Knight asked after a few minutes. “What’s that?” Of course, they’d listened in.
“It is a ceremony,” Lucas explained. “Two vampires pledging their lives to one another.”
“So it’s a marriage?”
I rinsed the coffee mugs in the sink. “No, it’s not a marriage. It’s deeper than that. It’s forever. Once bonded, you can never be bonded with another, not even if your mate dies. The ceremony is a very rare occasion, for that reason alone.”
Lucas got up and put his bowl on the counter. “We need to go now. They are expecting us.”
“They?” I asked him in confusion. There was someone with Anastasia? Lucas didn’t elaborate. Instead, he came over and started munching on a package of coffee beans.
Knight raised an eyebrow and got up from the couch. “I’ll just be a minute. You watch Crazy, make sure he doesn’t lick the electrical sockets.” He disappeared into one of the rooms.
“Your friend thinks I am insane,” Lucas said, mid-crunch of another coffee bean.
“Well... you’re eating coffee beans.”
He frowned and looked down at the bag. “Is this not how they’re consumed?” I leaned over and took one, popped it in my mouth, and chewed it.
“Not bad,” I told him with a smile. My phone rang during our moment, scaring Lucas enough that he threw the coffee bag and beans flew everywhere.
“WHAT IS THAT? IS IT A DEMON FROM HELL? Just playing. Who’s calling you?”
I pulled my phone from my pocket and shook a finger at him. “Clean up the mess, Lucas.” He grumbled and bent to pick up the scattered beans. Olivier was calling me in a video chat, so I answered and saw her holding Kitty in her arms.
My heart squeezed, and nothing else mattered at all except my little girl. Kitty looked healthy and happy. She held her little teething toy to her mouth and munched on it with gusto, stopping every now and then to giggle at Olivier’s fingers tickling her.
“Say, hi mommy,” Olivier prompted in her baby voice. Kitty squealed and looked over at the phone someone was holding for Olivier. When she saw my face and realized it was me on the other end, she looked happier than she had with the teether or the tickles.
She grabbed for the phone and I heard Arthur say, “No phones, young lady.” Kitty looked sad for a few moments until she saw me again. She shook her teether to show it to me and cooed. “Hand her to me,” Arthur said. The phone changed hands, then Olivier set it down and sat on the couch next to Arthur and Kitty so I could see all three of them.
“How’re the negotiations going?” Olivier asked me. Oh. That.
“We haven’t started yet. Knight reached out, we’re waiting for an answer.” It wasn’t wholly untrue, we had sent them a letter that they should’ve gotten already. The follow-up would have to wait, though.
“Let me see the child,” Lucas insisted, and he grabbed the phone before I could stop him. “Aye, she is perfection. I am so proud of you.” I took the phone back and slapped at him when he tried to stop me.
Olivier had a suspicious look when I got back on the camera. “Who was that...” Lucas had his hands together, tapping his fingertips in excitement.
“Rogue vampire. We’re trying to convince him to come back with us. He’s a little...” I glanced up at Lucas’s smiling face. “Odd.” His smile deflated in a pout.
“Okay then,” Olivier responded, her eyebrow still raised at me. “Call us back when you hear from the Lycans.” She moved the camera to show Kitty again, and with a wave of her teether, the screen went dark, and my heart squeezed in pain.
Remember the mission. I could do this. I could do this.
Lucas was still pouting as he munched coffee beans from the floor.
“Have you fed?” I asked him.
“Room service,” he said with his mouth full of beans. “You call, and a human comes. It’s very convenient.”
When had that happened? Oh god. Was there a body in here? I was not in the mood to dispose of a body. I glanced around and gave a few deep sniffs to see if I’d missed the stench of death.
Lucas stood up, offended at my lack of trust. “I didn’t kill him. I fed, altered his memories, and let him leave. I’m not a monster. I may have stolen people in the catacombs, but I always let them live.”
My cheeks flamed in shame. I’d naturally assumed he was a human killer, but that wasn’t fair of me. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I’ll be right back.”
I left Lucas to the coffee beans and walked over to the door Knight had entered. The door was slightly open, so I pushed on it and knocked on the side.
“Knight?” The room was empty and the shower was still running. Knight’s small bag sat at the edge of the bed with a shirt on top of it. I walked closer to run my hand across the shirt fabric. It was soft, and had, ‘Translation: This house is bitchin’ written on it.
“Yo,” Knight said behind me.
“Hey,” I said as I turned, only to see he was shirtless. Right. The shirt on the bed. Of course he wasn’t fully dressed. “Heyy,” I repeated louder as I turned my focus to the crown molding of the ceiling, and not on the glorious display in front of me. “I just umm, well, it’s morning, so I kind of...need...” I twirled my hand around to get my point across.
“Blood?” he asked with a smirk. He came up close to me and held out his wrist.
“Umm, shirt first?” I suggested in a higher pitch than I intended. He wiggled his wrist at me with a sigh. “Fine.” I grabbed his hand and sank my teeth into the muscle on his forearm. Mid-sip, he pulled me until my back was against his chest, and he folded me up in his arms. I drank until my stomach was full, and licked the skin clean. “That was a dirty trick,” I complained half-heartedly. Was he trying to tease me and show me what I could never have? Maybe he was trying to punish me. Either way, this was nice. Wrong, but nice. Could I stand here forever?
He breathed a sigh of relief and pulled his arms tighter around me. “I missed you so much, Lis.” His lips floated through my hair, planting a million kisses against my scalp.
Against my will, I felt myself relaxing against him. “I missed you so much I wanted to die. I even tried to kill myself.”
“In the bathtub,” he whispered, his lips getting closer and closer to my face.
In the bathtub? How had he known that? I pulled away from his warm embrace, which was the last thing I’d wanted to do.
“How did you know that? How did you know I tried to kill myself in the bathtub? I never told anyone that.”
His hands opened and closed, trying to invite me back into his arms. “Because I was there? I was outside in the prison they’d made me. It was muddy and cold, and then suddenly I was in your bathroom and you were holding your head underwater. ‘I was being a dolphin,’ that was what you said. You were trying to kill yourself? Why would you do that?”
“That was a delusion. You weren’t really there,” I insisted, mostly because I couldn’t wrap my head around this.
“I was,” he said back.
Lucas popped his head in. “Can I turn on the telly, or are we leaving soon?”
I looked away from Knight’s searching eyes. “We’re leaving. Pack up.”
