Arnaud’s current lover? Elissa broke free of him and burst into the room, sobs escaping her. Not fear or sorrow. He couldn’t sense such emotions in her as she ran towards the bed, blocking his view of it. She felt happy.
She rounded the bed and Payne’s eyes widened as she peeled away the dark blue covers and gathered a small boy who looked no older than six in human years into her trembling arms.
This was the item she had lost?
It couldn’t be hers. Payne could sense the boy was an incubus. No markings covered what he could see of the boy’s arms beyond the short sleeves of his charcoal grey t-shirt but they would emerge in a few years, revealing his lineage. Payne didn’t need to see it to know it would be like his own.
His scruffy sandy hair was evidence enough.
“Who does the boy belong to?” he said and stepped into the room.
Elissa looked up at him, her eyes bright with affection even though tears lined her dark lashes. Her chestnut hair fell around her shoulders and the boy in her arms nuzzled it, reached up and sleepily buried his small hand into the wavy locks. His black loose bottoms blended into her halter-top as he curled up against her and murmured something in his sleep.
“He is mine now... he was my sister’s. She gave birth to him and had raised him in secret, moving from one town to the next, forever on the run until the coven finally found her and executed her. I kept my promise to raise him in her stead and I had managed to keep him hidden, but then his father tracked him down.” She held the boy closer to her and looked down at him, and Payne could see the love in her eyes as well as feel it in the remnants of her blood in his body.
He wished she would look at him like that, while feeling emotions so warm and beautiful.
Payne looked at the sleeping innocent in her arms. They were related. His grandfather’s son. His uncle. That didn’t feel right as he looked at the boy, so much younger than he was, new to this dark world and unaware of just what he would become when he matured. A witch had given birth to him, a human, making him a full-blooded incubus, not a half-breed like Payne. The boy would need protecting and teaching. He would need love and Elissa looked as though she would give it to him unconditionally.
He ached inside with the need for her to give that to him too.
“Thank you, Payne,” she whispered and looked up at him through her eyelashes.
He shrugged it off. “We have to go.”
“Where?” Her voice shook now and he knew what she was thinking.
“I will take you somewhere you will be safe and I can protect you.” He was risking a lot by taking her to Vampirerotique but it was the only place he knew and he would only stay there long enough to figure out somewhere else to take her. He would find a safe home for her and the boy.#p#分页标题#e#
She rounded the bed and the sight of her struck him hard. She looked beautiful as she carried the boy, gazing upon the sleeping child with love and happiness. Jealousy coiled in Payne’s heart, striking deep with poisoned fangs. He closed his eyes and took hold of her arm, unable to see her without feeling she was never going to give him what he needed from her and that as soon as they were away from here, she would leave with the boy and he would never see her again. She wouldn’t want to keep the child around him. He was barely mate material, let alone father material, and an erotic theatre was no place to raise a child.
Payne focused and teleported them.
Right onto the black stage of the theatre in the middle of a performance.
Fuck.
He must have been thinking about what it would be like for the boy to grow up around the erotic shows and got his coordinates skewed.
The whole theatre froze and the combined focus of over two hundred vampires shifting to him and then to Elissa and the boy sent him off the deep end.
Payne roared at them all.
Red bled over his vision.
The two male and two female performers on stage broke apart, crimson eyes on Elissa. Payne growled a warning at them and then things took a severe downward turn. One of the males moved. Payne tried to go for a flesh wound but the thought of Elissa coming to harm, the thought of someone hurting the boy, had him automatically aiming higher. He swiped his claws in a direct arc across the male’s throat and thankfully the male had fast reactions.
Victor.
Payne hazily recognised the shaven-headed immense elite male.
His claws caught him on the shoulder, digging deep and ploughing through his flesh. Blood spilled fast and thick from the wound. A female shrieked, not on the stage but in the audience. The other male on the stage growled and bore his fangs.
Payne lost it.
He barrelled into the male, taking him down, and punched him hard. The heady scent of blood saturated the air. Elissa’s rapid heartbeat filled his ears, driving him on, urging him to maim and kill, to protect her and her youngling.