Bad Mouth(17)

“Stop what?”

“Stop thinking so much. Sometimes you have to live the moment you’re in or you’ll miss everything.”

Her lips tightened, but he couldn’t tell if it was from displeasure or from trying not to smile. “Profound. How’d you get so wise?”

“I’m older than I look.” He laughed despite his own dismal mood. He wanted so strongly to caress her face that he fidgeted with the seam of his jeans to quell the urge. He never fidgeted, but it had felt too damned good to touch Val’s skin, like touching a velvet cloud.

The fact that he’d touched her at all was all kinds of f*cked up. Her humanity put her so far out of his reach in more ways than one, and he had no business engaging his desires beyond fantasizing about them. Even that pushed his limits. He’d never gotten along well with humans. After all he’d seen and experienced, they might as well be domesticated animals at his feet.

Val tapped her plump, freshly kissed lower lip thoughtfully. “So what you do you want to do now?”

“Nail you against the wall with my cock.” He’d meant to tease her to see that beautiful, rosy flush heighten in her cheeks, but most of him was onboard with nailing her, no matter how bad that idea.

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “How romantic. You never quit, do you?”

He gave her his most lecherous grin. “I told you—two hundred years. If I can’t do it in that much time, it’s not mean to be.” His smile disappeared. “And it is romantic. I don’t touch humans without the intent to harm.”

“Kade, I have to show you that what you’ve known of humans until now is all wrong.” A sweet, keen urgency radiated from her voice and her eyes. If a bomb had landed on his head, it wouldn’t have hit him harder. How he felt about her, about humans, truly mattered to her. “Those men weren’t normal people. They were more like the deranged. I’m getting a work group together. They’ll screen the applications to make sure no more of them get approved. You won’t have to punish them anymore.”

“Punish them?” He couldn’t have been more surprised by her assumption. “Is that what you think I do?”

“Is there another reason?” She leaned forward and clasped her hands together tightly. A glimmer of hope shone in her expression. Several beats of his heart passed before he could get past how f*cking beautiful she looked right then.

He shook enough sense back into his head to respond. “Their disfigurement isn’t a punishment. It’s insurance.”

She frowned. “Insurance?”

“Val, transformation doesn’t change anything. Humans come out of it the same as when they went in, their dark desires, their vices, their weaknesses. Take what you know of those men and add supernatural strength and speed topped with a hunger for blood that’s nearly impossible for a new vampire to control. How safe is it to unleash that on the world?”

“You said the Immortalis don’t break protocol.”

He crossed the distance between them to sit beside her. “Not all newly turned make it far enough to truly become Immortalis. The first year is brutal, tenuous. They’re watched closely by an adjuvant until the risk of them going rogue has passed. It’s in the interim when those men get dangerous. I have no power when they assign a subjugate. I have to turn the goddamned subjugate. But I damned well make sure what’s inside the motherf*cker will show on the outside. So every man, woman, and child will turn and run at the sight of him.”

Her gaze softened, and her luscious mouth pulled up into the sweet hint of a smile. She should have thought him the worst kind of beast, an unfeeling, sociopathic barbarian. It’s what he believed of himself. Instead, she looked at him as if he rescued orphans for a living.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he grumbled. “I do it for selfish reasons. I enjoy what I do to them. My true nature comes out.”

“You only say that because you think all humans are brutal. Kade, you protected humanity from the evil those men could have done. You did it in a more violent manner than I would have chosen, but your intent was noble.”

Goddamn. Every time he turned around, she surprised the hell out of him again. Would any other human have understood him so well? He swept a lock of hair from her forehead, twirling it his fingers. “I don’t think all humans are brutal.”

She went on as if he hadn’t tried to divert the subject. “What about Ezra? You said he loves everything human. Didn’t you think it strange he’d love people as evil as the ones you turned?”

He gave her a flat stare. “Ezra also likes to kill his food.”

Val nearly choked. “I don’t believe you. I met him in person today.”

“Don’t be deceived by his Jolly Joe act. He’s all legal and everything, but he’ll love a human to death, literally.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“Why should it?”

“Kade!”

He shifted away from her and sank back against the couch. He’d grown so used to living within his horrific reputation. Cruelty was expected of him. But not by Val. She saw something in him that even he didn’t. Her stubborn notion of his intrinsic sense of honor flustered him. “Fucking hell, Val. I told you I do what I do for selfish reasons.”

She followed his movement, bracing her elbow next to him with her long, golden hair brushing his shoulder. He immediately began toying with a thick, curly lock again. His body must have developed a mind of its own.

“Tell me,” she whispered. He didn’t answer, his eyes fixed on the view of the Sound. If he looked at her, he’d be lost. “Please, Kade. I want to understand.”

The warm, syrupy emotion in her plea won the battle raging inside of him. He’d spent the equivalent of several human lifetimes living silently with the weight of the atrocities he’d endured and committed, and for some godforsaken reason, he wanted her, of all people, to understand. He wanted—needed—to dredge the deep lake of his pain.

He gathered his balls of steel, brought his gaze to meet hers, and cleared his throat before mentally leaping over the edge of a cliff. “My surrogate was a subjugate. My nannies, my tutors, the cooks, the drivers, and the house staff were all subjugates. I was raised by subjugates. I rarely saw Olen and Evangeline, at least for the first dozen years of my life.”

He took a deep breath. Tension bunched in his muscles to an aching pitch. “The subjugates hated me, Val. Hated me. From my earliest memory, every one of them did all they could to bring on the agony. They chained me, beat me, whipped me, cut me, broke me, starved me, burned me. They left me in the elements when I’d just learned to walk. They ripped out hair and fingernails.”

“Did they…?” She didn’t say the word rape aloud, but her meaning was clear enough to him.

He shook his head. “One small mercy.”

“Your parents never found out? You never told them?”

“It was what I knew. It was how life was. I had no idea things should be different, and it was either a blessing or a curse that I healed before the Ancients could see the evidence.”

“How long?”

“Twelve years. Until I was old enough and strong enough to fight back.” He closed his eyes, his mind taking him back to a barbaric moment in time, a time he didn’t want her to see reflected in his expression. “That first day was a bloody massacre. I bathed in it. I fed better than I had my entire life, even until now. That day I learned the truth of things, that I am the predator and they, the prey. The Ancients found out and had the others executed, the ones I hadn’t yet slain.”

Her gorgeous emerald eyes grew damp. “Kade.” She didn’t say anything more. Perhaps he should have been offended—he was the wrong sort of vampire to find tolerance for pity—but it wasn’t really pity he saw in her. It was heartache over what he’d endured. She felt for him in a way no person, vampire or human, had ever shown him. Before he realized what he was about, he swept his thumb along her lower lashes.

“Are those for me?” he murmured. Her empathy shocked him and then settled over him like the warmth that had been denied him as a child. “You’re crying for me?”

She captured his wrist before he could pull away. “For the boy you were.”

Aw, hell. She always had a way of dragging a smile to his lips. “He’s still in here, Val. Where do you think my foul mouth comes from?”

“Maybe it’s a good thing you don’t get rid of that then,” she said with a wobbly grin. She brushed tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. The innocence of the gesture hooked its barbs into what little tender bits of his heart existed.

Again she pinned him with that hung-the-stars look. A sharp twinge of longing lanced through him. She made him want to be the man she imagined him to be. If only he could be that man, but she couldn’t be more wrong. He’d done terrible, f*cked-up things to humans in his long life. He was still doing terrible, f*cked-up things, the kinds of things that would destroy any warmth she had for him.