She let out a broken gasp but didn't seem capable of moving. Dante held his hand out to her.
"Come on, angel. Everything's all right. I promise you, you're safe."
Looking as if it took all her courage to do so, Tess sidled away from Rio and put her hand in Dante's open palm. He brought her to him and kissed her, relieved to have her near.
As Rio slunk to the corridor wall and dropped into a huddled crouch on the floor, Dante's pulse downshifted to something almost resembling normal. Tess was still upset and trembling, and while he didn 't think Rio posed any danger to her--especially now that Dante had made his position clear--he had some serious damage control to handle.
"Stay here. I'm just going to help Rio get back to his bed--"
"Are you crazy? Dante, we have to get out of here. He will tear both our throats open!"
"No, he won't." He held Tess's anxious gaze even as he moved closer to Rio's huddled form on the floor. "He won't hurt me. He wouldn't have hurt you either. He didn't know who you were, and something very bad happened to him that's made him wary of females. Believe me, he's not a monster."
Tess gaped at Dante as if he'd lost his mind. "Dante, the fangs... those eyes! He's one of the ones who attacked me--"
"No," Dante said. "He only looks like them because he's angry, and he's in a lot of pain. His name is Rio. He's a Breed warrior, like me."
"Vampire," she gasped brokenly. "He's a vampire... "
Damn it, he hadn't meant for her to learn the truth like this. God help him, but he'd thought he could ease her into his world--a world that belonged to them both--once she understood the vampire race was nothing to be feared, and once she saw how she was part of it, as a Breedmate.
As the only woman he would ever want at his side.
But everything was unraveling fast, a thread of half-truths and secrets that was spiraling down around his feet as she stared at him in panic, her eyes pleading with him to make sense of an unfathomable situation.
"Yes," Dante admitted, unwilling to lie to her. "Rio is a vampire, Tess. Like me."
Chapter Thirty-three
Tess's heart took a sharp pe into her stomach. "W-what did you say?"
Dante looked at her, those whiskey-gold eyes far too serious, his expression much too calm. "I am one of the Breed. A vampire."
"Oh, my God," she moaned, her skin going tight with alarm, with revulsion.
She didn't want to believe it--he didn't look like the creatures who'd assaulted her or the one who now lay in an anguished ball on the floor of the infirmary. But Dante's tone was so level and matter-of-fact, she knew he was telling her the truth. Maybe for the first time since she'd met him, he was finally being honest with her.
"You lied to me. All this time, you've been lying to me."
"I wanted to tell you, Tess. I've been trying to find the words to tell you--"
"That you're some kind of sick monster? That you've been using me--for what, just to get close to Ben so that you and your bloodsucking buddies could kill him?"
"We haven't killed the human, I swear to you. But that doesn't mean I won't, if it comes down to that. And, yes, at first I needed to know if you were involved in his Crimson dealing, and I thought you might be useful in getting more information on those activities. I had a mission, Tess. But I also needed your trust so that I could protect you."
"I don't need your protection."
"Yes, you do."
"No," she said, numb with a heavy kind of dread. "What I need is to get as far away from you as I can."
"Tess, the safest place for you now is here, with me."
When he came toward her, holding out his hands in a gesture that begged trust, she recoiled. "Stay away from me. I mean it, Dante. Get away!"
"I'm not going to hurt you. I promise."
An image slammed into the front of her consciousness as he said the words. In her mind, Tess was suddenly transported to her clinic storeroom, crouching down over a badly injured man who'd somehow found his way inside after a vicious fight on the streets Halloween night. He was a stranger to her then, but not now.