out of a speeding car rather than take your chances with me."
"You were playing rough, Damon. They had told you to go out and play rough, maybe even to break your toys."
"I've been looking for the one who made you jump from the car - I couldn't remember anything before that. And I swore to take out his eyes and his tongue before he died in agony. You couldn't walk. You had to use a crutch to get through the forest, and just when help should have come, Shinichi drew you into a trap. Oh, yes, I know him. You wandered into his snow globe...and would be wandering still if I hadn't broken it."
"No," Elena said quietly. "I would have been dead a long time ago. You found me at the point of suffocation, remember?"
"Yes." A moment of fierce joy on his face. But then the trapped, horrified look returned. "I was the tormenter, the persecutor, the one you were so terrified of. I made you do things with - with - "
"Matt."
"O God," he said, and it was clearly an invocation to the deity, not just an exclamation, because he looked up, holding his clenched hands to heaven. "I thought I was being a hero for you. InsteadI'm the abomination. What now? By rights, I should be dead at your feet already." He looked at her with wide, feral, black eyes. There was no humor in them, no sarcasm, no holding back. He looked very young and very wild and desperate. If he'd been a black leopard he'd have been pacing his cage frantically, biting at the bars.
Then he bowed his head to kiss her bare foot.
Elena was shocked.
"I'm yours to do what you please with," he said in that same stunned voice. "You can order me to die right now. After all my clever talk, it turns out that I'm the monster."
And then he wept. Probably no other set of circumstances could have brought tears to Damon Salvatore's eyes. But he had boxed himself in. He never broke his word, and he'd given his word to break the monster, the one who had done all this to Elena. The fact that he had been possessed - at first a little, and then more and more, until his entire mind was simply another of Shinichi's toys, to be picked up and put down at leisure - didn't make up for his crimes.
"You know that I - I'm damned," he told her, as if perhaps that might go a small way toward restitution.
"No, Idon't ," Elena said. "Because I don't believe that's true. And Damon, think of how many times you fought them. I'm sure they wanted you to kill Caroline that first night you said you felt something in her mirror. You said you almost did it. I'm sure they want you to kill me. Are you going to do it?"
He bent toward her foot again, and she hastily grabbed him by the shoulders. She couldn't stand to see him in such pain.
But now Damon was looking this way and that, as if he had a definite purpose. He was also twisting the lapis lazuli ring.
"Damon - what are you thinking? Tell me what you're thinking!"
"That he may pick me up as a puppet again - and that this time there may be areal birch rod. Shinichi - he's monstrous beyond your innocent belief. And he can take me over at a moment's notice. We've seen that."
"He can't if you'll let me kiss you."
"What?" He looked at her as if she hadn't been following the conversation properly.
"Let me kiss you - and strip out that dying malach inside you."
"Dying?"
"It dies a little more each time you gain enough strength to turn your back on it."
"Is - it very big?"
"As big as you are by now."
"Good," he whispered. "I only wish I could fight it myself."
"Pour le sport?" Elena answered, showing that her summer in France last year hadn't been entirely wasted.
"No. Because I hate the bastard's guts and I'd happily suffer a hundred times its pain as long as I knew I was hurtingit. "
Elena decided this was no time for delay. He was ready. "Will you let me do this one last thing?"
"I told you before - the monster who hurt you is your slave now."
All right. They could argue about that point later. Elena leaned forward and tilted her head up, lips pursed slightly.
After a few moments, Damon, the Don Juan of darkness, got the point.
He kissed