Kindred (35 page)

With his tongue tangled in mine, he pulls my body away from the wall. I feel both hands slip underneath me, carrying me across the room where he throws me onto the bed. The warm weight of his body presses against mine; rainwater runs down his chest and shoulders. It drips from the tips of his hair onto me as he lies on top of me.

I don’t even think about it when I reach down and fumble the button on his jeans. He does the same, peeling mine off first before letting me get his zipper down. Without ever moving his lips from mine, he manages to get his pants off.

I’m trembling, every inch of my body shaking inside when I feel him through his boxers as he presses against me.

He looks down at me and whispers, “I have to know…are you okay?”

I touch his lips with my fingertips, searching his face with my eyes. He kisses my fingers, gently licking the tips of them. “I drank you before I got here,” I say staring up at him. I pull him back toward me, taking him into another kiss, squeezing his body between my shaking thighs.

I feel his hand move between us, his fingers slipping behind the waist of my panties as he slips one side down and then the other seconds afterwards. I don’t even notice when he gets his boxers off. I gasp when his fingers slide in-between my legs and he touches me. My back arches, my chest lifting gently toward his and the longer his fingers move the more I feel my body urging to pull away, but he holds me in place.

He kisses me once more as he moves his hand away, letting his wet lips linger on mine for a long moment before looking down into my eyes and hesitates.

When I don’t back off, I feel him inside of me.

I inhale a hard and tremulous breath and my eyelids fall heavily. My thighs are shaking, every inch of my body quivering. I can’t open my eyes. I want to, but they’re too heavy with heat. He crushes his mouth over mine and I feel his moans in my throat. I push my body farther into his, wrapping my arms around his back, feeling his sweat under my fingernails as I drag them firmly down his moist skin.

He moans hungrily against my mouth until he pulls away and buries his head in my shoulder, pushing himself deeper between my legs. Tiny gasps escape my lips, over and over. My hands grip the back of his head, my fingers dig deeply into his dark, wet hair.

I hear a distinctive growl reverberate through his chest, through his entire body and I know, just like three months ago, what it means, what he’s becoming. Breathing fast and heavy, I reach up to feel his hand and let the sharpness of one claw barely graze my skin, but not enough to cut it.

I feel his body ease, struggling with himself, fighting against the transition into his mediate form.

I reach up with both of my hands and lift his head so that he’ll look at me. He resists at first keeping his head down, the rainwater and sweat soaking his hair and my fingers. “Isaac, look at me,” I whisper soft and forcibly. “I want to see your eyes.”

He shakes his head no in my hands and I can hear the denial in a low series of growls. I crush his body between my thighs when I feel him stop and he doesn’t try to pull away.

Pulling his head two more inches down to me, I plant my lips against his forehead and through his disheveled wet hair, my palms still trying to force him to face me. “
Please
….”

Slowly, Isaac raises his black eyes, but not without reluctance. His lips are slightly parted, but I can see his sharp teeth barely piercing the top layer of flesh on his bottom lip. Little blue-black veins have spread across and down his cheekbones from both corners of his eyes.

He is frighteningly beautiful.

His lips are inches from mine. I touch them with my fingertips and he gazes down at me with a look of conjecture. The rain pounds harder against the roof. I hear it draining and trickling through the gutters. I hear Isaac’s softened growls as he tames the beast inside. The heat coming off his body is almost unbearable now, but I press my body into his until I can’t anymore. “You have to infect me,” I say; each word so balanced and sincere.

Isaac’s weight starts to lift from mine, but I pull him closer, digging my fingernails into his back, tightening my legs around him to hold him in place.

He gives in to me, letting me hold him down, only because of the soft look of resolution in my eyes.

“No….” He shakes his head twice. “No.”

“You have to, Isaac.” I reach up and brush the very edge of my fingertip across the skin under his eye, feeling the tiny raised veins. “I won’t be like Aramei…you knew I wouldn’t. Isaac…you
have
to do this for me.”

Finally, he lifts up, but I latch onto him, forcing my hands around the back of his neck, my legs stay wrapped tightly around his waist. He sits up on his knees in the center of the bed with me, refusing to look at me, shaking his head no over and over again.

I won’t let go.

I follow his eyes no matter where they wander, forcing him to stay with me, to look at me and never look away. “My sister lived through it,” I say. “You heard what your father said, Isaac. He said that because my sister survived, the chances are I probably will too.”

“Chances aren’t certain, Adria!” The infernal growl in his angry words shocks me, but I don’t give in.

I grab his face in my hands again, forcing his gaze. “It’s enough for
me
,” I say, “Isaac
look
at me!” My fingers are pressing harshly against his cheeks and temples.

He stares painfully at me, giving me what I want, but not without letting me see the absolute pain and conflict in his face, of what I’m asking him to do.

“No!” he says and his whole body shudders. “You promised you’d never ask this of me!”

I grab his face in my hands even tighter and stare intensely into his churning black eyes. “And you promised you’d never leave me to Aramei’s fate….”

My words rip through him, tightening the pain in his face into something much more heartbreaking, but still he refuses. He shakes his head over and over, turning his eyes downward and trying to push me away, still conflicted by also wanting me here.

My body tightens with anger. “YOU TOOK MY CHOICE AWAY! THIS IS THE ONLY CHOICE I HAVE
LEFT
!” I never wanted to blame him and I know that it’s not his fault, that he did nothing wrong, but my desperation is making me say things that I would never otherwise say.

Becoming what he is, is my only chance at any kind of life.

“This is my choice, Isaac…while I’m still capable of making my own choices…while I’m still the one in control.” I lower my voice to a whisper. “I would rather die than live a life incapable of thought and of happiness. To live a life incapable of love…Isaac, I choose to risk it because I want to love you for as long as I can….”

His frightening black eyes glare back at me with so much grief, but I see something else in his eyes, too. I see the undeniable guilt of knowing that what I say is true.

Moisture forms around his solid black eyes and tears stream down his wounded face. I feel his clawed hands on my back, pulling me deeper into his chest. I lay my head against him, listening to his heart hammer through his body so fast and so hard that it scares me. Tears gush from my eyes and my whole body shakes from determination and fear. Fear of living the rest of my life devoid of thought and emotion and love. Fear of him not giving me what I want, yet fear of him giving in and making me what he is. Fear of not living through it and cutting my time with him even shorter than the blood might have given me.

I hate fear. It’s just another form of death.

Isaac’s chest shudders with tears and anger and self-torture. His arms tighten around me so hard that I struggle to find my breath. His skin is so hot now that it burns me.

“Tell me that you’ll never hate me for this, Adria!” he says; the words trembling on his lips, his head pressed into my hair. “PROMISE ME!” His arms nearly crush me.

“I will
never
hate you for this, or for
anything
. I will love you forever….”

I shut my eyes as I feel his claws dig into my back and I try to bite back the pain.

But I can’t. I scream out in agony, wrapping my arms and legs tighter around Isaac’s body, using his flesh as a means to filter the pain somewhere else.

I scream out one more time and so does Isaac; a heartrending bellow that echoes infinitely through the darkness.

ISAAC

25

ADRIA WAS GONE WHEN I woke up. Sometime, in the early morning hours of June 21
^st
, she slipped out my bed and out of my life. I can no longer smell the scent of her hair, or her skin lingering on my sheets. I can’t even taste her in my mouth even though I try. The only evidence that she had ever been here was the necklace that I gave her lying on the pillow, and this torturous, burning hole in my chest where my heart used to be. The link I once had with her through my blood is also gone. I can’t feel her emotions anymore. I can’t see a glimpse into her life through her eyes as I was able to do on occasion throughout the seven months she had been bonded to me.

I knew she could feel me at times, too, that she could see through my eyes never knowing how it was possible, or if it was real. But I could never tell her. I could never let her know what I did to her or that because of our link, I knew about Viktor Vargas all along…at least…I knew about him being alive.

Nothing could have prepared me to learn the truth about Aramei and my father….

I knew that Adria didn’t keep the truth from me to save herself, to secure her place in my heart. No, she kept the truth from me to save
me
, my feelings about my father and his unremitting betrayal. Adria’s fears of being bonded to Viktor had little to do with how she felt. Because she knew deep down that it never would have made me love her less.

She was punishing herself for keeping me in the dark about Viktor being alive. I just wish I could’ve seen that long before I did, because I would have told her everything much sooner to spare her that guilt.

Submissive to guilt. I heard her say that once. But I never fully understood the way it affected her, until now. Adria lived a lifetime of pain and grief and injustice in just the few short years of her young life. There were things that happened to her as a child that I would never speak aloud and that she never told me. And when someone grows up knowing so little of what real love feels like, whether from family, or friends, or the love of a companion, that person starts to believe that they weren’t meant to be loved, that good things will never happen to them. They start to believe that whenever something good
does
happen, it’s inevitable that something bad will come along to replace it.

But she never complained. Adria never once cried on my shoulder about how life treated her. In fact, she often talked about how good her life was and that she was lucky she didn’t have to face some of the hardships that other people face.

She never complained.

And sometimes, it pissed me off, because she had every right to.

Adria didn’t deserve what happened to her the night she almost died in that car wreck. I did the only thing I thought I could do by feeding her my blood and hoping that it was enough and that I wasn’t too late. I may have only saved her for a little while, but I wanted to give her that chance to live. I had no idea that me being so young would cause the effects of the blood to happen faster. Genna told me this on the way to Georgia. I never would’ve thought…Yet another way that my father betrayed me.

But she didn’t deserve any of it, not the attack, or the Blood Bond, or the months she spent worrying about me. She didn’t deserve to be forced to make a fateful decision that I knew she would honor. And seven days ago, when I last held her in my arms and listened to her implore that I infect her, I knew if I didn’t that the alternative was…well, I couldn’t let that happen.

“Isaac,” Daisy says gently from the door of my bedroom, “They’re ready for you now.”

I sit on the edge of the bed, looking down at Adria’s necklace draped over my fingers like I’ve done every day since she left. And I put the symbolic pendant to my lips and shut my eyes, reliving the memory of her face before placing the necklace back in the box on my nightstand.

My beautiful English sister watches me from the door, always worrying about me even though Harry went missing the same morning that Adria did. None of us knows what to make of it, and none of us can find any evidence that they may have left together. But one thing is for certain: two of us are brokenhearted. Daisy and I have grown closer as brother and sister in just a week than any of my brothers and sisters have in all of our years together.

Except maybe for Nathan, but the reasons for mine and Daisy’s newfound closeness are different.

And I try to find some humor in all of this by admitting to myself that Daisy is stronger than I could ever be. I don’t know if it’s the nature of a female werewolf, who are often more powerful than the males, or if she was just born that way, able to keep a straight face when someone lets it slip that Harry might not even be alive.

I put a hole in the downstairs wall when someone said that about Adria.