Bleu rubbed his throat and glared at him. “Maybe I can draw my own damn blood or just spit in the vial.”
He grabbed the needle from the table near him, sent his armour away from his chest and arms, and carelessly stabbed himself in the soft flesh on the inside of his elbow, grimacing as the sharp metal punctured his skin.
Loren closed his eyes and lowered his head, feeling like a monster for the way he had treated his friend and driven him to harm himself. Bleu’s lip was cut and bleeding, swelling too, and his chest bore deep claw marks. Bleu hadn’t held back when he had struck Loren, but it wasn’t payment enough for what Loren had done to him.
“I am sorry, Bleu.” He lifted his head and looked across the room at his friend, his black eyebrows furrowed and his heart heavy. “I will wait outside while Olivia tends to you.”
Loren didn’t wait to hear either of their responses. He headed straight for the twin glass doors. They whooshed open, sliding apart for him to exit the room, and he moved down the corridor far enough that he couldn’t see into the room so he wouldn’t be tempted to look. He couldn’t risk another outburst like that. Olivia needed to record Bleu’s vitals and take his blood, and Loren had no doubt that he would try to kill him again if he saw Olivia touching him.
He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, seeking some calm amongst the raging storm of his emotions, needing it so his fangs would recede and his eyes would return to blue, masking their true colour from the humans using the corridor.
He could feel their eyes on him as they passed. Some of them even triggered his senses, warning they were a threat to him, but he didn’t care. If they attacked him, it would be their death right now. He would kill them in a heartbeat to slake some of his thirst for violence. Rather them than Bleu.
Olivia wouldn’t be pleased.
Her expression had cut straight through him and he never wanted her to look at him with such disgust and disappointment again.
Loren’s fangs finally receded and he commanded his eyes to become blue again. He pushed away from the wall and took swift agitated strides along a short length of the pale cream corridor, fighting his desire to return to the room. Too dangerous. He wanted to see what they were doing but he couldn’t risk it.
His mind supplied images of them, taunting him with visions of Bleu and Olivia. He ground his teeth and tried to shut them out, focusing on other things, anything to get his mind away from his friend and his female.
The more he tried to halt the images, the worse they became, until all he could picture was Bleu and Olivia, locked in a passionate embrace, his friend pleasuring her as Loren had in his dreams.
Loren couldn’t take it, or how it made him feel, violent and on the edge, wild and lost to a feral need to claim Olivia as his and put Bleu in the ground.
He growled under his breath, earning a startled gasp from a young female hunter as she passed and a glare from her older male companion. The male’s hand went to his weapon, a short blade hanging at his waist, and Loren silently urged the mortal to draw it. He wanted to fight. He needed it.
Loren dragged himself away, turning his back on the humans. This wasn’t like him. He was normally peaceful, seeking diplomatic solutions whenever possible, even with his brother.
Vail.
He didn’t want to end up like his younger brother but he feared he was already treading that dark path, and the bond wasn’t even complete.
Loren stopped, turned towards the wall and banged his head against it. The humans passing by gave him a wide berth and he couldn’t blame them. He was acting like a madman.
Driven wild by a female.
He pressed his palms against the wall, despair eating away at him, twisting his insides into tight painful knots. What was he going to do? He had been in Olivia’s presence for barely more than a human hour and he was already close to falling over the edge and doing something terrible that he could never take back. The longer he spent in her company, the worse this hunger was going to become, and if he wasn’t careful, it would end up controlling him. What if he hurt her? What if he killed Bleu?
He would never forgive himself.
Loren banged his head against the wall again, grinding his teeth and grimacing as it all became too much for him. The images of Bleu and Olivia still played out in his mind, pushing him ever closer to the edge, until he had to dig the claws of his armour into the plaster of the wall to keep himself anchored there, stopping him from bursting into the room behind him.
The doors swished open.
Loren forced himself away from the wall, a second apology to Bleu balancing on his lips.
It was Olivia.
Their bond spoke to him, telling him what he could already see in her expression and her soulful brown eyes that always showed him everything she was feeling. She was tense and wary, afraid of him now. He lowered his head, unable to look at her. He had frightened his female, shaking her trust in him.