Page 73 of No One’s Daughter

“It isn’t,” he said, glancing back at me with a smirk that immediately set off alarm bells. I slowed slightly, narrowing my eyes at him. A week ago, I would have thought this was some sort of test. Or a trap. Something to catch me out and punish me for.

He saw my hesitation and laughed.

Actually, out-loud laughed at my reaction. “What are they gonna do?” he said between it, the sound lighter than I’d ever heard it. “Come after us?”

That only made him laugh harder.

I couldn’t help but stare at him.

Because this was new.

His moods were always up and down. But he’d never been… whatever this was.

But then, a ridiculous, bubbling urge I hadn't felt in what seemed like forever surged within me. My lips pressed together in a futile attempt to hold it in.

I failed and a laugh slipped out anyway because I mean, he had a point. They were already after us, how much worse could it realistically get?

The absurdity of it hit all at once, and suddenly we were both laughing in the grim, dingy stairwell like it wasn’t completely unhinged.

Like this wasn’t what our lives had become.

And it felt weirdly liberating. I hadn’t laughed like that in… I didn’t even know how long. Maybe longer than I wanted to admit. Long before I was a vampire.

And what was more unsettling was the fact he was the reason for it. That he could pull something like that out of me.

“Besides, we need our strength.” He rumbled as we made our way into the empty street with only the flickering glow of a broken streetlamp above us.

“Careful now, it almost sounds like you care for my wellbeing," I teased between breaths of laughter.

​“When did I ever give the impression that I didn’t,” he said with a bizarre genuineness that had me questioning everything I’d ever thought.

​“You’ve quite literally been an ass to me this entire time.”

​“True,” he chuckled, “I won’t argue that, but, I think you’ll find I’ve also looked after your wellbeing.”

The words gave pause for thought. Was he right?

He had looked after me, in his own way I supposed.

Had I developed Stockholm syndrome?

I must have. Why else would I suddenly begin to like the company of my captor.

I wasn’t sure I could even call him that anymore though. I could have run if I had really wanted to. But I hadn’t, and I wouldn't. He knew it and I knew it. I guess somewhere in the past two weeks I’d realised I needed him, whether I wanted to or not. And brute he may at times be, a liar he wasn’t.

Maybe that’s just what happens when you spend day and night with someone for weeks on end. Or maybe that’s just the vampire in me.

We kept to the shadows, slipping between them like we belonged there, and I began to ponder just how many times in my life I must have been close to a vampire without even realising it. I thought that the world had been dangerous enough without any supernatural elements.

I wondered how one even hunted in these busy streets. Wouldn’t we be seen? Wouldn’t they scream?

“Stop overthinking,” he murmured beside me, not even looking at me as he paused in the mouth of an alley.

“I’m not—”

“You are,” he cut in, now looking at me. “You get that crease between your brows when you are.”

I scowled, smoothing it out instinctively and his mouth twitched, just slightly.