Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 (35 page)

I remembered the cops who nearly shot me under the thrall of a vampire and looked at the bandage on his hand with sudden clarity. This was bad. Really, really bad.

Geoff was standing between me and the door now, which he’d allowed to swing shut. For the first time, I looked at his height, his size, and I was afraid. There was no way that I could stand up to him. No way that I could defend myself.

If I screamed, would anyone even hear? And if they heard, could they come in time?

I pulled off my heels, first one, then the other, as I continued to back up slowly, clutching them in my hand.

“Of course I believe him, Cora,” Geoff said. “But don’t be afraid. I can help you get free.”

Sex with a human would break the bond, forever. No one ever said the sex had to be consensual....

And Geoff was in Cosimo’s thrall. He could be made to do anything.

Cosimo had made him want to rescue me. Probably made him love me, too, with the kind of love only a vampire could engender. I could have my old life back, after all, an even better version of my old life, with a lover—boyfriend, husband, whatever I wanted—who was perfectly and entirely devoted to me. Who would never leave me, who would do anything for me, and who would never, ever make me change.

All I had to do was say yes and go with Geoff right then and ask him to break the bond. There would be no rape then. No violence. I’d be free again, free forever.

And I realized with perfect clarity that I would rather die.

I cast around for anything I could use to defend myself, but all I saw were the tacky throw pillows scattered about the floor where I’d tossed them.

“He cut you, didn’t he?” I demanded. “Cosimo, I mean. He had you drink something—”

Geoff made an impatient noise. “None of that matters. I’m here to get you free, Cora. He warned me that the monster might have perverted your mind, but as soon as it’s over, you’ll see what I’ve done for you.”

“You’re talking about rape, Geoff,” I said. “Do you understand that?”

He shook his head. “It’s not really you who’s saying that. He’s inside your head, Cora. That’s why you rejected me that night.”

“The only reason I invited you up at all was because I thought that maybe I wanted to break the bond,” I said. “Because it’s my decision to make.”

But now I was going to lose both the decision and the bond I thought I didn’t want. The thought filled me with a choking panic. I was really going to lose Dorian. I wasn’t playing with the idea or weighing it—it was going to happen, here and now, whether or not I wanted it to.

And my heart splintered into a thousand tiny pieces.

I’d been so wrong. Wrong to fear the lesser terror. Wrong to run away. And now I’d pay the ultimate price.

There was no reasoning with Geoff now. Not after Cosimo had messed with his head. And I’d begged Dorian not to follow me....

Geoff came toward me even as I fell back, deeper into the room. “It’s the sickness talking, Cora. Come with me, and it’ll all be over in just a little while, and then you’ll see. I love you so much. All I want is to make you happy—the real you.”

I screamed then at the top of my lungs, and I threw the shoes at him. They bounced harmlessly off his chest, his earnest expression showing no reaction at all. He continued to advance as I backed up towards the wet bar.

He isn’t Geoff,
I told myself.
Not now. Not really.
My groping hand encountered a bottle, and I threw it hard.

He caught it easily and let it drop harmlessly to the floor, where it rolled away.

I screamed again, even louder.
“Help me! Somebody—anybody. Help!”

“Hush, Cora. I’m not going to hurt you,” Geoff said. He was only a few steps away now, still squarely between me and the door. Pinned against the wet bar, I had no place to go.

I reached behind me and began hurling glasses at him. He brushed away the one that would have hit his face and ignored the others, letting them strike his body and shatter on the floor. I found another bottle, swung it—

And Geoff caught my wrist before it could come crashing down on him, plucking the bottle from my grasp and setting it back on the wet bar.

“Be quiet, now,” he admonished.

I screamed again, kicking and biting, struggling to hit or scratch him. But he outweighed me by eighty pounds of muscle, and he deflected or ignored my blows.

Dorian, please! Save me, Dorian. Please!
The words were a frantic chant in my mind. I’d told him not to come. I’d told him to leave me alone. I’d stripped myself of my protection, and now my only hope was that he’d listen to my heart as I called for him.

Geoff grabbed for my dress and tore it from my shoulders with one motion, pulling it down to my ankles with one more wrenching yank that nearly knocked me off my feet. He reached for my panties as I struggled against him, his arm pinning me with my back to his chest.

I wasn’t even trying to form words anymore, just screaming over and over, the sounds tearing at my throat. He snagged the edge of my panties and pulled hard, the elastic cutting into my flesh as the seam gave. He dropped them and fumbled at his fly. I threw my entire weight to the side, wrenching free with such force that I sprawled against the floor.

Shards of glass from the shattered barware cut into my hands and knees, but I scrambled to my feet and darted around him, running for the door.

Geoff was faster, though, and his body hit me, slamming me into the wall and knocking the wind out of me as lights flashed behind my eyes. I dragged in a breath, trying to clear my vision as I struck out blindly.

“It’s all right, Cora,” he kept muttering. “It’s going to be all right.”

His pants were loose around his hips, and he was pulling out his cock.

This is really going to happen,
I thought with frantic clarity.
This is really, really happening, and I can’t stop it.

“Dorian!” I screamed one last time, and then the room exploded.

Dorian came through the door so fast that I hardly saw him, his vampiric will lashing through the room with such force that my vision darkened. And he was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen in my life.

“Stop!”
he ordered, and every muscle in my body went instantly stiff in obedience.

But Geoff was under Cosimo’s thrall, impervious to Dorian’s control, and he continued to jerk at his clothes, intent on his assault.

Dorian moved faster than any human could, smashing into Geoff and flinging him across the room even as I dropped to the floor hard, my rigid muscles unable to save me.

Dorian raised a fist, and I forced my tongue to work inside my frozen jaw.

“Don’t kill him! Don’t kill him!” I pleaded. “It was Cosimo. He’s done something to him.”

Dorian cast me a look, and in it I saw such darkness, such vengeance and black fury that I could taste it in the back of my mouth.

But he stopped—Dorian stopped, and he scooped up one of the glass shards from the ground before stalking forward swiftly as Geoff struggled to his feet. I saw him make two slashing motions—one on his hand, the other on Geoff’s. The blood ran free. Dorian clasped their hands together for an instant, palm to palm to make the blood mingle, even as Geoff fought against him. Then there was another movement, almost too fast to follow, he had Geoff in a headlock and was forcing his cut hand against Geoff’s mouth.

Geoff sputtered and kicked for an instant, then grew frighteningly slack in Dorian’s arms. Disdainfully, the vampire dropped the boy and stepped back.

Geoff lay curled against the floor for a long moment.

Was he—? But just then he stirred, pushing to his hands and knees as he shook his head as if to clear it.

He looked up, first at Dorian, then at me.

“Holy shit. It’s true.” All the color ran out of Geoff’s face, and he stumbled to his feet. “Oh, shit,” he repeated. “Shit.”

He jerked up his pants, and I saw in his broken face what Cosimo had done to him—what I’d indirectly caused Cosimo to do. If I’d still been capable of feeling anything for him, I would have wept.

“Get. Out.” Dorian’s words lashed out again, and Geoff, under his control now, jerked like a puppet on strings and fled past me. I would have recoiled if my muscles had been under my control. He was gone in an instant, the door swinging shut behind him.

And all of a sudden, my body went limp, and my brain went blank with relief.

D
orian was instantly at my side, dropping next to me and saying something low and urgent. My half-stunned mind caught up and processed what it was.

My name. Over and over again, like it was being torn from his very soul, Dorian was saying my name.

I started to push up off the floor, but he grabbed my wrists. I hadn’t noticed the blood flowing down them from the slices on my palm, dripping onto the floor. With a hiss, he plucked the fragments of glass from my palms and lifted my hands to his mouth, kissing them over and over again. His face was stricken, lines of the deepest grief carved into the marble of his beauty, and the darkness roiled and pulsed around him.

I only realized then how complete his power was over me. I’d known it, but I hadn’t felt it before that moment in which my mind surrendered before his like a moth to a blowtorch. With a word, he had frozen my body. With another, he could freeze my heart.

But he had stopped. When I had called out to him to spare Geoff, he had stopped, even in the heat of a fury so intense that the force of it had filled the room.

He pulled my hands from his mouth and looked down at them. Where he touched me with his mouth, the skin had healed instantly, leaving only a faint tracery beneath the blood.

Dorian clasped my hands in his and closed his eyes and swayed, his breath rasping loudly in his throat.

And then I understood.

“I’m still a cognate,” I said numbly. “I’m still yours.”

And my heart sang.

I’m his, still his, forever and ever and ever his....

A shard of glass dropped from my knee to the floor. My other wounds were healing, too, though slower without Dorian’s touch.

Of course I was his. I knew what had happened—and what hadn’t. And I didn’t know what a broken bond would feel like, but what pulsed between us now was whole and true and good. But for just an instant, utterly irrationally, I had almost thought the worst.

He opened his eyes then and fixed them on my face, searching it as if he were memorizing every line. “I’d feared—” He broke off, and a shudder went through his frame.

And yet he’d drunk my blood. Drunk it anyway, even though if I had been changed back, he would have died.

Because without me, he didn’t want to live.

I looked into those cold blue eyes, so terrible and so haunted. “You let him live. Why? I thought you’d kill him for sure.”

He pressed my bloodied hands against his chest. I could feel his heart beating there, too fast and too hard, the heart that he had given me. “You told me not to. And you were right. He was a pawn. He didn’t deserve to die.”

All the wrath I’d seen, the indescribable fury, had been constrained at my word. The thought shook me, that I had such power over him. It was a power he chose to give me—but perhaps, in its way, it was almost as much power as he held over me.

Dorian scooped me up and carried me into the bedroom as bits of glass fell from my feet. I buried my face against his chest, the first shudders of shock going through me. I breathed him, his scent, as if I would never smell it again, and his arms felt like the only home in the world.

“I felt you,” he said. His face was a mask now, but his voice trembled, almost imperceptibly. “I felt your distress, and at first, I thought you were still upset about the proposal. I didn’t realize there was something wrong until it was nearly too late. I almost didn’t come in time. My God, Cora—” His voice broke. “I almost lost you.”

I tightened my arms convulsively around his neck as he carried me toward the bathroom. My naked flesh was smeared with my blood, staining the satin of my strapless bra and the snowy expanse of his tuxedo shirt. “It wasn’t your fault.” The words came from me but as if they were very far away. “I told you to stay away.”

“All that matters is that I nearly failed.” All his seething darkness turned inward in anger and guilt.

Everything felt so unreal. I knew it would hit me any moment, what had happened—and what had almost happened. Right now, though, I felt like I was floating in a kind of waking dream. “No. All that matters is that you succeeded. Cosimo tried to take me away from you, but you stopped him.”

Dorian stopped mid-step. “You know it was him?”

“Yes,” I said. “Geoff—that’s the boy, he’s my friend or was my friend or—” I shook my head. All that was irrelevant now. “He described him to me before, hanging around my apartment, and I’m sure it was Cosimo.”

Dorian started again, passing through the bathroom door.

“He will be dealt with.”

Bending, he laid me in the half-egg of the freestanding tub. My bloodied feet left shocking red smears on the white acrylic as I curled them under me. Dorian set the temperature and turned on the tap, and hot water poured into the tub, sending billows of steam up into the room. It turned faintly pink when it touched my skin, washing the blood away. I was trembling despite the heat of the water. Dorian touched my shoulder with his hand lightly, reassuringly.

“You’re safe now, Cora. I will be right back,” he said. He stepped out of the room, shutting the door behind him.

The water felt like the first real thing that had happened since Dorian burst into the room, tickling at my feet and knees, the heat of it melting my frozen shock. I hunched over, hugging myself, and with the abruptness of the tap turning on, I started to cry.

I cried at what had just happened, what had been done to me and what had been done to Geoff because of me. I cried for everything I had lost—my Gramma, my humanity, my innocence, my youth. And I cried for the future, so dangerous and terrifying, and about the vampire who scared me as badly as anyone ever had but whom I couldn’t live without.