skin before coating a fingertip in my own blood and dabbing it on her wounds.
“Are you okay, pet?” I murmur, stroking her cheek.
Her eyes are half-lidded and she looks dazed. “Mmmn.”
“Thank you for that,” I tell her. “I feel much better. And look, it’s already stopped bleeding. You just rest here for a moment, okay? And then we’ll go home.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Now that my injury is no longer at the forefront of my mind, the previous jumble of emotions has returned. Yes, Sir. Those two little words went straight through me, making a warm sensation pool in my gut, but I’m also still battling anger with her for getting herself into this situation, and fear—for her safety, for the future, for my own sanity.
First things first: clear up my mess. One thing at a time. Leaving Sabina curled up on the couch, I get to work, forcing thoughts about anything else to the back of my mind.
The longer I can put off what will no doubt be an incredibly difficult discussion, not to mention an even harder decision, the better.
24
Sabina
I feel like I’m in some kind of waking nightmare but the details are all so vague, and everything seems almost too surreal.
Maximus killed Zeke. Zeke kidnapped me. Zeke was a shifter. A cheetah. I’m curled up in the passenger seat of Maximus’s car, watching the occasional light flash past the black window, trying in vain to wrap my head around the events of this evening. Glancing to my left, I study Maximus’s handsome profile. He’s staring straight ahead, and there’s a muscle ticking in his jaw. I had thought he would be more angry with me for going to see Zeke behind his back but there’s been no sign of that at all. Is it still coming?
“You okay?” I ask softly.
“I’ve had better evenings.”
His arm is wrapped in a strip of material torn from his t-shirt, and my fingers go to the puncture wounds on the side of my neck. Who knew human blood could help vampires heal faster?
Who knew I would ever be sitting in a car with a vampire, even thinking that?
“I’m sorry,” I begin, wanting to get this conversation over with before we get to the diner where my car is still parked and I potentially lose my chance to apologize. “I just wanted to ask him to back off. I was meeting him in a public place. I had no idea—”
“That he was a shifter?”
The edge in Maximus’s voice makes me want to shrink back into the seat. Shit, he really is angry. Once he’d taken some of my blood and recovered himself somewhat, I’d basically passed out on the sofa while he took care of Zeke’s body. I don’t know what he did with it. I don’t want to know. Buried it somewhere outside, I assume, judging by the way he looked when he came back into the clubhouse. “That he was a shifter,” I confirm.
I put him into this position. This is all my fault. It’s all too much to even wrap my brain around. I want to wind the clock back to this afternoon. No, scratch that. I want to wind it back a couple weeks, to where I never met Ethan, never met Maximus, never found out about vampires, shifters…
“We’ll discuss it when we get home,” Maximus says curtly.
“Home? My car is parked—”
“We’re not stopping for your car right now. We’re going to my place, which is closer, and then we’re going to have a little talk. We can pick up your car afterwards.”
If I’m even still alive to drive it, I think glumly, once again turning to stare out of the window. There’s a knot of anxiety in the pit of my stomach, and I keep having these shaking fits. Leftover adrenaline, probably, not unlike the ones I get after an intense scene.
Of course all this had to happen after I’d already had a fight with Maximus. It’s just poured fuel onto the fire. I was mad at him because he was behaving like he owns me when we haven’t even yet labeled this thing between us, and he was mad at me because I didn’t want him to get involved in my situation with Zeke.
God, I should have listened to him. And that’s almost the worst part of all.
By the time we roll up Maximus’s long driveway and into his huge garage, you could cut the tension between us with a knife. Wordlessly, he gets out, and comes around to my