Page 46 of Hidden

“You did.” He doesn’t move. He stands there watching me. The sadness rolls off of him like heat waves on summer asphalt.

“I have my whole life. My career. I have everything.” I exhale on a shaky breath.

“I would never take that from you,” he says. But I have no idea if it’s a lie, or if it’s the truth.

“No?” I laugh and it comes out wrong, cracked and broken. I try again. “You’d just what? Put me in a gilded cage?” My throat closes on the next sentence, and I have to start it twice. “Give me the last name Sanguine so every vampire knows I’m a—” the word she used was nun and I can’t find it for a second, I can’t find a lot of words tonight. “A nun. The kind of Bride who said no, and no one else will ever touch me. That’s it, isn’t it? So no one else can touch me and you can still control me.”

“Nun,” he says it quietly. Almost to himself. Like he’s the one who just learned something. “We protected Angela.”

“You gave her a cage.”

“If we didn’t, she’d die.” He raises a hand and drops it. Later I’ll tell myself it was him reaching for me. That he couldn’t help himself. “She chose her life.”

“She regretted it,” I counter and I take no pleasure in his wince.

“Every day,” he says quietly. “I know.”

She tried to warn me.

“Callie?” I whisper. “You said she was out cold. What did you do to her, what did you do to my best friend?”

“I didn’t take her blood, none of us would dare take the blood of the unwilling.” His eyes are pleading. “We stole her memories.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know that was even an option. “Her memories.”

“When she wakes all she will know is the night was a success, she came home and crashed.” His voice is smooth, calm even. But he stole something precious to me.

“I should have gone right to her.” I swipe away a tear. “Instead I...” This guilt will eat me alive.

“We did not hurt her, Hadley, you have my word.” His eyes flicker between mine. “You don’t have to trust me as a man, or a vampire. But trust me as your boss.”

I snort. How can I differentiate between the three?

The man seduced me.

The vampire drank my blood. Then kidnapped my best friend.

And my boss? It’s true, he never lied. Never steered me wrong.

“Hadley.” My name is all the warning I have before he’s before me, pressing me against the wall. His hands are gentle against my face as he brushes his knuckles across my cheek. “Don’t run. Say no for tonight. Let me find you again.”

I swallow. There is a yes already half-built in my mouth. The me who just said no on a rooftop has not finished saying it. I need more information before I let either one win.

I need time.

“No.”

Leif sighs, his breath gusting over my lips before he presses his to mine one last time.

This? This is a goodbye kiss. I know it in the way he slowly presses his lips to mine. In the way his tongue savors my lips,tracing their outline before he presses gentle kisses along my jaw to my ear.

“Then I’ve no choice.”

His words are a warning. And still when the bite breaks my skin, I let it happen like an addict who already had her hit tonight and knows exactly what this is.

The lax sweeps through me. I know this feeling now. I knew it an hour ago. He has bitten me twice tonight and I am still letting it happen.

Later I’ll learn that’s the sedative in his bite.