Chapter Eight
Breen had seen this kind of thing happen on TV sitcoms.
A woman stomps around a room, banging stuff and exhaling loud breaths and acting generally T’d off.
Her TV boyfriend watches this play out for no more than a couple of seconds before he asks, “Are you okay?”
The woman snaps, “Fine.”
She’s not fine. The guy decodes this from her fed-up tone. It clues him in to continue with, “All right, c’mon, tell me what’s wrong.” He might add honey or sweetie, but will also usually attach a secret eye-roll loaded with, I can’t believe I’m dealing with another one of her moods.
So Breen supposed when he saw Charlize still all worked up after Toni left—shoving the chair away from the desk with a rough thrust of her hip, sitting down hard enough to eerch! the hinges, flipping pages of the community manual with sharp jerks of her wrist and paper air pops—he should’ve processed all of it as his cue to ask, “Are you okay?”
Except he couldn’t ask.
Right after Toni left, Charlize screamed at him, “Don’t talk to me!”
So he hadn’t—he wasn’t.
Except now it seemed like she was just as pissed at him for following her rule. She kept cutting irate, sideways glances at him. So what was he supposed to do? What did she actually want him to do? Did women make a habit of saying one thing and meaning another? That was probably an essential thing to know, but he didn’t have much experience with females. The only ones he generally dealt with were his mother and the waitresses at the diner. And clearly interactions like Beer, please, and I’ll have the number six, but with extra cheese hadn’t prepared him for figuring out if he was supposed to act on the literal meaning of what Charlize told him to do or the hidden one, whatever that might be.
Or maybe Charlize did mean what she said but hadn’t expected him to follow through. A sitcom guy, after all, would’ve broken down long ago and asked her what was wrong.
But silence was sort of Breen’s thing.
Charlize probably didn’t realize it when she’d ordered him to shut his trap.
Being muscles-falling-off-the-bone tired wasn’t helping him come up with the right answers to all these questions, either. He’d been pushed to the end of his limitations today by his savage fight with Jacken in the gym, the agony of going through a half-bond, the bastard-hard job of breaking into the mansion, then finally having sex with Charlize—who knew that would take so much out of him?
Top it all off with not feeling starved for the first time since coming into his blood-need eighteen years ago—eighteen years—and he was having a helluva time keeping his eyes open and his head from lolling off the back of the armchair he was deflated in. So being able to solve a mystery that had stumped man since the dawn of time—woman—was currently way outside his wheelhouse.
What he really wished was that Charlize would go to bed already. He couldn’t go to sleep till she did, and along with the exhausted thing he was dealing with, his changing cells wanted the comfort of her scent. And since the likelihood of her letting him tuck his face happily into the crook of her sweet-smelling neck while she studied the manual sat at an absolute, rock-bottom zero, he needed to draw in the scent lingering on her bedsheets—her good scent from earlier, when she’d been horny and raring to go. Not how she smelled now, kind of soured from her jammed feelings.
Suppressing an exhale, he idly scratched his hip scar through his black workout shorts—the only clothes he had with him. The old wound rarely bothered him, only twinging a bit when he was really tired. He’d taken a vicious blade cut in the War of Războiul Jertfei de Sânge, or the War of the Blood Sacrifice, called this because there wasn’t a single male Vârcolac who fought in it who hadn’t been injured.
The war had been waged against their ruthless neighbors, the Om Rău, a demon race who’d been causing the Vârcolac problems for years by skulking into Ţărână to try and steal precious Dragon women…and hurting a lot of innocent people in the process. Not much the Vârcolac had ever been able to do about it, except fight off the attacks. The Om Rău always had the advantage of being able to escape back through the long, convoluted Hell Tunnels connecting their two towns. Demons could bear the kind of heat those tunnels generated. Vampires couldn’t. So the Vârcolac warriors were never able to chase after their enemy or mount an offensive against them.
Until three years ago.
Everything changed when Shon Brun—Nyko and Jacken’s younger brother—gathered enough information about the Hell Tunnels to map a direct course through them. Direct meant less time in the heat, and so decreased the vampires’ chances of over-cooking.
The warriors planned a raid, then they rampaged—along with some beefy recruits out of construction—into the demon town of Oţărât.
There, they were met by overwhelming odds.
The Vârcolac fought a helluva battle, but being outnumbered and already partially depleted from the high temp of the tunnels hadn’t exactly added up to favorable odds for an all-out victory. They were forced to retreat before their main objective had been reached: to save the human women trapped in the squalor and abusive conditions of Oţărât.
It was a huge disappointment, but not, as it turned out, a complete fail.
The next day, Josnic, one of the leaders of the Om Rău, showed up in Stânga Town’s Outer Edge—the barred gate leading into the tunnels—with a woman they never thought to see again.
Gwyn Billaud.
She was a Dragon female who once resided in the community…until one of the warriors screwed up her security and let her get stolen by the Om Rău.
Ragged and worn-looking, Gwyn had asked Toni and Roth for help. The war had killed most of Oţărât’s best scavengers, she explained, and she didn’t have anyone to send topside for supplies. Soon food and water would be gone and the residents starving. Gwyn begged the community to provide for them, and in exchange, the Om Rău would agree never to attack again.
It was an appealing offer. A truce of this sort would finally allow the people of Ţărână to live in peace. Unfortunately, the deal would abandon the trapped human women to their lives in Oţărât.
After a lot of debate, the community’s Council finally agreed. The warriors were too injured to mount another campaign, anyway, and even if they could, the result of a second war might be the same—there were still plenty Om Rău left to fight. But mostly the deal was cut because it was what Gwyn wanted, and they owed her.
So the community bulldozed a chunk of cave out of the far end of Stânga Town to create an easily accessed drop-off area, and this became an agreed-upon “neutral zone.” Vârcolac went in to leave supplies, then left. Om Rău went in to collect the goods, then left. One breed never saw or talked to the other.
The community was very generous with the supplies they offered to make up for the failed—
Charlize slammed the manual closed. Bam!
Breen peeled his eyes open wider. If he’d had any energy, he might’ve startled.
She thundered over to his armchair and came to a rigid stop in front of him, her hands planted on her hips.
The position bowed open the neckline of her robe, but he tried not to notice the view. He might not be a sitcom guy, but basic male instinct for doing whatever it took to calm down his woman so he could get laid again told him that ogling Charlize’s tits while she was jammed up would only make her more jammed.
He met her gaze, which was glaring hot.
“You were a virgin!?” she hissed at him.
He blinked slowly. Now why would that piss her off? Was this another hidden meaning thing? He tried to reason it out, but his brain was a gigantic yawn.
“You fucked me like a wild man. How the hell does a virgin do that?”
He carefully studied her enraged expression. She was very, very angry. She was shouting every word at him, which he didn’t mind so much. He didn’t mind the fury in her gestures, either. No. It was when things got quiet—same as right before his father struck with one of his barbed remarks—that Breen didn’t like. Those barbs stabbed a man like a cold blade. For all the brutal hits Breen had taken in his life, and seen others endure, he’d never encountered anything able to do a man more damage than one of Ungar Dalakis’s perfectly aimed criticisms.
“Why the hell aren’t you answering me?” If Charlize’s voice turned any more sour, it would be sauerkraut.
He scooted up in his chair. “You told me not to talk to you.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Don’t be a dick.”
Yeah, so…the name-calling wasn’t a favorite.
Charlize’s mouth tautened until her lips were a stiff, red knot. “I asked you a direct question.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’ve been thinking about sex for a long time.”
She piffed. “Every man does that.”
“Not like our breed. A Vârcolac reaches sexual maturity at the age of twenty-one, but because there’s been no one for us to mate with for years—only you Dragons, who showed up on the scene recently—we’ve had to wait forever to have sex. I’m thirty-nine. That means I’ve been thinking about sex for eighteen years.”
She gaped at him, her mouth just hanging open for a long moment, then she turned around and stomped a couple of paces away. “I don’t know which number is more appalling to me. The thirty-nine or the eighteen.” Beneath her bathrobe, her spinal cord was a tight stretch of bones.
Thirty-nine was actually young in Vârcolac years. He wasn’t sure what to say about the eighteen. “Why does the virgin thing bother you?”
She spun back around, her glare reigniting. “Because the hell if I want to be anyone’s memory.” The edge of her jaw quivered. “Now I’ll forever be your first.”
First and only. Vârcolac mated for life. But probably he should keep quiet about it. She was already upset enough. He scratched his temple. “I’m not sure what you want me to do about it. I mean, I can’t undo it.” Virginity was one of those things.
Charlize crossed her arms beneath her breasts. The new posture was better than when she had her hands on her hips, and… No, actually, it wasn’t. “No, you can’t undo it, can you?” she snapped. “Any of it.”
Breen wasn’t able to stop himself. He was acting on instinct.
When Toni had said that, she’d cast him a sideways glance, and even though her expression wasn’t accusatory, it wasn’t exactly forgiving either. Like maybe at some point in this chain of events, she believed he should’ve known what the shit-nuggets he was doing.
Are you suggesting, Roth boomed in court, that when Miss Renault said ‘I want this’ to Mr. Dalakis, he wholly believed she was agreeing to a life-bond?
Sitting here now, the answer to that seemed kind of like a no-brainer. But when Breen had been around Charlize, especially during the half-bond, he was nothing but compelled. Driven to get the right skin back on. Desperate to escape an agony steadily turning his soul gangrenous. Determined to do whatever it took to convince Charlize to be his woman.
He sank down in his chair. So now he was bonded to a woman who was a virtual stranger. Who definitely didn’t love him. Who, in fact, was giving a very convincing performance of hating him.
You fucking piece of shit! You knew this was going to happen!
Breen closed his eyes, exhausted down to parts of himself beyond the physical. Charlize or a sitcom guy, either/or, but someone needed to tell him what to do.