“What is wrong with her?” Jonas boomed, making the floorboards tremble. He pulled on the chains with a desperate sound. “Ginny!”
“We think she’s feeling your pain.”
His breath left him in a shuddering rush. “No.” Slowly, his head started to shake in vehement denial. “No, she can’t be feeling this. I can’t let it go on. Elias, bring me a stake. Put it through my fucking heart.”
“Don’t ask that of me,” Elias seethed.
Jonas’s green eyes blazed over Ginny, his wrists restless in their chains. “She will suffer until I go otherwise. No. No, God. It could take weeks. Don’t you understand?”
“You aren’t going anywhere,” Ginny managed, almost to the threshold of the room where Jonas had imprisoned himself.
“Stop where you are,” Jonas ordered, even as his fangs sliced into view. “Elias. Tucker. Stop her immediately.”
“I’ve made my decision.” The pain started to lessen in degrees and she barely kept herself from slumping to the floor. “You’re my decision, Jonas.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he croaked, a hint of his usual regal self peeking through. “Take the way out. Now. Otherwise it’s fucking forever, Ginny.”
Didn’t he think she’d considered that? Didn’t he think she’d weighed the fear of the unknown against a life without him?
The pain had left her so weak, it was impossible to form words and breathe at the same time, so she just kept going. He wouldn’t be able to deny her once they were touching, so that was her goal.
When she reached him, Jonas’s princely presence was once again eclipsed by the starving vampire. He jerked toward her with a growl, teeth bared, his naked chest heaving. “Get out.”
“No.”
The floorboards quaked beneath her knees, lights flickering in the hallway. “Get out.”
In lieu of answering—obviously he wasn’t going to listen or give her credit for knowing her own mind—Ginny reached up and molded a palm to Jonas’s cheek. A shudder passed through him, his lids turning heavy. He leaned his face into her palm, whispering her name. “Ginny. Love, my love, my love…”
“It’s going to be okay now,” she said softly, pushing aside his chaotic hair. “You can’t make decisions like this without me. Do you know what it would have done to me if you’d died? Because of me?”
“You’d have been safer,” he muttered thickly. “Happier.”
“Not happier. Never that.”
His body was still tense but the air of violence hovering around him had thinned. Now he swayed toward her with a clenched jaw, as if chastising himself for needing to get closer. Well Ginny wasn’t having that.
She looked back over her shoulder at their three friends. Elias had his back turned, Tucker looked fascinated by the sight of Ginny and Jonas on the floor. Roksana looked afraid for her, so Ginny tried to reassure her with a small smile. “Close the door, please.”
“Are you sure?” Roksana asked.
“Completely.”
“Hang the key by the door,” Jonas rasped. “Where I can’t reach it.”
Elias grunted his agreement and hooked the key on a nail that had been hammered into the wall by the entrance. Seconds later, they were alone. Jonas was stretched as close to Ginny as he could get while attached to the chains and his body was beginning to shake. “It won’t always be like this, love. I won’t wither after a single day without your…”
“My blood.”
His swallow was audible. “I’ve been neglecting my appetite. Some part of me knew the minute we met, nothing would ever taste the same again.” He strained against his bonds, sending a ripple across the muscles of his abdomen. “Jesus Christ. I’m so afraid of hurting you, Ginny. Please God don’t let me hurt you.”
“You won’t. If you’d lock yourself up to keep from hurting me, if you’d willingly die for me, how can I not be safe?”
“I haven’t recognized myself these past twenty-four hours. I’ve never drunk directly from a human before and my first human is my mate,” he said hoarsely. “You can’t know what I’ll do.”
She took a deep breath to calm the fluttering of her pulse. “I guess that’s why we have the chains.”
His skepticism did nothing to quell the hungry way he looked at her. As if beckoning her closer with his gorgeous face and seductive green eyes, while worrying at the same time she’d actually obey. That worry thinned and vanished, making way for lustful awe, when Ginny placed a hand on his chest and pushed him into a sitting position. Soothing him with gentle strokes of her fingertips, she climbed onto his lap and straddled him.
An animal groan burst out of Jonas, his hips shifting beneath her, the links of the chains clinking together.
“I made your heart beat,” she whispered, pressing her ear to the center of his chest, listening in awestruck silence to the hectic thrum. “It’s beautiful.”
“No. No, it aches. It burns. It’s heavy with longing for you, but it also needs your blood to keeping beating and that makes…that makes the longing savage. You have to get away from me.”