His teeth grazed her skin, and she nearly lost her mind.
“Yes,” she said. “Tai, yes.”
He pulled back, and Claire growled her frustration, sounding more wolf than vampire. He rested his forehead in the crook of her neck where he’d nearly just left the silver scar of the bloodbound covenant. Claire pushed her fingers up into the hair at his nape.
“Please, Tai,” she whispered. “You want to. You just proved it.”
“Wanting isn’t the problem.”
“I trust you. I trust us, that we’re meant to be eternals. Can you trust us too?”
Tai’s fingers wandered to the piano keys and began to play again, a soft melody that sounded like mourning. He was trying to tell her, but maybe he lacked the words.
“I just want us to stay like this,” she said. “Together like this.”
His fingers went still, withdrew from the keys. He looked down at her, and his mouth was pulled into a grimace. “I’ll never leave you, Claire.”
“You can’t know that,” she said. “Not without the covenant.”
It was happening again, just as it had on the phone with Ember, talking about his insistence they couldn’t be bloodbound. Panic was clogging her throat, squeezing her heart. She wrapped her arms around him and held on too tightly, as if he were a ship in a storm, and she was the anchor, trying to keep him from being stolen by the waves.
“I do know it,” Tai said. “With or without the covenant, when I give my word to stay, I stay.”
“My dad said he would stay,” she whispered.
Tai cupped her head, stroked her hair. “How old were you when he said that?”
“Nine and a half. I didn’t understand in the moment, he was just talking. He always just talked. Half the time he didn’t even remember what he said within a few days of saying it, because it was just whatever was in his head, in the moment. But he gave his word too, Tai.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s just a fact. Vampires can walk out on each other any time. We’ve been doing it for centuries. We get bored with monogamy.”
His hand tightened on the back of her head. “Some of us do. I won’t.”
“In the moment he said it, my dad thought the same thing. But he had no reason to stay. If they’d been bloodbound, he would’ve had a reason.”
Tai tipped up her chin and placed the gentlest of all kisses on her lips. “Claire Elisabeth,youwere his reason to stay. You. His child. Andyouare my reason. I can’t seal my word with the bite, but it’s still my word.”
Tears pooled, overflowed, fell down her cheeks as she loosened her desperate hold around his waist and wrapped her arms loosely around his neck instead. She kissed him back.
“I trust you,” she said.
“I’m going nowhere.”
He kissed her again, and for a moment Claire let it be light, then hardened her mouth on his. He had nothing to fear. Not ever, not with her. Not even the bite.
She did trust him. She trusted he meant what he said. But he might not know what she knew, that his word might not be enough. For now she’d give him time to trust himself. She slid from his lap to the bench, facing the piano this time.
“Play me our song again.”
Twenty-Four
Tai had already bid goodnight to the people he knew best at Dr. Gerald Levine’s quarterly consortium when Lieutenant Fred Grunbock approached him from across the room with a low wave. Tai met him in the middle of the expansive foyer, where several others had also stalled in conversation on their way out the door.
“Hey, Fred.” They hadn’t yet spoken personally this evening, so Tai thrust out a hand, and Fred shook it firmly. “How have you been?”
“Never better, man. You?”
