and added, finding the inspiration to be honest with her, “I danced with you wearing a false face because I wished to see how you would speak with me if you were not aware of what I was. How we might have been, should the circumstances be different. If this were to be another world, and I a living man.”
“It is not your vampirism that troubles me, Vlad.” They had come to a small park in the road, a gathering of a few benches beneath several trees. She turned to look at him, stopping their progress. She reached out to touch his elbow, and he obediently turned to face her.
It was so rare that others chose to touch him.
“Oh?” He challenged her assertion that it was not his inhumanity that was the source of her unease. “I have trouble believing that.”
She shook her head, insisting. “It is what you seek to do that troubles me. That you are what you are is…frightening. I feel as though I am in a cage with a hungry tiger each time you look at me. But I do not blame the cat for thinking me its food. I do not fault you for your nature.”
“Then what troubles you? Why do you hide from me?” He lifted a hand to her cheek and let his fingers brush against the warmth he saw there. He knew his touch was tepid. To her credit, and his deep pleasure, she had not once flinched away from it. “Shall we speak of our dream, now?”
He felt her soul there, close to his, an inexplicable and uncanny sensation. It was truly unique. He was eager to discover how it might join them when they were paired in other ways. He idly wondered who would be inside whom.
Her face went crimson nearly in an instant, and she drew back from him. He let her go, and he watched as she paced around the bench, a hand against her cheek where he had touched her. “I…I am sorry that happened.”
“I enjoyed it.”
“I am not apologizing to you.” She glared at him, and he chuckled at the indignity in her eyes. “I am as I said—sorry that it happened at all.”
“Why? Did you not find pleasure in it?” He let his voice drop into the sultry purr he knew was so wonderfully effective on her. “Reality will be much more enjoyable, I assure you.”
She growled in frustration and turned her back to him, putting her head in both her hands. “Stop teasing me.”
“Never.”
She laughed, a weak, defeated sounding thing. She sighed and looked up at the sky, now pale purple as the stars began to emerge. “And when you have me, Vlad—”
“When.” He pointed out to her the choice of words.
She hesitated and nodded. He grinned to himself, glad she did not see the expression upon the tiger who waited for her in his cage.
“When,” she repeated. “What then?”
The emptiness in her tone—the forlorn quality to her question shattered his sense of victory and pride. He stepped to her side, and slipped a hand onto her shoulder, but did not turn her to face him. “What are you asking me, Maxine?”
Dark amber-brown eyes met his and sliced into his soul like a knife. “Will you forget me like all the rest?”
Who was this little mortal child, who could dig her hand so deep into his chest and tear out his heart without even knowing the damage she had done? He could not hide his grimace of pain as he turned away from her. The cards she had read for him, detailing that he had chosen to be numb to world to avoid feeling anything at all, had been terrifyingly accurate. He was both the helpless pauper and the terrible king in the same breath. She had seen that his egotism was not a lie to cover his helplessness—she understood that both could be very true at once.
She could see straight to the core of him, and she had no qualms about tearing him to pieces in the process.
It was only fair, he supposed.
Undone and exposed by a child, he hung his head. “Maxine, I—”
A gunshot rang out.
He felt pain in his shoulder.
She screamed.
Bam.
The sound of a rifle echoed loudly in the courtyard. Vlad twitched backward as if something had punched him in the shoulder. His hand went to it, and it was instantly stained red. He grimaced in rage, not in pain, fangs distended and long.