"What is it?"
"Death," he said woodenly. "For as long as I can remember, I've had these attacks--these visions-- of my last moments alive. It's hellish beyond imagining, but I see it as if it's happening. I feel it, Tess. It's my fate."
"I don't understand. How can you be sure of that?"
His smile was wry. "I'm sure. My mother had similar visions of her own death, and my father's too. They happened precisely as she envisioned them. She couldn't change what was to happen, or turn it back. So I've been trying to outrun my own end. I've been running from it forever. I've kept myself insulated from things that might make me want to slow down and live. I've never permitted myself to truly feel." "There's danger in feeling," Tess murmured. Although she could not begin to imagine what kind of pain Dante carried within him, she felt a kinship growing between them. Both alone, both adrift in their worlds. "I don't want to feel anything for you, Dante."
"God, Tess. I don't want to feel anything for you either."
He held her gaze as his lips slowly descended on hers. His kiss was sweet and tender, something reverent. It broke down all of her walls, the bricks of her past and her pain tumbling away, leaving her naked to him and unable to hide. Tess kissed him back, needing more. She was cold to her bones, and she needed all the warmth he could give her.
"Take me to bed," she whispered against his mouth. "Please, Dante... "
Chapter Twenty-three
Chase entered his Darkhaven residence from around the back, thinking it best not to alarm the whole house by coming in through the front, seething like an animal and covered in blood. Elise was up; he could hear her soft voice in the first-floor living room, where she and some of the community's other Breedmate females had gathered.
And he could smell her too. His senses were heightened from the rage still boiling through him--the violence he'd delivered--and the feminine scent of the woman he desired more than any other was like a drug shot directly into his vein.
With a feral snarl, Chase turned in the opposite direction of his sister-in-law and headed for his private quarters. He kicked the door shut as he entered, his hands working furiously at the zipper of his jacket, which was ruined with the human's spilled blood. He tore the jacket off and threw it to the floor, then pulled off his shirt and discarded it too.
He was a mess, from the bleeding scrapes and contusions on his hands after beating Ben Sullivan nearly to a pulp to the fevered, savage thirst that made him want to destroy something, even now, some time after he'd left the scene of his uncontrollable fury. It had been a stupid thing to do, attacking the Crimson dealer like he had, but the need to enact some measure of vengeance had been overwhelming.
Chase had given in to savage impulse, something he rarely did. Hell, had he ever? He always prided himself on his rigid, righteous ideals. His refusal to let emotion overrule his logic.
Now, in one careless moment, he'd fucked everything up.
Although he hadn't killed the Crimson dealer, he had leaped on him with full intent for murder. He'd bared his fangs and sunk them into the human's throat, not caring that in doing so he was exposing himself as a vampire. He had attacked savagely, but in the end he had brought his fury to heel and let the human go. Maybe he should have scrubbed his memory to protect the Breed from exposure, but Chase wanted Ben Sullivan to remember exactly what was waiting for him if he reneged on their agreement.
The entire situation was an outright betrayal of the trust he'd been granted by Dante and the rest of the warriors, but Chase couldn't see where he had much choice. He needed Ben Sullivan on the streets, not tucked away under the protective custody of the Order. Repugnant as the idea was, he needed the dealer's cooperation in helping him find Camden. It was a bargain he'd made the human scum swear upon over his own spilling blood. Sullivan was no idiot, and after the taste of vampiric fury he'd gotten tonight, he'd begged to help Chase in whatever way he could.
Chase understood that he was solo on his mission now. There would be some hell to pay with Dante and the others, but so be it. He was too far into this personal crusade to care about his own consequences. He'd already forfeited his position at the Agency, the career he'd worked so hard to make. Tonight he'd given up some of his honor. He'd give up anything to see this mission through.
Flicking on the light in his bathroom, Chase caught a sudden, stark glimpse of his own reflection. He was blood-spattered and sweating, his eyes glowing like amber coals, the pupils winnowed down to slits by residual anger and his body's thirst to feed. The dermaglyphs on his bare chest and shoulders pulsed in hues of pale scarlet and faded gold, indications of his general need for blood. The small taste he'd consumed when he bit Ben Sullivan's throat hadn't helped; the bitter copper tang lingering in his mouth only made him long to erase it with something sweeter.
Something delicate, like heather and roses--the blood scent he could trace coming closer to his apartments even as he stood there, glaring at the feral creature who stared back at him in the mirror.
The hesitant knock on the door outside went through his body like cannon fire.
"Sterling? Have you returned?"
He didn't answer. Couldn't, in fact. His tongue was cleaved to the roof of his mouth, his jaw ground tight behind the pained sneer of his pale, curled-back lips. He had to clamp down hard on his mind to keep himself from throwing the door open with the force of his will.
If he let her in now, unbalanced as he currently was, nothing would stop him from pulling her into his arms and slaking the twin hungers that were raging within him. He would be at her vein in a second; little more than that and he would be pushing inside her, damning himself completely.
Proving to himself just how far down he could sink in the course of one night.
Instead, he marshaled his mental strength and used it to cut the lights in the bathroom, plunging the space into a more comfortable darkness as he waited the long eternity that seemed to pass in those moments of answering silence. His eyes burned like embers. His fangs were ripping farther out of his gums, echoing the swelling ache of his arousal.
"Sterling... are you home?" she called again, and his ears were so attuned to her presence that he could detect her little sigh across the span of his apartments and through the solid panel of the door. He knew her well enough that he could picture the tiny frown that was certain to be creasing her forehead as she listened for him, then, finally, decided he wasn't there after all.
Chase stood stock-still, silent, waiting to hear her footsteps retreat softly down the hallway. Only when she was gone, the scent of her fading with her departure, did he release his pent-up breath. It leaked out of his lungs on a deep, miserable howl, vibrating the darkened mirror in front of him. Chase let it go, focusing his frustration--his damnable torment--on that rattling sheet of polished glass until it shattered off the wall into a thousand razor-edged shards.
Dante stroked his fingers over the soft skin of Tess's bare shoulder as she slept. He lay in bed next to her, spooning the back of her naked body against the front of his and simply listening to her breathe. Around them, the room was quiet and dark, as peaceful as the wake of a passed storm.
The persistent calm was strange, the sense of comfort and contentment something entirely unfamiliar to him.
Unfamiliar, but... nice.