with Camden it was different. He'd gotten mixed up with a new club drug that had been making the rounds last year in Boston. It was called Crimson. The shit was potent, a speedball designed especially for the Breed. One whiff or taste of that red powder and it was all you could do not to fuck, fight, or fang everything in your reach."
"My God," Tavia gasped. "It sounds terrible."
Chase grunted. "Not if you're a young male bored out of his skull in the Darkhavens. They ate it like candy, and some of them learned that it was the fast lane to Bloodlust. Cam was one of them."
"I'm sorry."
He shrugged. "Me too. The Order and I took out the Crimson dealer's lab, destroyed all of the product. Well ... almost all of it. I kept a vial of it for myself. One last dose, enough to be lethal."
"The silver container I found in your desk in Boston," Tavia murmured. "Why would you want to keep something like that?"
He didn't have to answer. She would read his logic plainly enough. The dose of Crimson was his escape plan, his silver bullet, should Bloodlust finally pull him under all the way. Which more and more didn't seem so much a question of if but when.
He ground out a raw curse.
Walk away. That's what he should do - what he'd done every other time shit got too real for him, too heavy to deal with. And there was a part of him now that wanted nothing more than to vanish into the night and never look back. Just run ... until he met daylight and all his problems - all his damnable failures, past, present, and future - were eaten by the sun.
That would have been the easy thing for him to do. Hard was making himself sit there and sweat through the shudders that were wrenching his body from the inside out. Hard was laying his weaknesses and his ugliest sins bare as he looked into Tavia's tender gaze and waited for the moment her concern mutated into justifiable contempt. Or worse, pity.
But Tavia's eyes wouldn't release him. Those clear, calm, spring-green eyes held him in the darkness like a caress. As he looked at her now, he realized the feral glow of his own gaze had banked. His irises no longer washed her in amber fire. Even the hungered throb of his fangs had eased in the time he'd been out there alone with her.
"You haven't lost the fight yet, Chase," she told him. "Isn't there anything you can do to help yourself get better? Maybe I can help you over time. I'd like to try, if you'd let me." He stared at her, leveled by the genuine compassion - by the depth of feeling he could hardly fathom - that shone from her beautiful face. He couldn't resist reaching out to stroke her cheek. "How can you be so caring after everything you've just heard? When I've done nothing but make your life hell since the moment I first saw you?"
"You haven't made my life hell. Dragos did that." Her hands were warm and soothing against his face as she drew him close and pressed a brief kiss to his lips. "You gave me truth, Chase. You have from the very beginning. You've opened my eyes. I may not like everything I see, but it's real and it's honest and I feel like I'm finally alive. You've given me all of that." He swore under his breath, wondering how it was possible that he'd allowed this female to get under his skin the way she had. Even worse, she had somehow gotten inside his heart, into his very blood.
Ironic that he should find her now, when the last thing he wanted - the very last thing he deserved - was a woman as extraordinary as Tavia Fairchild.
Whether or not he deserved her, Chase couldn't keep from wrapping his palm around her nape and pulling her close for his kiss. She tasted so sweet against his mouth. Felt so good and warm against him as she leaned into his embrace and parted her lips to accept the sweep of his tongue into her mouth.
He could have kissed her all night. Might have, if not for the sudden whoop and shouts of children racing out of the house to play in the snow. Chase pivoted his head to watch Mira, Kellan, and Nathan bound off the deck and into the pine-ringed yard