"You love me?" she echoed dumbly.
"What do you think this is all about?" he asked. Victoria turned her face away, unwilling to look in his eyes, knowing what she saw there would be her undoing. She shook her head in angry denial, refuting his gently given words.
"No. You were right. What we are doing is wrong. There's a reason for the laws," she said, bleak. "They hate us ... they hate me." And then fire flashed again for an instant in her eyes as she remembered something else. "And I can't believe you never told me you're a stupid Earl or whatever!"
"A Duke. My father was the cousin of the King of France. Remember? I did tell you that he was the Duke of Avigny." As he said the words, Victoria remembered that he had said that, but at the time she had been more concerned with what had happened to him to make him what he was, rather than details about who he was. She nodded. "Well, that same title has passed to me and its royal lineage is recognized in our world," he said.
"And Lucian?"
"He has other titles, but as first-born, I inherited this one. Although it means little to me, and I would give it up in a heartbeat if I could."
"Couldn't you?" she blurted out.
"Only by dying."
Victoria blanched at his response, knowing that Lucian would be more than happy to have him dead.
"It doesn't matter," he said. "Don't you know by now that I do as I like? Tori, I gave you my mother's ring because it is my pledge to you, not to anyone else ... to you. It doesn't matter to me what the rules are in my world or in your world, I only care about us and our world because anywhere that is, is where I want to be. It's the only place I want to be," he said, desperately willing her to believe him, to trust him.
He could see her on the verge of it, just about to grasp the hand he offered, when suddenly the door swung open and Enhard walked in, taking in the scene of Christian, a vampire royal, kneeling before Victoria.
His glacial response was all Victoria saw, and the tiny flicker of warmth struggling to stay alive between them abruptly faded, her expression deadening in seconds. Christian clenched his jaw swallowing his ire at Enhard's untimely entrance and whispered, "Please Tori, trust me."
"I can't, Christian." Her eyes closed in distress. "I'm sorry." She couldn't even look at him, knowing what she would see in his face.
Tori ... please.
I can't. We are impossible. It has always been impossible. No matter what we tell ourselves, there can be no happy ending for us. We are just another tragic love story waiting to be written.
Before Christian could even guess at her intent, he saw her grasp her amulet and she disappeared before his very eyes. He was left holding air as her hands vanished, leaving nothing but a cold memory of their presence. She had left him, he thought desolately, and he sank back to the floor his head in his hands. Enhard looked completely shaken by Victoria's unexpected exit, but the sudden lifeless expression on Christian's face troubled him far more than her startling vanishing act.
"Christian?"
"I'm sorry, Enhard." Christian's voice was like a staccato. "I can't let her go."
"You can't be serious, Christian. You do know what this means, don't you?"
"I don't care what it means." His words were hard, final, implacable. "I won't live without her."
VICTORIA HAD MANAGED to teleport herself without any lasting damage to Holly's house. It was the only place she could think of besides her apartment, and she did not want to be alone. Leaving Christian had been one of the hardest things she had ever had to do. Her heart felt like it had been cleaved into two pieces, the other half abandoned halfway across the world.
On top of that, teleportation over three thousand miles had left her utterly drained, physically and mentally. She'd had to depend on some of the energy in her amulet to complete the transfer but even so the actual shaping of the spell had required a colossal amount of her own energy. If she had given herself time to think about it, she probably wouldn't have done it.
She lay on her bed shivering in a cold sweat, trying desperately to keep the post-traumatic nausea at bay, and struggling to figure out what she could possibly say to Holly to explain her sudden arrival. She checked her watch realizing that it was almost five a.m. No wonder the house was so dead quiet. Victoria pulled her blankets up to her neck.
Her eyes were so heavy she could barely keep them open. She wondered groggily where Leto was for a second before darkness overtook her and she fell into a black, dreamless sleep.