Authors: Ginger Voight
When she finally opened the door she looked like she
hadn’t slept in days. “You never should have left the hospital,” Michael chastised at once. “Your mother bawled me out when I told her.”
“
At least she’s talking to you,” Adele mumbled and then returned to the sofa where she’d spent every anguishing waking moment since her horrifying revelation that morning.
Michael followed her to the sofa.
“I saw Vincent,” he told her as he sat opposite of her. Her blank eyes met his. “We have to do something. We have to find out who it is and stop them, Adele. Otherwise he’s going to kill you.”
She snorted. She felt like she already had.
“You’re going to have to raise the stakes a little more than that, Michael,” she said, blowing her stuffy nose in a battered tissue.
He
didn’t like the sound of that. “How about Dani? Does that raise the stakes enough for you?”
She looked decidedly shaken.
“Is that what Vincent said?”
Michael nodded.
“You’re both in danger. And I’m not about to let anyone hurt either one of you.” He paused only for a moment. “Especially you.”
She hopped up from the sofa, trying to run from his words.
He couldn’t do this to her now. Her emotional plate was filled to overflowing. A feather would have knocked her over the brink. “Michael, you don’t know what you’re saying.”
Michael was on her heals, refusing to let her run from him again.
He grabbed her by the elbow. “I know exactly what I’m saying. But more importantly, I know what I’m doing.” Reluctantly she allowed their eyes to meet. “I love you, Adele,” he finally admitted in a hoarse whisper. “I’ve always loved you.”
He had both her arms in his hands at this time, refusing to let her
turn away from him again. “Don’t you see? You are the reason I breathe, Addie. I would fight the devil himself to save you.”
“
You might have to,” she whispered back. “You don’t get it, Michael. What we’re fighting isn’t flesh and blood. It’s a monster. A real monster. And…” She gulped hard. “And I love him,” she finally eked out.
Michael released his hold on her and stumbled backward. She could see his heart shatter right before her eyes.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she tried to explain, only this time he turned away. “I can’t explain it.”
“
Explain it to Dani,” he bit out between clenched teeth as he turned on her with an anger she had never before seen in her dearest friend. “This thing you claim to love nearly killed her once and will try to do it again. Can you honestly tell me that’s someone you can love? Adele, listen to yourself!”
“
I know it doesn’t make sense,” she screamed back. “I tell myself I should hate him, despise him, wish him dead or even kill him myself. But my heart refuses to let him go. This is bigger than me, Michael.”
“
It’s not bigger than me,” he growled, yanking off the gold crucifix that had hung around his neck since the day his mother died. It was her necklace, it was his promise, and now he was breaking both of them.
She rushed to him but he brushed her off as he turned to leave.
“Michael, no! You can’t do this. You’re a priest!”
He turned around with a grimace, and then grabbed her to him and pinned her to the wall with his deceptively muscular body. Before she could catch her breath his head descended towards hers. His kiss was hard and unapologetic as his
tongue invaded her mouth with a passion a decade in the making. His strong hands molded her against his body, which at the moment felt like anything but holy.
She was speechless
when he finally released her. She stumbled a bit, staring at him in shock. “No, Adele,” he corrected in a low but firm voice. “I am a man.”
A tear escaped her eye and trailed down her face.
“If you love me, then go back to the church. Don’t risk your life for me.”
“
There is no life without you,” he said, and then he was gone.
By the time night had fallen again, Adele thought
she’d cried a lifetime’s worth of tears. How could fate be so cruel? Had she not known the truth about herself, she and Michael would have probably been married by now, with a half dozen of their own kids. She never would have become a reporter, never would have been exposed to Nicholas, never would have met Isabel or experienced the dreams or saw Lily or nearly lost Dani…
But then again
she’d have probably never met Dani, and then where would Dani be?
“Destiny links people who are supposed to find each other, help each other, and even love each other,”
Nicholas had told her.
“It knows no distance, no time, no circumstance. No matter what happens, this string will never break.”
Her throat closed as she remembered what Nicholas had told her. He had foreshadowed it all. If Vincent was right, and she had no reason to doubt that he was, Nicholas would have found his way to her door anyway. It was meant to happen.
He had made it happen.
And for one bright, shining moment it had been worth it. Stepping into his arms had felt like coming home. H
ow could she now separate those feelings and the thought of that Creature with the bright yellow eyes? How could she remember the warmth of Nicholas’s kiss and see those old cracked lips, sharp fanged and snake like tongue licking her blood from his long, sharp claws?
She shivered at the thought of it. How could this man be the man who raped her mother?
How could the man who had held her in his arms be the monster who fathered her and stole her brother? How could they feel like two entirely different people in the times she’d come face to face with both?
One she feared, and one she loved.
God help her she did. She dissolved in more tears.
She barely heard the knock at the door
around midnight. She thought for a moment it was Michael, but as she walked closer to the door her heart revealed who really stood on the other side. She didn’t even need to hear his voice. Even through two inches of wood his hold on her was undeniable.
“
Adele? It’s Nicholas.”
She gasped, unsure of what to do.
Her first impulse was to fling the door open and fly into his arms, but at the same moment she wanted to get as far away from him as possible. She needed to keep her head, and there was no doing it the moment that she looked into his eyes. She shook as she stammered, “You know, I’m really not feeling all that well, Nicholas. I think it may be a bug. I’m just going to get some sleep. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
There was a pause. She held her breath, hoping that he would not see through her feeble lie.
“What’s wrong, Adele?”
Her heart broke at the question.
“Nothing's wrong.”
“
I’ll feel better if I could see you,” he said, and she could hear the longing in his voice. It was the same longing she felt and subsequently cursed.
“
I’d feel better if you didn’t,” she finally said. A long moment stretched on and she started to think he had gone.
“
Don’t do this,” he said in a wavering voice. “Don’t push me away.”
She
didn’t answer. She couldn’t answer. Everything within her wanted to hold him just one more time – one more time before she had to kill him. Fate was indeed a cruel bitch, much crueler than Adele had ever thought possible. How could love demand so much? She sobbed softly.
“
Don’t you know how long I’ve waited for you?” he cried through the door. She shook her head, forcing away the memories, forcing away the feelings. “You’ve waited for me too. You know it.”
Just as she started to walk away he said,
“You love me. Remember.”
In that moment she was swept away into a memory she never would have believed belonged to her. She was wrapped in
Nicholas’s arms in an ornate four poster bed, her leg was draped over his barely clad hip and he kissed her along her neck and over her bare breasts. His kiss consumed her, his eyes dark with passion. Her voice was husky with desire as she begged him to make love to her. Her nails raked down his back, on her left hand a ruby ring that he had given her because she had promised herself to him, till death do they part.
She watched in her mind’s eye how his strong hands spread across her soft, ivory flesh, branding her with his touch, setting her soul on fire with each kiss she could feel on her cold, cracked lips hundreds of years later.
And now here they stood again, their love defying death itself. Time rearranged so they could be together once more. Adele pulled open the door and rushed out to feel him alive in her arms again, screaming, “I remember!” into the shrieking wind of the night.
But Nicholas was gone. She had to wonder for a moment if he had ever been there at all. Just like a dream he had come into her life, and just like her nightmares he would vanish. She returned to her safe four walls, feeling completely and utterly hollow inside.
The next day Michael returned to Adele’s, once again to implore to her the imperative nature of their dilemma. Only this time she didn’t answer the door no matter how much he pounded. He finally decided to use the spare she kept under her window box of dead plants and let himself into her apartment.
His echoed hello was met with silence. She was gone. His stomach twisted into a knot with one guess whe
re she was. With him, no doubt.
How could she be so foolish, he questioned. How could she proclaim
to love someone who was a cold-blooded killer? He couldn’t understand it. Vincent had told her that she was born to kill him, but something in his gut suspected she would turn into one of them before she could ever pierce the heart of the first man she’d ever truly loved.
He
couldn’t stomach knowing that after all these years, after all they’d been through, she had given her love to another… to a monster.
His mind returned for the thousandth time to the kiss from the night before.
He had dreamt of that moment for as long as he was aware he had hormones, and the moment finally came when he was angry. Instead of the passionate embrace he’d fantasized about for so long, it had been a hard, punishing kiss that crushed her lips against her teeth as he took advantage of her shocked compliance.
He had never wanted to hurt her. Never. He w
as willing to die for her. More than that, he was willing to kill for her. She may not know right from wrong or up from down at this moment, but he sure did. And it was high time he stopped letting her mess up her life. He had a long history of standing by and letting it happen. There was no way he would let her go now, especially to someone like Nicholas Sterling.
Michael went immediately to her desk and started looting through the notes, the papers, the photos, the clippings, trying to find something anything to help him save her. He found the red case with the diamond tiara, and tossed it aside contemptuously to keep looking. Finally he came to a small plastic bag containing a bloody handkerchief with an ornate family crest. He tucked it quickly in his pocket and rushed out the door.
Meanwhile Adele stepped off the elevator to the top floor of the Grand Royale. She pocketed the key card after letting herself into Nicholas’s penthouse, never knowing that at the same moment Michael was hitting the entrance of the local museum and summoning the curator to investigate the crest stitched onto the corner of the handkerchief.
As the curator's face lit up with delight at the rare find and escorted Michael to a back room filled with musty dusty books of records, Adele made her way slowly to the mysterious room in
Nicholas’s suite.
The entire penthouse was closed up tight like a tomb; each step she took felt like she was walking over a grave. Again the room was ice cold and quiet, but she did not let that stop her. Her hand grasped the cold golden door knob just as the curator threw open a large book and showed Michael a photo that made him turn white.
It was a photo of Adele, only it wasn’t Adele. It was Princess Natasha Siminov, with the same long black hair, the same bold white streak down her scalp, adorned by a familiar diamond tiara. She stood with the other members of the royal family from a small country in the Balkans, who were slain during a revolt in the early 1800s. Below their picture was the same family crest that adorned the handkerchief.
That meant the handkerchief wasn’t Nicholas’ at all. It had belonged to Adele in another life. Michael knew that it was in that life they could discover how to save her and all the people she loved in the present.
He bolted out of the museum and into the bright sunlight at the same time the latch on the door gave way and Adele pushed open the door to the hotel room that doubled as a tomb. It flung wide open as she turned on the light, revealing the coffins that lined each wall. They were old and new, fancy and plain, and they all had bodies inside. Dead bodies. Corpses just waiting for the sun to sink in the horizon and night to reanimate them.
Her skin crawled as she walked through the room, waiting at any moment for the bodies to leap from their unholy rest and grab her, pulling her
back down to hell with them.