My Immortal (24 page)

“
Home,” he whispered.

She glanced up at him. He swung out his free hand.
“I’m building it for you.” He pulled her close. “A place where you can feel safe and you never have to be afraid ever again.”

The promise sounded so familiar and sh
e had a distinct feeling of deja vu. Words failed her. “This will be our ballroom,” he said. “Like the one you described in your dream. I can give it all to you. You just have to trust me,” he added as he took her in his arms. She closed her eyes as he began to swing her around the dusty wood floor. In her ears were the echoes of an orchestra and a cotillion crowd cheering them on as they danced together. She could almost feel the silk against her body as he pulled her tighter. Faster and faster they moved until he stopped suddenly, a catch in his breathe as he turned away from her. His strong shoulders heaved with silent sobs. This, too, felt familiar. She went to him, her hand on his shoulder. She turned his head to face her, his features distorted with pain. “Do not fear me,” he begged in a hoarse, low voice.

Tears sprang into her eyes
. What was happening? And why did it hurt so much? “Nicholas,” she whispered, but even his name on her lips seemed to pain him. She placed a soft, tentative kiss on his full lips. His fingers bit into the soft flesh of her hips as he pulled her tighter into a possessive embrace. His tongue drove between her lips, setting every single nerve ending on fire. His longing was palpable. It swallowed her like a hunger. He held her so close she feel his heart thump against her chest.

Her hands slipped into his hair as she met his kiss, unconsciously
writhing subtly against the hardening contours of his body. There was a low groan in his throat as he gave in to the moment, but just as quickly he pulled away, trying to regain composure. Something inside him was threatening to break free, but he fought hard to suppress it. “I wanted to give you this before, but now it seems like the wrong time.” He produced a red velvet box from his jacket.

She opened it slowly to reveal a diamond tiara like the one she had worn in her dream. She gasped.
“I cannot accept this,” she murmured.

“
You must,” he insisted. “It was made for you. Only you should wear it.”

She glanced at him. His expression was so hopeful that she could not resist the gift.
“Where on earth would I wear it?”

He knelt down
on one knee in front of her. “When you marry me.”

She toppled headlong in the dark intensity of his eyes. She wanted to protest. She wanted to outline all the reasons why she could never marry, much less marry him. She wanted to say so much. But all she could say was,
“Oh, Nicholas.”

He knelt on his knees, his arms wrapped around her waist as he held her close
. Tears ran freely down her cheeks as she stared at the tiara. He was offering her a happily ever after when her life was anything but a fairy tale. She was starring in a horror story and nothing, not even the unexpected love of an unpredictable man, could pull her back from the brink.

“You don’t have to give me an answer tonight,”
he said, as if reading her mind. “I want you to think about the life you want, the life you deserve, the life I can give to you. Then you’ll see that we were meant to be together. We are tied together by an invisible string that cannot break. Look in your heart, Adele. You’ll see that I’m a part of you.”

If he had kissed her again, in that moment she might have screamed “Yes,” to the treetops. But he opted instead to
release her and rise to a standing position in order to douse the lantern. They were silent as he led the way back to the car. Even as he held her close as they road back to her apartment, they didn’t speak.

It was as if he knew he had said too much already.

Everything was happening so fast while everything else in her life was falling apart. How could she think about marrying this man she’d known for mere weeks? Everyone in her life needed her more. Her mother, her brother, Dani… it was all too much.

He didn’t pressure her as he kissed her goodnight, but his parting kiss was firm. It was like he didn’t want her to forget.

How could she? With every heartbeat she relived their brief time together. Her body was aflame with her own unfulfilled desire. It was like she had waited a thousand years for him, too. That night when she finally did fall asleep, she dreamt once more about the hallway of doors, only instead of being locked, each and every door opened and slammed shut over and over again.

“If you love him,” the voice whispered, “you will do it.”

She was up by dawn, sitting cross-legged in her bed, staring at the way the diamonds caught the dawning sun, cutting shards of light across the walls of her apartment.

The phone made her jump. It was Michael. He instructed her to turn on the news, and she saw the angry mobs as they crowded
Vincent’s bookstore. Chanting punctuated the sounds of glass breaking as people threw things through the various windows, preceding loud explosions. Each sound cut into her heart like a whip and all she could do was cry for the brother she had barely met but loved all the same.

It was that same brother Nicholas asked her never to see again. It was the first of many promises she knew she couldn’t make to the man who had entered her life like a bolt of lightning.

She may have loved him, inexplicably and unexpectedly. But there were things that she could not do.

She had another soul to save
. If they were bound by the red string of fate, like he said, then time could not be their enemy. If Nicholas truly cared about her, he would be there when she was ready.

In her heart of  hearts, she found herself hoping that he would.
If anyone needed a fairy tale ending right now, it was Adele.

She tucked the tiara in her jacket, headed out the door and hoped for the best.

Max was at the desk when she arrived. “You’re getting to be a familiar face around here,” he teased with a big grin.

“
What can I say? I am relentless in search of the truth.” They both laughed. “If you’ll call the guys and let them know I’m on my way up, they won’t have to send anyone.”

Max looked a little taken off guard.
“You mean they didn’t tell you?”

Her brow creased.
“Tell me what?”

“
They don’t take visitors during the day.”

The phone rang and Max excused himself. No, she thought to herself. They
hadn’t told her that. In fact, she concluded suddenly, she’d never seen any of them during the day since the day they met. It was always at night. Always. How had that been possible? And why hadn’t she noticed before? More curious now, Adele ducked into the elevator when Max wasn’t looking.

The top floor was empty except
for the housekeeping staff that cleaned some of the rooms nearby. A couple of the rooms had privacy signs dangling from the doorknob – Nicholas’s was one of them. Adele waited until one of the housekeepers had gone into a nearby room before she grabbed a room key card from the cart and quickly inserted it into Nicholas’s door. She disappeared before anyone could tell she was there at all.

The air was still in the darkened apartment. It was quiet. Way too quiet. Nothing made sound. Not clocks, not air conditioners or heaters, no phones or televisions, it was entirely
and completely still. Deathly still. Her shallow breath escaped in tiny misty puffs, like it would on a very cold morning. Her heartbeat began to thunder in the silence, thumping in her ears.

Because a
ll the drapes were drawn, it was hard to find her way around. She reached out to touch the wall to guide her along, and the surface felt ice cold to the touch. She snatched her hand back and turned right into a table, bumping her knee. She had to stifle a curse as she limped over to where she remembered the desk to be.

She parted the drapes just slightly to get a good look. She
sifted through the paperwork, trying to find the one envelope with the name she did not recognize. It was gone. She sighed as she stood, glancing off toward the room Nicholas had pulled her away from. The door was tightly shut. There was something in that room he hadn’t wanted her to see, and in that moment the fearless reporter wasn’t too sure she wanted to see it, either.

Instead she prowled through his desk drawers, through the business papers and other things she
couldn’t have cared less about. Who gave a rat’s ass about a logging company in a sleepy woodland town? It was old news by now. Even the protestors had found other causes to champion, though the wolf carcasses had increased in recent weeks. Adele’s instincts kicked in, letting her know there was something more going on here. To get to the real story, she had to look deeper.

There had been something magical that had happened between her and Nicholas from the moment they met, but magic was an illusion. Many
of the feelings stemmed from her visions and dreams, like she had picked up in some alternate reality that skipped over all the time normal couples would have spent falling in love. It was like she had stepped into the dance halfway in progress.

“I have waited a thousand lifetimes for you,”
he had told her only the night before. It was a romantic thing to say, but now that Adele entertained the thoughts of reincarnation she couldn’t help but wonder if he had been speaking literally rather than figuratively. How else could he have fallen in love with her so fast, as though he’d simply been waiting for her, and only her, to come along?

Had every vision and dream actually been a memory?

And if that was possible, then who could he have been in her past life? What if Vincent was right, and she had been a vampire, a cursed soul, in a former life? Who had Nicholas been to her then?

When Max had said they never saw anyone during daylight hours,
something just seemed to click. She had never seen Nicholas in the daytime. Ever. Her mind raced over all the information she had soaked in by all the books Vincent made her read. It was a cheesy, cliché vampire myth, but she couldn’t escape the fact that she had fallen in love with someone she’d only seen when the sun was absent.

But surely her heart could not have
fooled her this badly. Surely her heart would never fall in love with a man who could not only kill a child, but be the man who raped her mother.

And
that’s what being a vampire made him. A killer. A rapist. Her father.

She shuddered then, and not just from the intensely cold room. She could not have wanted her father. The thought made her ill.

It had to be a coincidence, she told herself. She wasn’t ready to heave herself headlong into the paranormal just yet. They were still living in the real world, after all. And aside from a few coincidences, there was no evidence to support such an insane, unthinkable hypothesis.

She ransacked the next drawer, and the next. It was only when
she withdrew the plastic bag with the bloody handkerchief that a panicked scream lodged in her throat. “Roman,” she whispered, her throat so constricted the sound came out as a squeak.

S
he turned back toward the first room in the hall. After a deep breath, she willed her feet to walk over to the door, where she ever so gently turned the knob until the latch gave way with a deafening click that echoed through the empty space.

Dirt sc
raped against the marble as she slowly opened the door and peeked inside. In the darkness she could barely make anything out of the shadows any more than she could the night before. Her hand shook as she reached for her phone. She cast the light into a tiny corner of the room, where she could clearly see someone’s bare, gray, dirty feet sticking out of a dirty pine box.

At that moment
her phone rang in her hand and Adele nearly jumped right out of her skin. She slammed the door and got the hell out of that penthouse, out of that hotel, out of Nicholas’s life.

It
couldn’t have been true, and yet it was.

The l
ove of her life was a killer. And no one she loved was safe unless she could kill him.

“And only we can stop him,”
Vincent had told her.
“Dhampirs are hunters. This is what we were born for. And what you were reborn for.”

She didn’t stop running until she reached her apartment.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Michael pounded on
Adele’s door around dusk. The light was on, he knew she was awake, but she was not answering. She didn’t want to see him; she didn’t want to see anyone. She let the world go on around her, all noises blended together into a dull, annoying hum. She didn’t even pay attention to the voices. There was nothing they could do to hurt her more. Inside she was devastated. She wanted to stay holed up inside her apartment where it was safe, where she didn’t have to choose.

She understood her mother a whole lot better now.

Michael, however, would not be deterred. He continued to knock, undaunted by her refusal to answer the door. There were times when he’d allow her to mope her way through a situation, but this was not one of those times. Her life, and Dani’s, depended on it.