A Shade of Vampire (A Shade of Vampire #1)(34)

I bit my lip as I stared at him. I wanted so badly to ask him how he ended up at the Shade, how long he’d been there, what he’d been through, but I still wasn’t sure I was ready to hear about it all, so I just began blabbering about the sun room instead.

“Derek told me that he hadn’t seen sunlight in five hundred years. I could swear he missed it, so that’s where I got the idea, and…”

Ben withdrew his hand from the mural he was touching and admiring. It was as if the mention of Derek being involved in the creative process suddenly made the mural unappealing.

“So you did this for him?” He asked incredulously.

“Well, yeah…” I admitted. “That - and I also missed the sun.” I tried to use a perkier tone to lighten the mood. I didn’t like where the conversation was going.

“How could you do anything for him? For any of their kind?” His tone was accusing and intense. “You’re his slave, Sofia. How could you live with that?”

I didn’t have the answers to the questions he was throwing my way. What could I possibly say to him? That Derek was different? That he wasn’t like the others? All I knew was that over the past weeks that I’d been there, Derek had begun to mean the world to me. Even after what he did earlier, and no matter how hurt and confused I was by it, I still had trouble seeing Derek in a negative light. Not after everything we’d been through. How could I even begin to explain this to Ben? I wrapped my arms around Ben’s waist from behind, hoping to take his thoughts away from the vampires just as much as I wanted to take my thoughts away from Derek.

“Let’s just forget about them for now, can we please? I missed you so much.”

“I can’t just forget, Sophie. You have no idea what that bitch Claudia put me through.”

There was an edge to his tone. Jaded. Broken. Cynical. There was no sorrow left. Just pure hatred. Completely unlike the happy-go-lucky Ben I used to know. He turned around to face me, his blue eyes blazing with bitterness and spite.

“I never would’ve thought that it would be you – the girl Claudia’s been harping on about, the human who stole the vampire prince’s heart. You couldn’t possibly understand how much it crushes me to see that you were taken captive too, that their kind can ruin you any way they please. And after everything, it almost seems like you’ve fallen in love with him.”

I swallowed hard. Fallen in love? With Derek? I couldn’t lie to myself. I knew I was in danger of falling for him, but whether that had happened already… whether I’d actually fallen for him I still wasn’t sure of. I felt as if I didn’t need to defend whatever it was that I had with Derek to Ben, nor did I want to, so I focused on Ben instead. I knew that there was no escaping where this conversation was going. I heaved a sigh gearing myself up for the worst.

“What happened to you, Ben? How did you get here? What has she been doing to you?”

There was a long pause before Ben heaved a sigh and began to explain. “You didn’t return to the villa the night of your birthday. I was worried sick. I waited for you and when dawn came and you still weren’t around, I started looking for you. That’s when she found me. She took me to her penthouse and I’d been there since. This was the first time she’d allowed me out after I tried to escape.”

My stomach was in knots, as I ran through my mind what pain his attempted escape might have brought him. I had no idea how lucky I was to be with Derek.

“You…you tried to escape? What happened?”

A bitter smile formed on his face. “See for yourself.”

He pulled off his white woolen shirt.

I gasped at the sight, tears spilling from my eyes, as I clamped a palm over my mouth.

His upper torso was practically covered in scars as cut after cut marred his body. I trembled even as I ran a finger over one of them.

“How were you able to survive this, Ben?”

“That’s the last round of torture that you see. She used a dagger to cut me, deep enough to scar, but shallow enough not to cause internal damage. The first two rounds of torture, she beat me up to a bloody pulp and then made me drink her blood so I could heal so she could torture me again.”

It took everything I had to keep myself from vomiting. Tears were dripping down my cheeks, horrified by what he had to go through.

“These creatures are evil savages, Sofia. All of them. They don’t have a conscience just as much as they don’t have a life. You might think that this prince of theirs has a heart in him somewhere, but he doesn’t, Sofia. No matter how he’s taken care of you, he’s still a vampire. And whenever he lays his eyes on you, all he sees is a beautiful young woman he can sink his teeth into.”

And yet… he hasn’t. No matter how tempted he was, he never gave in. I looked up at my best friend, wanting to agree with him, but still finding my inner conscience standing in defense of Derek. It made me feel guilty, because after all Ben had been through, it felt like he deserved to have me on his side on this, but all I could think of was the smile on Derek’s face and the way he looked at me when he motioned to kiss me. No matter how I tried to recall, the times that I could consider negative about my captor, I found that I didn’t have it in me to see Derek as a savage… simply because that wasn’t what he was.

“I can’t blame you for thinking that. Claudia certainly is,” was the compromise I could come up with to appease my best friend.