Page 63 of Eternally Bound
“Are you ready, miss?”
Kadence glanced at Marta before focusing on the hall again. That awful feeling of not belonging in her own skin hadn’t eased, but now she found it nearly impossible to breathe as she kept waiting.
“Miss?” This time it was Baldric who stepped before her.
Go, or stay for an eternity? And what did he mean by an eternity with him? He couldn’t havereallymeant what she’d thought when he said that? She wasn’t a vampire. There was no eternity for her.
Kadence looked over at where Marta stood by the door with a small duffel bag in hand. Her mostly gray hair had been pulled into a ponytail. Her round face only showed lines around her eyes and mouth when she smiled. Plump with kind hazel eyes, Marta had become someone Kadence really liked.
“Yes,” she croaked. “Yes. I am ready.”
Baldric stepped back and opened the door for her. Kadence glanced over her shoulder, but there was still no sign of Ronan. She took a step toward the poolroom before retreating. If she went to say goodbye to him now, she might never leave.
She forced herself to walk out the door. She’d turned against her brother and all her kind for this opportunity at freedom. She’d forsaken everything she knew; she could not change her mind now, even if she was contemplating staying for a man she’d only known for a short while.
A man she had willingly given herself to. By doing so, she’d chosen a course she could never take back and didn’t want to. If she tried to return to the hunters now, and they somehow learned who she had given herself to, they may label her a traitor and kill her. Even Nathan wouldn’t be able to stop that from happening if they decided that’s what she was.
Not like she would ever willingly tell them she had given herself to a vampire, but like Declan, there were those of her kind who had gifts. She certainly did. She had the same strength, speed, and enhanced senses her father and Nathan possessed and her strange knowing of things.
Stepping into the day, Kadence tipped her head back and let the warmth of the sun wash over her. Baldric opened the back door of a black car with heavily tinted windows for her. Every step she took caused her shoulders to sag more, but she tossed her bag into the back seat and climbed in behind it.
She winced at the clicking sound of the door closing behind her. Huddling into herself, she watched as Baldric and Marta climbed in and Baldric started the vehicle. She couldn’t look back as they drove down the tree-lined, cobblestone drive to the thirty-foot-high gate at the end.
“Put your blindfold on now, miss,” Marta said.
“Please call me Kadence. It’s going to be an extremely long time together if you keep calling me miss.”
“Kadence then,” Marta said with a smile. “Do you need help with the blindfold?”
“No,” she whispered and slid the thick material over her eyes.
***
“What have you done, Ronan?”
“If you want to survive to hunt tonight, I would suggest leaving,” Ronan didn’t look back at his friend as he replied to Declan’s question.
“You have to stop them. You can’t let her go.”
“I can and I did.”
He kept his gaze focused on the bar as he swirled the whiskey in his glass. He was going on his third bottle of Jameson, and he still didn’t feel any effects from the alcohol, which was probably a good thing. In his current mood, he might tear this entire house down if he were drunk.
The people who had lived here before them had shitty taste in décor, but they had fantastic taste in alcohol, he decided as he took another sip of the Jameson Vintage Reserve he’d discovered beneath the bar. At one time, he’d lived on Irish whiskey and women.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken a sip of alcohol, but he could clearly recall the last time he’d taken a woman. Every second of that encounter had been emblazoned on his mind, along with the fiasco of an ending. And now she was gone, set free by none other than himself.
Had he hoped she’d stay? Right up until she walked out the door. He would have denied it, but he realized now, he’d been holding out hope she would decide to stay for him.
Now he was trying to remember the last time whiskey had burned its way down his throat instead of thinking about who had walked out the door.
The light Declan let in when he’d slid open the doors flashed, but not because he was closing them again; it was because Declan was coming closer. Ronan had closed the shutters over all the windows, unable to handle that small amount of sun right now as the demon churned within him. He definitely couldn’t deal with Declan’s worry for him.
“Ronan—”
The tumbler shattered in his hand, and liquid splashed over him as shards drove deep into his flesh. He didn’t bother to pull the glass from his palm before he lifted the bottle he’d set next to his chair. Declan remained mute as he padded by him to the bar where he removed a couple of bottles before walking over to him. Grabbing the back of one of the ugly chairs, Declan set it beside him, placed one of the bottles between them, and opened the other.
“Not one more word about her, Declan.”
