Well, shit. Her experience with sex seemed so vanilla now. “I was fourteen.”
He slipped his hand down, trailed a finger over the skin of her hip that peeked through the blanket. “That’s young for a human.”
“Yeah, well, I was a wild child. My mom was an addict and my grandparents were in a nursing home, so I was living in foster care with people who couldn’t control me. I did what I wanted, when I wanted, and I did it with my boyfriend after we got drunk at a party.” She slid a glance at him, but he didn’t judge, merely watched her curiously. “It kinda hurt. Was over in about three seconds. Earth didn’t move. So I wasn’t in a hurry to do it again. Right after that, my mom got clean and got custody of me, and I was so busy for two years that I sort of forgot about boys.”
“Then what?”
It went against her nature to talk about this stuff, but his touch soothed her, coaxed her, lulled her into a place that felt foreign . . . but somehow right. The way he touched her cut right through all her defenses and left marks on her that couldn’t be seen but were there nevertheless. Why he would waste his time with her, an enemy who had clawed her way out of the gutter only because Ky had rescued her from the life of a rodent, was beyond her, but for now, she wouldn’t question his motives.
“My mom was killed,” she said quietly. “I went to yet another foster home, and one night, my foster dad came into my room.” Eidolon’s hand that had been stroking her hip stilled, and a low-level rumble came from deep in his throat. “We fought. I took off. Later, he was found dead, and a warrant was issued for my arrest.”
“I’m glad you killed the bastard.”
“I didn’t. He was beat up, but alive when I left him. I think one of the other kids he molested killed him while he was incapacitated.” She shrugged, and his hand went back to stroking her.
“What did you do after that?”
“I lived on the streets. I did what I had to in order to survive. It wasn’t pretty.”
Silence stretched between them. Maybe she shouldn’t have told him the truth. Maybe he was disgusted. Yeah, a demon who once kept a sex slave, disgusted. Please.
His fingers closed around her ankle, and she found herself lying on the floor again, his heavy thigh pinning hers down, his chest covering hers. “Is that what you’re doing now?” he murmured, his warm, strong hand stroking her cheek. “Are you doing what you have to in order to survive? Are you fucking me because you need a roof over your head?”
Tay’s first instinct was to get angry. But she was suddenly too tired to fight anymore. Especially because he knew she wasn’t sleeping with him in order to have a place to stay or to get protection or money or whatever. He wanted her to admit that something had changed between them, that she’d wanted him, not what he could give her.
“Please don’t make me answer that.”
He drew her close, and for a moment she reveled in his embrace, something she doubted he gave often. It was certainly something she didn’t get often. Come to think of it, it was something she’d really never had. She couldn’t remember a single instance where even her mother had hugged her. It wasn’t that her mother hadn’t loved her, but there had always been a wall of guilt between them, one her mother had constructed out of the shame she’d felt for abandoning Tayla, a wall Tay hadn’t been able to topple no matter how hard she’d tried to bring her mom into the secret mother-daughter fantasy Tayla had dreamed of. The one where they were best friends. Where they could bake together and laugh at chick flicks while curled up on the couch on Saturday nights.
Yeah, her fantasies had been lame, but anything was better than the reality of cleaning up her mom’s puke and hiding her crack pipe from the cops.
Anxious to escape the memories as well as the man who was making her think about them, she pushed away from Eidolon . . . and froze as the floor lit up beneath them.
“What is that?” She sat up, found that they were inside a pentagram, outlined in blue lights.
Eidolon’s expression went stony, completely flat and emotionless. “Make yourself comfortable for a while. I’ve been summoned for punishment.”
“For what?”
“For killing a human.”
Seventeen
Eidolon had never liked vampires. Not after what they’d done to Wraith. Not after what they’d reportedly done to their father when Eidolon was just two years old.
The thread of prejudice had woven itself deep into the fabric of his soul, but his upbringing had given him enough of a sense of logic to realize that not every vampire was the same. He’d been fond of Nancy, some of his hardest-working staff members were vampires, and he’d enjoyed all of the female vamps he’d bedded.
But he would never feel anything but contempt for any member of the Vampire Council. Worms and cowards, all seventeen of them. He’d love to get even one of them under his scalpel.