“Nothing will harm you. You have my bond,” he rasps. “And if ensuring you are not harmed extends to your friends, I will provide them with protection too.”
“I don’t think they’d like it,” I respond. “I don’t think Ferenc would like it either.”
Dominik snorts. “The werewolves can look after their own. I wouldn’t interfere.”
“But they need to know.”
“Ferenc knows what he needs to know.” Dominik growls. “Nothing more. Vampire business is vampire business.”
I turn my head away from him.
“I know your business.”
“And I know yours.” He grasps my chin and pulls me back to face him. “We are alike, you and I, Lucy. We provide protection where it is needed, and we provide the cold hard truth when it is required.”
I want to yell at him, to say I am nothing like the vampire. Except he’s not wrong. My life, as his afterlife, has all been about atoning for the horrors I do. The deeds I’ve been involved in.
Dominik leans in and extracts a kiss from me, one which makes my hair curl and my core throb.
He may have a way with words, but this vampire also has a way of worming into my soul. Dominik has presented me with a fait accompli. It’s up to me what I do with it from here on.
Lucy
Dominik wantedto wrap me up in an enormous white fur coat, but I’d prefer not to screamvampire’s consort, to the entire world, So instead, I grabbed his black wool cape, which almost drowns me, donning it over a pair of beige cashmere leggings and matching sweater.
I seem to have a wardrobe full of the stuff. Dominik was suitably cagey when I asked him about it, stating the human he had employed to assist him here in Pécs was limited to what he could order online for next day delivery. And adding he didn’t have much of an imagination.
His reaction to me asking to go out for some fresh air after all the bombshells which have been dropped (not least the one which involved us creating a mess in the kitchen in more ways than one) was suitably dramatic.
He would come with me. He would protect me. I could not go alone.
Before he grumbled something about fresh air being overrated, meaning I had to point out he was a vampire and as such mostly forgot to breathe.
He swings his ebony walking stick as we make our way through the narrow streets, snow piled on either side of wherewe are walking. It’s clearly an affectation, given he’s a big, powerful vampire, but obviously it wasn’t going to be left behind.
All of which makes me interested in how he can be out here at all.
“Does it not hurt?” I query, glancing up at him as he strides along as if he owns the city.
“What?”
“Being out in the daylight. Most vamps don’t dare.”
“I don’t burst into flames, if that’s what you mean,” he says. “It just itches.”
“It itches?”
He wrinkles his nose. By all which is unholy, he looks utterly, utterly gorgeous as he does it. And when he sees me looking, he stops immediately.
“Yes, it itches.” He increases his pace, clearly not wanting to expand on the whole itching thing.
All my life I’ve been taught about vampires, but it seems I wasn’t ever taught anything interesting other than how to kill them and by default where they hang out.
Sure, I’ve known vampires can daywalk, but that ititchesis completely new.
“Couldn’t you just wear a sunblock or something?”
Dominik gazes down on me. “My skin is sensitive,” he intones. “I’ve had it for many centuries.”
