Night Kissed (Chosen Vampire Slayer #1) - Mila Young Page 0,53
actually be better than me.
Though, there was so much to him I had to uncover. I wanted to know about that secret core, lurking like the shadow of a leviathan below the surface of the water. There were so many mysteries I had yet to unlock. And he was one I understood the least.
“Talking about death isn’t going to scare me,” I informed him now. “Look, I don’t know how much experience you really have with vamps, but they’re not very nice. I’m…” I hesitated on the brink of spilling that I was from the Pacific Northwest—in fact, the very same city that harbored Orion’s rivals. What he’d do with that knowledge was utterly unpredictable. He could use it against me. He could throw me to the wolves. “I’ve seen some pretty awful shit.”
Dylan’s face, a guy I’d been dating and lost to a vamp assault when I was seventeen, floated up into the back of my mind, and I tried to keep my face as neutral as possible. Logan paused and looked at me, suddenly curious. His fingertips moved lightly along the inside of my arm, as if he was reading the path of my veins.
“Who is that?” he asked quietly. The intensity of his stare chilled me deeply. I knew he had to be talking about Dylan, even though it didn’t make sense. Had he seen my recollections of him? “Lost,” Logan added, more or less to himself.
I chewed on my lower lip. Abruptly, the situation in this room had turned intimate in a weird, intangible way. I felt like the tables were turning on me; I was no longer the one doing the prying. And on one hand, that made me extremely uncomfortable. Dylan was, to me, a rather sacred subject, though I haven’t thought of him in a while. I pushed the tragedy to the farthest recesses of my mind. Even thinking about him for too long made my eyes sting.
“He died.” Those two words were all I could manage at first. I had no idea why they felt so different to say in front of this silent stranger. “They killed him,” I finished at length. “The vamps. Okay? Is that what you wanted?”
Why was I the one being interrogated now, and how had he done it without saying more than a couple sentences? He was still gazing at me with that X-ray vision, his eyes like marble glaciers.
“You hold it against them,” he murmured. “I see.”
“Yeah. Yeah, of course I do,” I blurted. “They fucking murdered my friend!” A slow wave of heat crept up through my chest and neck, coloring my cheeks. This was a pain I had not expected to revisit when I stepped through the door, and for a minute, I truly regretted it. Dylan was my secret, my own private knot of pain to carry, and suddenly it was all out in the open again. The wounds that had not fully healed squeezed out a few drops of fresh blood.
“So you hunt them for what? Vengeance?” The twist of amusement in his smooth, cool voice raised my hackles.
I curled my fingers into a fist against his palm and yanked my hand away.
He let me go easily, unperturbed. I’d have been lying if I said I didn’t think about hitting him right in his perfectly chiseled, Adonis-y face. Then the white-hot flash of anger died down.
Breathe, girl. I tossed my hair defiantly. Taking my wrist back made me realize that it was numb and freezing. Alarmed, I tried to shake some feeling back into my extremities. “Hey, what the hell did you do to my hand?”
“Sorry,” he remarked nonchalantly. “Side effect. It will go away.”
“Ugh.” I scowled at him. “You know, I didn’t give you permission. For any of that.”
Logan remained totally unconcerned. He leaned back against the wall of the window alcove where he was sitting, propping one foot up on the edge of the window seat. “Death is public domain,” he said.
“But my memories aren’t. And before you go denying anything, I know you saw something, because that’s the only way you could’ve known about Dylan. Thanks for bringing him up, by the way. That’s exactly what I needed today.” As I finished the last sentence, I realized with a start how panicked I was. Both my heart and my thoughts raced a million miles a minute as I attempted to collect myself. Tears gathered at the corners of my eyes. “Don’t ever do that again.”