Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 (34 page)

Dorian had changed it all.

I looked across the table at him. If I broke the bond, would I be filled with regret or relief? I would hurt him. I knew it. The sadness I saw in his eyes when he talked about his other cognates, gone so long ago, would include me, too—perhaps a deeper wound, since my separation from him would be from betrayal. At that moment, I felt his future pain as if it was my own.

And I was frightened that I loved him, that I really loved him, both through and beyond the bond that held us. I was afraid that I loved him for who he was, not just what he had done to me. It seemed more and more impossible with every passing moment that what I felt could be nothing but an imposition from something outside of myself—or that it could be removed without taking a piece of me with it.

“Thank you,” I said, dropping my eyes to my drink. “I don’t think I ever told you that. Thank you for saving me.”

No matter what the future held, I was glad to be alive. I hadn’t always felt that way since I’d woken. At times I had wondered if I had entered the proverbial fate worse than death.

But now I was glad for it, for everything that had passed between us, even the things that still made my heart shudder in fear. I felt myself slipping closer to that edge, the one from which there was no return.

I still had a choice tonight. I wasn’t sure that I would by tomorrow.

“You are more than welcome, Cora,” Dorian said. “And that’s some part of why I’ve brought you here tonight—to celebrate your life. Though I understand that it has not entirely worked out as you anticipated.”

“That’s an understatement,” I agreed with a wry smile.

He took a drink of his cocktail, then set it deliberately on the small cube table between us. Again, I had the sense of urges and desires scarcely contained, but when he spoke, his words were measured, almost impersonal. “I have asked—will continue to ask a great deal of you. The world that you have stumbled into is one of the highest stakes, not just for you personally but for all humanity.”

I nodded mutely. I refused to accept responsibility for it, but that didn’t keep it from being true.

“You see yourself as a victim of circumstance. But my own role was in many ways thrust upon me as well,” he said, as if he were weighing every word. “To stay true to what I believed, I was forced into opposition to those who would want to destroy it. Nothing would please me more than to achieve the ultimate goal of my research and retire from society. But I won’t be left alone to do that—
we
won’t be left alone. We’re a part of the world whether we like it or not.”

And his sense of duty kept him from even trying. But I didn’t have a duty to his world—or to humanity, in the abstract. I’d been just a regular girl, with ordinary dreams.

But I wasn’t sure they were enough anymore for the girl I was becoming.

“I just don’t know where I fit into that. How I can fit into that. There doesn’t seem to be room for
me
,” I tried to explain.

He reached across the table and put his hand over mine, sending the familiar, sweet, trembling awareness through me. He threaded his fingers between mine, trapping them as his thumb stroked the palm of my hand, the darkness pulsing with energy within him as it yearned to break free. “All you see are the requirements. There is power, too—in wealth, in the position that I hold in society.”

I remembered the guests who had streamed onto Dorian’s yacht—senators and lobbyists, he’d said.

“But it’s really your power, not mine,” I said.

He raised my hand to his lips, kissing each knuckle in turn. My skin came alive in the wake of his mouth, and I shivered.

“Who cares how you come by it?” he murmured against my skin. “Don’t underestimate what you can do with it.”

“I think you may be overestimating me.”

“Never.”

Just then, a movement outside of the window caught my eye, and I turned to see the first burst of fireworks rising up out of the Potomac over the National Mall.

It was midnight.

Dorian continued, “You might not have been born for this, Cora. But you were made for it. Just because I’m offering something different than how you imagined your life would be doesn’t mean that I’m not offering something more.”

“This,” I provided, motioning to the empty lounge, the city, and the fireworks beyond.

“Not just wealth, Cora,” he said. “Not just an extended life, though I have given you that, too. I offer you meaning. A purpose. A significance that can live on long after we’re gone.”

It isn’t my fight,
I wanted to say as I watched his thumb play across the back of my hand. But was it true? If it was a fight for all humanity, then was there anyone whose fight that it wasn’t, whether or not I chose to run away?

I hadn’t ever looked for meaning in my life. Not like that. And I wasn’t sure if I wanted it.

“And I offer you myself.”

My eyes snapped to his face, and I caught my breath at the intensity in his icy blue gaze. It cut right through me, into my very core, and I hurt with it.

God, but he was so beautiful in his inhuman perfection, his alien strength. I could feel the force of his will curling around me, roiling in turmoil even as it scarcely brushed my nerves and mind. It was such a part of his presence that I hardly took note of it anymore, but I could feel it now, pulsing with the strength of his desire...for me. For me to choose him. Forever.

The desire that he held back from touching me. Changing me.

“Dorian,” I said, and then I stopped. I didn’t know what I could say.

He continued, every word fervent. “I offer you everything that I am. I offer you my black soul, for whatever it’s worth in this world. I love you, Cora Shaw. My heart is a small thing compared to the destiny of nations, but it is yours.”

The weight of the moment hung around my neck like a great stone. I knew that if I took a step, there would be no coming back—not because of him but because of me. I had the sudden sense of standing at the edge of an abyss and looking down, down into eternity....

He offered so much more than I’d ever dreamed of calling mine. But could it be enough, when my soul was in the balance?

“I—I just don’t know,” I said.

“You do,” he said. “Look inside yourself.”

But I already was. I’d been trapped inside my own head for months now, ever since the day of my cancer diagnosis. And what I wanted, really wanted was the impossible. I wanted him and I wanted my old life. I wanted his touch and my small dreams. I wanted everything he offered, and I wanted to always be the same.

“What if I can’t do it? What if I can’t.... ” I trailed off, not wanting to say the words.

His hand tightened over mine infinitesimally. “You can,” he said. “You must.”

And I looked straight into those eyes and into the well of pain, and I realized that he wasn’t speaking of forcing me, because the darkness pulsing around him still hardly brushed against the edges of my mind. His words came from his deepest desires.

I must—because he couldn’t bear it if I didn’t.

Dorian was like a blast furnace, and I was a moth. He seemed so cold only because of the fierce self-control that kept him from destroying me in his heat. He’d offered me the world first, his material possessions and a role as a symbol and maybe even a hero, not because he didn’t care about me but because he counted those things greater than his heart, his love. And I ached with the echoes of his pain that he could not realize that his heart and mine were the only things I could care about.

“My God, Dorian,” I managed. Fear and loss battled inside me. The image of Geoff, with his good looks and lopsided grin, was already growing faint in my mind.

“While I’ve changed much of your life, there is at least one human thing I can give you back,” he pressed on.

I stared at him as he dropped to one knee in front of me. Just like the first time we met, I thought, a sudden, eerie sense of déjà vu coming over me, when he had taken the vial of blood from my arm and caught the drop that welled up where the needle had been.

Then I looked down at my hand, still clasped in his, and I realized what he intended to do. Panic came over me, and I felt doors slamming all around me. I opened my mouth to speak, to interrupt him, but no sound came out.

“Cora Ann Shaw,” Dorian began, his eyes piercing me, so handsome that my heart hurt to look at him, “would you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”

I gasped even though I’d known the question was coming, my heart squeezing so hard that I rocked forward in my chair. Marriage. Marriage to a man I’d known hardly more than a month.

No, not a man. To Dorian—final, forever, a pledge that could not be broken, the choice irrevocably made.

I would never feel with anyone else what I felt with him—not the passion nor the danger. No one would make me feel as wanted, nor would I ever want someone with the depth I felt for him.

But I would always be a pawn in a greater game. He was a monster with a conscience, and it was only that conscience that could save me—but it was also that conscience that might damn me, if the stakes were high enough. And I would be changed. By him. By his world.

By me, if I took what he was offering.

And still he knelt in front of me, the light of the fireworks flickering across his face.

Waiting for an answer. One that, at that moment, I could not give.

I stood abruptly, the tray on the coffee table jittering as I bumped it with my knees.

“I—” I started, then broke off. “I don’t know,” I managed. “I can’t. I need some time—more time.”

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I could give him only one answer while he was there, touching me. He knew that. He had to know that. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.

And for the first time since he’d changed me, I found the strength to pull away—and he let my hand go, let me slide it from between his own.

He didn’t have to. He didn’t have to let me do anything. And that was exactly why I needed to escape, get away from his influence where I could think clearly, where I could process what he’d just said.

Where I could make my choice.

I spun away and started toward the door. I heard Dorian behind me, and I turned back to see that he’d taken a step away from the table, after me. If he followed, touched me again, kissed me, even with his will clasped so tightly to him, I would be lost forever. My heart was hammering so loudly in my ears that I couldn’t hear my own voice.

“Please—please just stay away,” I begged, and I lifted my skirt with one hand, turned back around, and ran.

I slapped the button for the elevator, and it opened immediately. I pushed inside and hit the button for the tenth floor, leaning against the wall as far from his dark figure as I could be as the door slid silently closed between us.

H
e knows,
I thought, breathing fast, too fast, as I stared at the elevator door. He knew what I’d almost done with Geoff, that I’d almost broken the bond. That I knew that I had a choice.

And he wanted me to give it up. To give myself over without reservation, now and forever. To him.

And I didn’t know that I didn’t want to.

The elevator doors opened, and I stumbled out, my heart beating against my chest. I took two paces before I stopped helplessly.

What was I going to do now? I didn’t have a key to the suite, and my purse was still inside, so I couldn’t even call a cab to take me home because I had no way of paying for it when I got there.

I’d turned back to catch the elevator again before the doors closed, whether to go up or down I didn’t know, when someone called my name.

“Cora!”

I froze, the familiar voice taking me by surprise. I turned back around reflexively and blinked at the empty elevator alcove.

“Cora!”

Following the voice, I stepped out into the corridor. And I saw him.

“Geoff?” I asked incredulously. “What on earth are you doing here?”

It was definitely him, looking every inch the down-to-earth golden boy that he was in a blue Henley and chinos. He looked, for just an instant, like my savior.

“I heard you were going to be here,” he said, stepping toward me. He stopped, gave me a quick surveying look. “Damn, you look awesome. I would have taken you somewhere nicer than the movies if I’d known you’d clean up this good.”

“Thanks,” I said automatically. “But seriously, why are you here?”

“To rescue you,” he said. He grabbed my arm and began hustling me toward my suite. His palm was warm and slightly roughened by his lacrosse calluses. “Wow, that sounded melodramatic, didn’t it? But I mean it.”

I looked at him again, the edges of my surprise blunted now, and I realized that he seemed somehow less impressive than the place he’d occupied in my mind. Handsome, yes, but ordinary in a way that I wasn’t anymore.

We reached the door, and he produced a key and slid it into the lock. To my bewilderment, the light blinked green, and he opened the door. I noticed a bandage taped across the back of his hand as he pushed it open and I stepped past him inside.

“What happened?” I asked, nodding at it as I flipped on the lights.

He glanced at the bandage.

“Oh, that? Nothing,” he said dismissively. “Cut myself on my way here.”

“How did you know I was here?” I asked. “And how did you get a key? And who told you that I needed rescuing? Not that I do, thank you,” I added.

“That guy who talked to me the day I picked you up for our date,” he said. “He told me where you’d be, gave me a key.”

“Cosimo?” I asked, my breath catching in my throat.

“If that’s his name,” Geoff said. He was talking too quickly, and his eyes were feverishly bright.

I backed away slowly, but he approached, seeming oblivious to my uneasiness.

“He told me everything, Cora. You don’t need to be afraid. I understand,” he continued.

“What’s ‘everything’?” I demanded, but I was afraid that I knew.

“About you being bitten by a vampire, turned into his mind-slave,” Geoff said.

“And you believed him,” I said. Now I knew something was wrong, because the Geoff I knew would laugh that off as craziness. But this Geoff looked deadly serious.