It was his fault, but he wasn’t going to shoulder the entire blame for Terese’s death. “No, it was yours.”
An odd, pained sound came from Nicole. “I—what makes you say that?”
“Because she wouldn’t have felt the need to kill herself if your family hadn’t made her a slave, treated her like a lab rat, and forced a pregnancy on her.”
Silence. Then some shuffling. A moment later, Nicole pressed something into his hand.
“I know you don’t believe me, but I loved Terese, and I know she loved me. She gave that to me the day she died, but I think . . . I think it belongs to you.”
Nicole started back toward the cave entrance, her hair damp and clinging to her neck and slumped shoulders. She looked as defeated as he felt.
Exhaling on a curse, he glanced down at his hand.
Lying in his palm was Terese’s ring.
----------------------------------
Nicole was shaking so hard that she stumbled as she approached the cave entrance. The ground came at her, but then Riker was there, hauling her up with his arms around her waist. She found her balance, but Riker didn’t release her, his grip sure but surprisingly—no, astonishingly—tender.
“Are you okay?” he asked gruffly.
For some reason, she couldn’t find her voice, could merely nod. As if he didn’t believe her, he stepped back and scanned her from head to toe, his gaze lingering a little too long on her neck. Damn her and her self consciousness, she reached up to cover the scarring.
Riker covered her hand with his and gently moved it aside. “What happened?”
A shudder ran through her. When he’d asked before, she hadn’t answered. She didn’t want to talk about it, but Riker had just opened himself up about Terese, a trauma that was surely far worse than hers.
“Vampire,” she murmured.
Frowning, he skimmed the pad of one finger over her neck, and an unexpected pleasant sensation ran through her. “That’s a lot of damage.”
“He was a . . .” She started to say that Boris was a servant, but Riker was right. Boris was a slave. Still, she couldn’t quite get the word past her lips. “He’d been defanged.”
Riker’s eyes flared, and she expected another blast of bitterness. “It must have been brutal.” When she didn’t reply, because she didn’t even have the words for how brutal it had been, he asked, “Did it happen during the slave rebellion?”
“Yes.” The memory, combined with the churning in her stomach that was only getting worse, sparked sudden anger. “No doubt you wish I’d been killed.”#p#分页标题#e#
“You were a child. You didn’t deserve what that vampire did to you.” He smoothed his finger over the skin of her throat. “My clan adopted rules of engagement a long time ago, and killing children goes against every one of them.”
Her anger flagged, and she glanced away, overwhelmed by everything that had happened since being kidnapped from her home. She’d learned more about vampires in the last twenty-four hours than in her en— tire twenty-eight years of life. And she was considered an expert in her field.
What a joke.
“What’s the matter?” When she said nothing, he hooked a finger under her chin and lifted her face so their gazes locked. “You don’t believe me?”
“It’s not that.” She took a deep, shuddering breath.
“It’s just . . .”
“Just what?”
“I was raised to think vampires were soulless monsters. Creatures that needed to be kept under strict control or they’d kill everything they could lay their hands on. And then I was told you’d killed Terese and my uncle, and after that came the slave rebellion.”
The memory of being attacked got all tangled with the way Riker was touching her, and her heart stuttered, as if it was having difficulty deciding between
fight and flight. Someone really needed to add freeze to the instinctive response options to stress. Fight, flight, or freeze.
“You said you loved Terese.”
“I did. And that’s the wrench in this whole mess.
I thought she was a fluke. The cat that likes mice or the retriever that doesn’t fetch.” She swallowed. “And now . . .” Now she was seeing life from the other side.
The way she’d been raised, capped off by the slave rebellion that had taken her parents, her cousins, and her friends and had nearly killed her, had left her withblinders over her eyes.
Now the blinders had been ripped off, and her new experiences and new knowledge were making her head spin.
Another wave of nausea washed over her, and shewobbled. So maybe the spinning head was ab out more than sensory overload. About more than stress or exhaustion or fear. She needed her meds. Riker caught her again, but this time, he swept her up and carried her deep inside the cave.