“What the fuck? What idiot doesn’t just use the doorbell?” I complain. I can’t see Julian’s face mainly because he’s pulling my dress over my head but I know he’s agreeing with me. I yank my dress down my body and turn to charge out into the hallway but Julian catches my arm and slows me.
Julian smooths my hair down and nods when he’s satisfied with how I look. “My guess is whoever is at the door is someone you didn’t invite.”
“Maybe,” I agree.
“And after today’s attack, you are not answering that door. I am.”
I start to protest that it’s my house and that if anyone is going to answer the door, it’s me when Julian says, “If they stab me I won’t die. Anything that anyone does to me won’t kill me but your condition is far more delicate.”
I make a face. “My condition? Since when is being human a condition?”
“Since time immemorial.” Julian motions for me to walk with him. “Stay behind me until we’re sure they’re harmless.”
“Fine.” I go to cross my arms but I never get the chance to. Julian’s hand finds mine and he tugs me to his side.
“Stay close,” he tells me. He presses a kiss to my forehead and I hate that part of me swoons at the touch of his lips. How can this be the same man that was three fingers deep in me while I screamed myself hoarse? And now here he’s giving me aforehead kiss? I clear my throat and lean away from him to put distance between us. Julian lets me get as far as an inch away before he has me right back against his side.
Julian gives me a disapproving look. “I said stay close.”
I bite the inside of my cheek so I don’t say anything stupid. My entire body feels stupid after the orgasms Julian squeezed out of me. I feel…well, I feel good. Relaxed and loose. Is this what I always heard about when girls said they were dickmatized?
He hasn’t even given me dick yet and I’m dopamined up and ready to accept the fact that he’s a vampire. The only thing that keeps bringing me back to reality is when he calls me wife. For years that was the goal—at least where granny and the Martinez lineage was concerned.
Find a man, make him take your name, and keep going.
When I became damaged goods and Billy asked Minnie to marry him, I gave up on marriage. Not all at once, but slowly, over time. Piece by piece I let go of the idea of what a normal life could be. I accepted that I was never going to have that. I told myself I was fine with that and that I didn’t need it. I didn’t need anyone.
Before Julian, I was content to live out my life here and die. Maybe I would adopt or pass on everything to some distant niece who’s never heard of me, I didn’t know. There wasn’t a future where I wasn’t the last Martinez woman to walk these halls and know its secrets. Someone new might move in but they wouldn’t love it like I did.
They wouldn’t understand Vesper House because they couldn’t.
That was reserved for someone like me. I’d clung to that knowledge. It was precious. What else could it be in a world that shunned me, one that I had willingly made the same mistake twice in. I’d broken the rules of nature, of society, the thinboundary that separated humans from animals. I’d smashed that boundary into a million fucking pieces, hadn’t I?
And now what was there for me?
Julian squeezes my hand and stops walking. We’re in the foyer now. It’s almost a repeat of the scene that played out earlier with Maxine.
“I should have fucking known it was him,” Julian mutters. His face becomes hard and cold. The predator that I glimpsed earlier rises to the surface faster than I can blink and it’s him that steps in front of me and stalks towards the door.
“Fucking Billy,” I whisper. I’d forgotten all about his threat to come by. His stupid ass insistence for me to leave the light on like I had when we were dating and he would come by after work stinking of fish guts and dish soap.
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
“I’m going to teach him a lesson,” Julian tells me.
I hurry after Julian. What does that mean?”
He stops in front of the door and looks down at me.“Don’t worry, I won’t kill him.” I let out a sigh of relief. After today, no, after this week, I don’t think I can stomach another death. “I’m just going to beat him up a little. Okay, not a little.A lot.”
“As long as you don’t kill him,” I say.
Julian grabs my hand and kisses the back of it. “Cross my heart.”
BANG. BANG.
I jump away from the door at the banging but Julian doesn’t.
“Open the fucking door, Mare. I see you. Who the fuck is in there with you?”
