Bound by Night (The Moonbound Clan Vampires) (12 page)

“I’m taking you home today. Myne, Baddon, and Katina are waiting behind the wall.”

“It’s too dangerous. I won’t let you do it.” Terese’s hands slipped under his jacket. “I won’t let you die for me.” She brought a dagger, lifted from his harness, to her throat.

The warrior in him, the male who despised weakness and never stopped fighting, got really fucking pissed. “Dammit, female, what are you doing?” He wrapped his fingers around her hand. “I’m not worried about the danger, and I don’t plan to die. I’m taking you, and that’s final.”

A single drop of blood formed where the tip of the blade made a dimple in her pale skin. “Please, Riker. Don’t do this. Please.”

“We’ve got it figured out, Terese. We can do this. We have to. You’re due any day now, and I won’t let our son be born here.”

Terese stared blankly. “It’s not your baby, Rike.” There was no emotion in her words. It was as if she was reading lines from a book she didn’t even like.

It was Riker’s turn to stare, his brain having trouble processing what she’d just said. Finally, he managed to utter a few stunted, croaked words.

“Not mine? Whose?”

“I don’t know his name.”

Riker shook his head, still unable to think through the cobwebs. “You fucked someone else? Was that where you were this whole time? With him?”

“I was locked inside a Daedalus lab.” Her gaze went somewhere he couldn’t follow, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. “There was a male in a cell. They put me in it with him.”

A slow burn started low in his belly. “And you . . .”

“I was restrained.”

Emotion consumed him . . . rage that Terese had been abused that way, self-loathing that he hadn’t been able to protect her, and sorrow that the child he’d been wanting so desperately wasn’t his.

But her confession explained so much, and as he looked down at her swollen belly, he knew that what she needed right now wasn’t an explosion of fury that would terrify her. She needed comfort and reassurance, and he needed her and the baby—
his
baby, dammit—to be okay.

“Listen to me, Terese. Everything will be all right. I promise you. We’ll raise the baby as mine. I will be his father, and no one has to know.”

“I can’t!” she cried. “Don’t you see that I can’t do this? I don’t want this monster inside me. I don’t want the memories in my head.” She gave him a small, sad smile that chilled him for a reason he couldn’t pin down. “I’ve never been strong,
not like you. You deserve better than to be saddled with me. You always have.”

“That’s not true,” he croaked. “Our match wasn’t of our choosing, but I never regretted it.”

“That’s because you’re a good, decent male who doesn’t go back on his word. You made a commitment, and you kept it. But I release you from it now.” She pushed the tip of the blade deeper into her skin. “Please. Do it for me.”

“No! How can you ask that?” He squeezed her hand in an attempt to pull the knife away, but she didn’t budge. “Dammit, Terese, we can do this. I’ll get you out of here. Once you’re home, you’ll see that it’ll all work out.”

Then he saw it in her eyes, something that had been there for weeks but that he’d denied with all his heart: lifelessness. She’d lost the will to live. She was dead before he’d even arrived on the Martin property.

“Riker?” Nicole’s hand came down on his shoulder. He wanted to shrug away from her touch, but his body wouldn’t obey. “That day . . . the day she died, I heard her beg you for something.”

Bitterness welled up like acid, scorching his throat and putting a caustic edge on his words. “She begged me to not risk my life to rescue her. And then she begged me to kill her.” He’d been angry at her weakness, and now remorse threatened to eat him alive. He could have handled things so differently. “When I wouldn’t, she did it herself. I think I could have talked her down or overpowered her, but a siren went off.”

Terese had panicked at the sound of the alarm and raised voices, and while Riker was distracted, she’d plunged the blade into her throat.

He didn’t see Nicole stiffen, but he felt it. “It wasn’t your fault.”

It
was
his fault, but he wasn’t going to shoulder the entire blame for Terese’s death. “No, it was yours.”

An odd, pained sound came from Nicole. “I—what makes you say that?”

“Because she wouldn’t have felt the need to kill herself if your family hadn’t made her a slave, treated her like a lab rat, and forced a pregnancy on her.”

Silence. Then some shuffling. A moment later, Nicole pressed something into his hand.

“I know you don’t believe me, but I loved Terese, and I know she loved me. She gave that to me the day she died, but I think . . . I think it belongs to you.”

Nicole started back toward the cave entrance, her hair damp and clinging to her neck and slumped shoulders. She looked as defeated as he felt.

Exhaling on a curse, he glanced down at his hand.

Lying in his palm was Terese’s ring.

NICOLE WAS SHAKING
so hard that she stumbled as she approached the cave entrance. The ground came at her, but then Riker was there, hauling her up with his arms around her waist. She found her balance, but Riker didn’t release her, his grip sure but surprisingly—no,
astonishingly
—tender.

“Are you okay?” he asked gruffly.

For some reason, she couldn’t find her voice, could merely nod. As if he didn’t believe her, he stepped back and scanned her from head to toe, his gaze lingering a little too long on her neck. Damn her and her self-consciousness, she reached up to cover the scarring.

Riker covered her hand with his and gently moved it aside. “What happened?”

A shudder ran through her. When he’d asked before, she hadn’t answered. She didn’t want to talk about it, but Riker had just opened himself up about Terese, a trauma that was surely far worse than hers.

“Vampire,” she murmured.

Frowning, he skimmed the pad of one finger over her neck, and an unexpected pleasant sensation ran through her. “That’s a lot of damage.”

“He was a . . .” She started to say that Boris was a servant, but Riker was right. Boris was a slave. Still, she couldn’t quite get the word past her lips. “He’d been defanged.”

Riker’s eyes flared, and she expected another blast of bitterness. “It must have been brutal.” When she didn’t reply, because she didn’t even have the words for how brutal it had been, he asked, “Did it happen during the slave rebellion?”

“Yes.” The memory, combined with the churning in her stomach that was only getting worse, sparked sudden anger. “No doubt you wish I’d been killed.”

“You were a child. You didn’t deserve what that vampire did to you.” He smoothed his finger over the skin of her throat. “My clan adopted rules of engagement a long time ago, and killing children goes against every one of them.”

Her anger flagged, and she glanced away, overwhelmed by everything that had happened since being kidnapped from her home. She’d learned more about vampires in the last twenty-four hours than in her
entire twenty-eight years of life. And she was considered an expert in her field.

What a joke.

“What’s the matter?” When she said nothing, he hooked a finger under her chin and lifted her face so their gazes locked. “You don’t believe me?”

“It’s not that.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “It’s just . . .”

“Just what?”

“I was raised to think vampires were soulless monsters. Creatures that needed to be kept under strict control or they’d kill everything they could lay their hands on. And then I was told you’d killed Terese and my uncle, and after that came the slave rebellion.”

The memory of being attacked got all tangled with the way Riker was touching her, and her heart stuttered, as if it was having difficulty deciding between fight and flight. Someone really needed to add
freeze
to the instinctive response options to stress.
Fight, flight, or freeze
.

“You said you loved Terese.”

“I did. And that’s the wrench in this whole mess. I thought she was a fluke. The cat that likes mice or the retriever that doesn’t fetch.” She swallowed. “And now . . .” Now she was seeing life from the other side. The way she’d been raised, capped off by the slave rebellion that had taken her parents, her cousins, and her friends and had nearly killed her, had left her with blinders over her eyes.

Now the blinders had been ripped off, and her
new experiences and new knowledge were making her head spin.

Another wave of nausea washed over her, and she wobbled. So maybe the spinning head was about more than sensory overload. About more than stress or exhaustion or fear. She needed her meds. Riker caught her again, but this time, he swept her up and carried her deep inside the cave.

“What’s going on, Nicole?”

She supposed the truth wouldn’t hurt, and at this point, denial would only make her look stupid.

“I have a medical condition that causes imbalances in iron and blood-sugar levels.” He set her down, but when her feet hit the dirt, her legs wouldn’t support her. Very carefully, he lowered her to the ground.

Then he shocked her by sinking down in front of her. He made himself comfortable with one leg propped up and his arm draped over his knee like they were getting ready to enjoy a picnic. “Do you need to eat?”

“Food would help. But what I really need is medication.” Or a blood transfusion, which was a very temporary measure and would only prolong the inevitable.

He stared at her, the calculation in his shimmering eyes making her squirm. “Let me guess.” Skepticism dripped from his words. “Your medication is at your house, and if you don’t get it, you’ll die.”

“Yes. Not right away but eventually.”

“Insulin?”

She shook her head. “It’s an antiviral drug developed specifically for me, although there are a couple of other known cases of
vampiridae
that are being treated with the same drug.”

“
Vampiridae
?”

“I contracted the vampire virus when I was bitten.”

“Then why aren’t you a vampire?”

She turned her left hand over, revealing the round pencil-eraser-sized scar on her wrist. “Because I’d been immunized against the orally contracted form of the virus.”

Vampires carried two forms of the virus, but humans were immunized only against the virus that was transmitted by saliva. No company had yet developed anything that would defend against the more powerful strain of the virus vampires carried in their blood. Daedalus was working on it, and Chuck claimed they were close, but trial results were, so far, not as satisfactory as the FDA would like.

“The immunization kept me from turning, but it didn’t stop the virus from attacking my body.” Closing her eyes, she slumped against the cave wall. “No one knows why it happens, but in cases like mine, the virus creates dangerously high levels of iron that shut down the pancreas before shutting down other organs.”

He cursed. “Can I do anything?”

“I could use some food and water.”

“Hold on.” She hadn’t expected him actually to do anything, but he fetched the duffel full of supplies. “Here,” he said as he handed her a wrapped protein bar. “It’s not a hot meal, but it’s better than nothing.”

“Thank you.” Gratefully, she took the food he offered. As long as she kept hydrated and kept her blood sugar as level as possible, she could go without the medication for a couple of weeks, until the iron in her blood and organs built up to lethal levels.

But no need to worry, she thought. She’d probably be dead long before she had a chance to die from her disease. Some vampire was likely going to rid her of the iron-in-her-blood problem. And the blood-in-her-veins problem.

She took a bite and tried to pretend it didn’t taste like a bird’s nest. Without thinking, she offered the bar to Riker, who blinked in surprise.

“It’s yours,” he said, shaking his head.

“You must know what they taste like,” she muttered.

“Hey,” he said, his tone light, almost teasing. “I gave you the best of the two flavors.” He jerked his thumb over at the survival kit. “The other one is Peanut Butter Sawdust.”

She laughed, thankful for a moment of levity, no matter how brief it might be.

“Eat.” He started toward the cave entrance. “There’s more water in the bag, too.”

“Where are you going?” She hated herself for the alarm in her voice, hated herself more for relaxing when he halted at the entrance and gave her a reassuring look.

“I’m going to patrol the area. I want to make sure no one is close.” His voice went low, soothing. “I won’t go far, and I won’t be gone long.”

Yesterday his words would have been threatening. Today they were comforting, which was messed up. Here she was, relieved that her kidnapper was going to return. Worse, he was probably planning to take her back to his clan to be tortured or something.

No longer hungry, she forced herself to choke down the protein bar. When Riker hadn’t returned by
the time she finished, she downed a bottle of water and dug the pad of sticky notes out of the bag. Although her eyes were burning with the need to sleep, she made two tiny origami birds and a flower. As she started another flower, Riker strode through the entrance. The sight of him, moving with confident, easy strides, the weapons harness molded perfectly to his muscular bare chest, sent a wave of both unease and hot, feminine appreciation rippling through her. He could just as easily kill her as protect her.

Hurt her as kiss her.

Bite her as caress her.

Suddenly, the chilly cave felt a lot warmer.

As Riker sauntered toward her, the heat cranked up even more. “What are you doing?”

“Doing?”

He gestured to her paper figures. Flustered and embarrassed, she tried to sweep the creations into the bag, but he crouched down and captured a bird.

“They’re silly things I make sometimes.” She shrugged dismissively. “Terese taught me.”