Chapter Four

Morning was a memory and afternoon had become evening by the time I closed the final book on my pile with a defeated sigh.

Ling glanced up at me from across the table and then closed her book, too.

"Ready to stop hiding in here?" she asked.

"I was not—I haven't been… Fine. Yes." I picked at invisible dirt under my fingernails. "And maybe no? What if…"

"What if what?" She arched a brow. "What if he doesn't want you when he finds out what you are?"

My breath caught in my throat and I could only nod.

"Girl, do not make me come over there and slap you."

"Um…okay?"

"I mean it," she said, and then her voice softened to something supportive, yet fiercely loyal. "There is not a single thing you could do to stop that man from loving you. Have you even looked at his face when he looks at you, like a single time?"

"I know, it's just…"

"Just what? You think some accident of birth changes that?"

"He's a shifter, Ling. They're not exactly known for their tolerant ways."

She reached over and slapped the back of my head, and I yelped.

"Hey! What was that for?"

"Your mate—that's your true fated mate, by the way—is hardly the poster child for hating vampires, now, is he?"

"That's even worse," I said, rubbing at the back of my head. She narrowed her eyes and I leaned away, just to be safe.

"How, exactly, is having a mate who was on the cusp of a political marriage to a vampire to overthrow the current shitshow worse?"

"Well, firstly, can we not throw the M word around?" I feigned a shudder, and she shook her head in mock despair. At least, I thought it was probably mock. "And second, based on everything Astor said, it seems like my new-found half brethren are not exactly going to be welcoming to the ‘abomination' in their midst. What if... What if he feels the same way they do?"

She threw her head back and laughed, and I'd have been hurt if I didn't trust her more than almost anyone else in this academy. Okay, maybe I was a little bit hurt anyway.

"Oh, come on, Cali. You can't possibly believe that?" She searched my face for a moment, and all trace of laughter slid from her features. "He loves you. He was ready to die for you last year. I don't care what messed up shit you've been through in your life, or what bullshit you've been told: that kind of love doesn't just go away—mate bond or no mate bond. If—if—he felt that way before, the moment he finds out about you, he's going to realize everything he believed was wrong. And you're going to feel pretty damn stupid for sitting here worrying about it. Want to know why?"

"Because it's stupid to worry about it?" I ventured.

"Because it's stupid to worry about it," she agreed, nodding her head sagely. "Now get out of here."

She shoved my arm hard, pushing me from my seat.

"But…"

"But what?"

"Well, he's got to be back by now, right?" I glanced out of the window, where the academy's artificial sun was starting to set.

"I assume that is why you're hiding here, yes."

"Right. And he knows I'd be here. So…why didn't he come looking for me when he got here?" I sagged back against the wall behind me. "Maybe he already knows."

"Out!" She jerked an arm at the door. "Go and find your mate right now, or so help me, Cali Ellis, I will drag you to him by your glorious damn hair."

"Alright, alright, I'm going. Geez." I pried myself from the wall and pulled open the door. "And Ling? Thanks."

The corridors were busier now, which came as no surprise—students would have been arriving throughout the afternoon in preparation for the start of the semester tomorrow. And if you told me last year that that would be the least of my problems, I'd have called you a liar. If you told me I'd be all tied up in knots at the idea that my fated mate might have had a change of heart about me, I'd have laughed in your face. And yet, here I was, and I didn't feel much like laughing. I felt like a woman headed for the gallows and actually I was starting to think that might have been preferable. Death was one thing, but I didn't think that I could deal with rejection all over again. I kept my head low, and if I was traipsing along the corridors at a snail's pace, it was only because I didn't want to bump into any of the students and inadvertently start a war. We'd all come close enough to that last semester, and I didn't much care for a repeat.

Then I collided with something solid.

"You might want to watch where you're going, pet. This is becoming a tradition."

I swallowed hard as Davorin's imperial tones washed over me. Shit. So much for not bumping into anyone…and of all the people to bump into, it had to be the fae prince with a penchant for compelling people. And by people, I meant me. Great start to the semester.

"You know, you have a point. Maybe we should just make more of an effort to avoid each other."

"Aw, and here I was thinking that you'd missed me."

"Yes. Ritual humiliation is exactly what has been missing from my life these last two months." My stomach churned abruptly as I thought of the last two months…that I'd spent with Cole. Cole who might not want me now… No. I had to go and find him, and get to the bottom of this, now. I cut across whatever Davorin was saying. "You know what? Let's try for a new tradition. I'll pretend I don't know you, and you can do the same."

I brushed past him and made it two steps down the corridor.

"Stop."

I ground my teeth together as my feet came to a halt of their own volition.

"That wasn't very polite, pet."

He circled round to stand in front of me.

"And besides, there's a flaw in your new tradition."

"Oh?" I rolled my eyes. "Please, oh mighty prince, enlighten me."

Something heated flashed through his eyes at my words, but was gone before I could pinpoint it.

"This time last year you didn't know who I was…and look how well that ended for you."

He had a point, loathe as I was to admit it. Pissing off a fae prince on my first day in the academy had not been amongst my smartest moves last year. It hadn't been amongst my dumbest, either, so there was that. Still, in the interest of avoiding that whole ritual humiliation thing, it might be best to try out a new tact.

"You know how we finished up last semester, you know, not actively trying to kill each other? Any chance we could pick up there?"

"Where'd be the fun in that, pet?"

Tension rattled across my shoulders. I didn't have time to be trading smart words with this idiot. What I needed was to find Cole.

"For once in your life, would you just leave me alone?" I snapped. "I don't want to play your stupid games. I don't want anything to do with you!"

Anger marred his perfect face, and he leaned in close.

"Well, that's too bad, pet, because I'm not done with you yet."

He caught a strand of my straight black hair between his thumb and forefingers, skimming it with his nose before tucking it behind my ear. I resisted the urge to bite his fingers on the grounds I was pretty sure he'd do something to me ten times worse—like make me parade around the academy naked.

"Not by a long shot. So be a good little pet and run along, and I'll catch you later."

He straightened with a smirk and walked away, leaving me staring in his wake. Well, that had been easy.

"Are you checking out that fae's ass? Because I think your mate would have something to say about that."

I twisted round, cursing my lack of supernatural senses, to see Thaden watching me with an amused expression playing across his lips. I rolled my head back in a silent appeal to the heavens.

"Great. Just what I need. Another jackass."

"It's good to see you, too, sweetness. And your delectable blood."

Oh. Fuck.

He ran his tongue over his upper lip and I blanched, even as my mind pictured his tongue doing other things. Fucksake, what was it about this vampire that got me all messed up? And how could I even be thinking things like that right now?

"How about a little taste to get me through the night?"

"Thaden, we can't," I said, backing away. He came with me, invading my space until I was pressed up against the wall, caged between his arms on either side of my face.

"Oh, don't worry, I'll carry you back to your mate so he can satisfy your more carnal needs…right after you've satisfied my needs, first."

"No, I mean it, you can't!"

His face darkened. "We had a deal, sweetness. This would not be a good time to renege."

"I'm not…" It was almost impossible to get a breath with Thaden invading my space like this, his presence sending heat through me—which was purely my body's conditioned response to the endorphins being fed on pumped into my system, and nothing else—and my head felt fuzzy from his proximity.

"You're not refusing me your blood, sweetness?" he murmured in my ear. "I'm so glad to hear it. A deal is binding in our world, and you wouldn't want to find out what happens if you go back on your word."

He bent his head to my throat and skimmed his nose across the delicate flesh there. My heart rate tripled and I could do nothing but lean into his touch as his lips made their home on my puckered skin. My eyelids slid closed in anticipation of the ecstasy about to fill me as the heat of his mouth teased me mercilessly.

No!

With a gasp, my eyelids flew open and I slammed my palms into his chest, breaking the contact between his mouth and the unbroken skin of my throat, and shoving him across the corridor. Tension roiled through his outline, and he canted his head a fraction, a predatory look lurking behind his eyes as he stalked back towards me, his long dark hair casting shadows across his face.

"You shouldn't have done that, sweetness."

"You need to listen to me," I insisted, but my words were undermined by the jagged edge to my breathing.

"No, sweetness," he said, looming over me. "You need to listen to me. We have a deal, and I am taking what I'm due…one way or another. I seem to recall you never had a problem with it before."

That, clearly, was conveniently ignoring the whole part where I'd resisted him feeding from me with every part of my soul, where Cole had spoken up against his best friend to spare me from his attentions. Ignoring everything that had happened...before I'd come to crave his touch.

And it was completely irrelevant.

"I'm not what you think I am!" The words burst from my mouth just as he was lowering his lips to my throat again, and he froze, and then drew back a fraction to search my face with his eyes.

"You look like the pretty little mortal whose blood tastes like the tears of fallen angels," he said, and heat smoldered in my core.

Dammit!

"Appearances can be deceiving," I snapped, and ducked from between his arms. His hand snagged my wrist as I made to brush past him, jerking me to a halt and spinning me back around to face him.

"Yes," he all but purred as his hungry gaze roved every inch of my body. "They can."

"Stop this!" I yanked my arm from his grip. "I'm not good for you!"

His brow creased at my words, confusion puckering his decadent lips for a heartbeat until they quirked into a sinful smile.

"I'm a vampire, sweetness. I don't do good."

"You don't know who I really am."

"I know enough."

"No, you don't."

"You're mine, sweetness, that's all I need to know. Your soul might be Cole's, but your blood belongs to me. And don't you forget it." He closed the gap between us again, tilting his head to inhale the scent where my neck met my shoulder. "You might run with monsters, but you're so decadently human."

"No I'm not! I'm not human!"

Heat prickled behind my eyes and Thaden drew back, an appalled expression on his face as he took me in.

"Yeah, go ahead and hate me. I'm not human. I'm a freak and everyone round here is going to know soon enough. I shouldn't even exist!"

I rushed past him, and this time he didn't try to catch or stop me—and why would he? Astor had been right. I was…an abomination. An atrocity. And everyone would know and they'd hate me, too, and Darkveil had finally been becoming a home to me, and it wasn't fair! It wasn't fair. Hadn't I been through enough?

I jammed the key in the lock of my dorm room door with shaking hands, rattling it when it didn't want to turn, and then barging it open and tumbling inside, holding the tears exactly long enough to slam the door shut behind me and then sag back against it.

It was too much. It was just too much. I wasn't strong enough for this, I wasn't strong enough to be this. I was just me, I'd always just been me. Weak, human…but me. Enough. And now? Now I wasn't even me. I didn't know who I was. What I was. I didn't know how to be this thing they said I was. And I didn't know how I could survive knowing that everything I believed about myself my entire life had been a lie. The girl who looked back at me from the mirror, she'd been a lie. A fabrication. A creation of my warped, inhuman mind.

I gasped, and the tears flooded down my face, and each breath I drew was more shuddering than the one before as my grief escaped me so that I couldn't even have the solace of drowning in it.

And then arms were wrapped around, holding me up, holding me close, drawing me against Cole's familiar heat.

"Hey, hey, it's okay," he murmured in my ear as he tucked my head against his shoulder, one of his hands stroking my hair as the other held me to him. "I've got you. You're safe."

Despite his soothing words, I could feel the alarm thrumming through his chest.

"No," I gasped into his shoulder. "It's not okay. Nothing's ever going to be okay again."

He tensed, and a growl rattled through his chest before he exhaled and smoothed my hair again.

"Tell me who I need to kill, and I'll kill them."

I gasped another shuddering sob and drew back from his grasp to stare up at him.

"Me. You need to kill me."

"Well, that's not going to happen. But I'm gonna kill whoever made you feel that way."

"You shouldn't waste your time." I wrenched the words from the bottom of my stomach, feeling like I was ripping out my soul by its roots. "Your father was right. You should find a way to dissolve the mate bond."

"Never going to happen," he said, his words a fierce rumble. "You're mine, and I'm yours. And you might not be ready for forever yet, but I'll be here for you when you are. And I will defend our bond to the death."

I shook my head, swallowing the lump in my throat. "No. You don't get it. It was bad enough for your pack when you thought I was human. But I'm not human."

He was motionless except for his eyes, which searched my face as I spoke. "Cole, if you take me as your mate, it could destroy your pack. I'm a dhampir."

He blinked. "Dhampir?"

I wrenched my eyes from his. Any moment now his loyalty and confusion would turned to disgust and hatred, and I didn't want to see that. My heart had already been burned to ash, but I couldn't face that.

"I'll find a way to free you from me," I whispered. "I swear it."

Abruptly, arms wrapped around me from behind.

"I don't want freedom," he murmured in my ear. "I want you. All of you. No matter what that is."

"But your pack…"

"Is pack. They can choose to follow me or fight me, and it won't make a difference to how I feel about you."

"But…"

He turned me and captured my lips with his, drawing me into a kiss that tasted of hope and desire, of passion and promise. His tongue explored mine, tentative yet familiar, and it would be all too easy to lose myself to his timeless pledge.

I twisted my head a fraction to the side, breaking the contact between our lips.

"Your father…"

A ragged groan burst from him.

"You want to talk about my father at a time like this?" His eyes narrowed wickedly and his hand found the small of my back, pinning me to him as his other hand ventured further south. "If you're thinking about my father, I must be doing something wrong. Time to remedy that."

His hand slapped my ass then slipped between my legs as his mouth recaptured mine, planting a dozen feather light kisses on my mouth. I gasped as his hand slipped inside my jeans.

"What are you thinking about now?" he demanded.

"Your... pack..." I protested as he slid a finger inside me.

He gave a throaty chuckle. "My whole pack? Then it would seem I have a lot of distracting to do indeed."

His mouth claimed mine again as his finger worked inside me, and it became harder to focus on the problems of my birth by the second, my mind instead fixating on ways of ridding ourselves of these very unwelcome clothes between us. I kissed Cole back with the intensity of every possessive, jealous fiber inside me, and he growled his approval into my mouth, his cock hardening against me.

"There she is," he rumbled into my mouth. "My mate."

The word should have filled me grief and longing for what I would have to sacrifice, but instead I felt a thrill of lust and hunger and desire for this incredible creature that somehow fate had decreed was meant for me.

"Mine," I murmured, breaking contact with him for just long enough to allow him to pull my shirt over my head and toss it aside, and in the same moment my hands were fumbling with his shirt buttons. With an impatient sound, he wrenched the fabric apart in a spray of buttons and shed it like an unwelcome second skin. His flesh burned against mine, but it wasn't enough, I needed more, even if it was just this once—but some part of me screamed in protest it would never be just this once—and I would have all of him. In tune with my thoughts, he shed his pants and underwear as I rid myself of mine, and in seconds we were both completely naked, separated by nothing more than two inches of charged, electric air. And I soon remedied that.

We crashed back into the door, and then he spun me around and pinned me against the wall, trailing kisses from my neck to my naval, and I almost came undone right there. He fell to his knees in front of me, burying his head between my legs and flicking his tongue across my clit in a way that had my legs quaking.

"Cole…"

He scooped me up and tossed me on the bed, coming down on top of me and pinning me between his powerful body and the mattress…and there was no place I'd rather be.

I reached up to tangle my fingers in his short hair, tugging his face down to me and catching his lips with mine. I felt him grow harder against me as he abandoned my lips to catch one of my nipples between his teeth. I arched my back into him and a needy mewl slipped from between my lips. He gave a raspy chuckle in reply, and slid his hand between my legs to tease me until I was squirming and bucking against him in need.

"Cole, please…"

"You're mine, Callista Ellis," he growled against my naked flesh, then caught my chin and turned me to look at him, at his eyes boring into mine. "And nothing is going to take you from me. Do you understand now?"

And I did. In that moment, I got it. Cole didn't care what I was. He cared who I was…and that hadn't changed. We belonged together.

He saw the moment I got it, and grunted in satisfaction. Then his lips twisted into a smirk, and he thrust into me, giving my body everything it craved. I matched him thrust for thrust as we chased our climax together until heat rushed through me and my back bowed up from the bed. The orgasm crashed over me just as he buried himself to the hilt and stiffened, spilling himself inside me.

"Mine," he growled.

"Mine," I vowed.