Bad Mouth

chapter Eleven


“Stop it.” Kade could tell Val’s wheels were turning by her expressive face.

“Stop what?”

“Stop thinking so much. Sometimes you have to live the moment you’re in or you’ll miss everything.”

Her lips tightened, but he couldn’t tell if it was from displeasure or from trying not to smile. “Profound. How’d you get so wise?”

“I’m older than I look.” He laughed despite his own dismal mood. He wanted so strongly to caress her face that he fidgeted with the seam of his jeans to quell the urge. He never fidgeted, but it had felt too damned good to touch Val’s skin, like touching a velvet cloud.

The fact that he’d touched her at all was all kinds of f*cked up. Her humanity put her so far out of his reach in more ways than one, and he had no business engaging his desires beyond fantasizing about them. Even that pushed his limits. He’d never gotten along well with humans. After all he’d seen and experienced, they might as well be domesticated animals at his feet.

Val tapped her plump, freshly kissed lower lip thoughtfully. “So what you do you want to do now?”

“Nail you against the wall with my cock.” He’d meant to tease her to see that beautiful, rosy flush heighten in her cheeks, but most of him was onboard with nailing her, no matter how bad that idea.

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “How romantic. You never quit, do you?”

He gave her his most lecherous grin. “I told you—two hundred years. If I can’t do it in that much time, it’s not mean to be.” His smile disappeared. “And it is romantic. I don’t touch humans without the intent to harm.”

“Kade, I have to show you that what you’ve known of humans until now is all wrong.” A sweet, keen urgency radiated from her voice and her eyes. If a bomb had landed on his head, it wouldn’t have hit him harder. How he felt about her, about humans, truly mattered to her. “Those men weren’t normal people. They were more like the deranged. I’m getting a work group together. They’ll screen the applications to make sure no more of them get approved. You won’t have to punish them anymore.”

“Punish them?” He couldn’t have been more surprised by her assumption. “Is that what you think I do?”

“Is there another reason?” She leaned forward and clasped her hands together tightly. A glimmer of hope shone in her expression. Several beats of his heart passed before he could get past how f*cking beautiful she looked right then.

He shook enough sense back into his head to respond. “Their disfigurement isn’t a punishment. It’s insurance.”

She frowned. “Insurance?”

“Val, transformation doesn’t change anything. Humans come out of it the same as when they went in, their dark desires, their vices, their weaknesses. Take what you know of those men and add supernatural strength and speed topped with a hunger for blood that’s nearly impossible for a new vampire to control. How safe is it to unleash that on the world?”

“You said the Immortalis don’t break protocol.”

He crossed the distance between them to sit beside her. “Not all newly turned make it far enough to truly become Immortalis. The first year is brutal, tenuous. They’re watched closely by an adjuvant until the risk of them going rogue has passed. It’s in the interim when those men get dangerous. I have no power when they assign a subjugate. I have to turn the goddamned subjugate. But I damned well make sure what’s inside the motherf*cker will show on the outside. So every man, woman, and child will turn and run at the sight of him.”

Her gaze softened, and her luscious mouth pulled up into the sweet hint of a smile. She should have thought him the worst kind of beast, an unfeeling, sociopathic barbarian. It’s what he believed of himself. Instead, she looked at him as if he rescued orphans for a living.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he grumbled. “I do it for selfish reasons. I enjoy what I do to them. My true nature comes out.”

“You only say that because you think all humans are brutal. Kade, you protected humanity from the evil those men could have done. You did it in a more violent manner than I would have chosen, but your intent was noble.”

Goddamn. Every time he turned around, she surprised the hell out of him again. Would any other human have understood him so well? He swept a lock of hair from her forehead, twirling it his fingers. “I don’t think all humans are brutal.”

She went on as if he hadn’t tried to divert the subject. “What about Ezra? You said he loves everything human. Didn’t you think it strange he’d love people as evil as the ones you turned?”

He gave her a flat stare. “Ezra also likes to kill his food.”

Val nearly choked. “I don’t believe you. I met him in person today.”

“Don’t be deceived by his Jolly Joe act. He’s all legal and everything, but he’ll love a human to death, literally.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“Why should it?”

“Kade!”

He shifted away from her and sank back against the couch. He’d grown so used to living within his horrific reputation. Cruelty was expected of him. But not by Val. She saw something in him that even he didn’t. Her stubborn notion of his intrinsic sense of honor flustered him. “F*cking hell, Val. I told you I do what I do for selfish reasons.”

She followed his movement, bracing her elbow next to him with her long, golden hair brushing his shoulder. He immediately began toying with a thick, curly lock again. His body must have developed a mind of its own.

“Tell me,” she whispered. He didn’t answer, his eyes fixed on the view of the Sound. If he looked at her, he’d be lost. “Please, Kade. I want to understand.”

The warm, syrupy emotion in her plea won the battle raging inside of him. He’d spent the equivalent of several human lifetimes living silently with the weight of the atrocities he’d endured and committed, and for some godforsaken reason, he wanted her, of all people, to understand. He wanted—needed—to dredge the deep lake of his pain.

He gathered his balls of steel, brought his gaze to meet hers, and cleared his throat before mentally leaping over the edge of a cliff. “My surrogate was a subjugate. My nannies, my tutors, the cooks, the drivers, and the house staff were all subjugates. I was raised by subjugates. I rarely saw Olen and Evangeline, at least for the first dozen years of my life.”

He took a deep breath. Tension bunched in his muscles to an aching pitch. “The subjugates hated me, Val. Hated me. From my earliest memory, every one of them did all they could to bring on the agony. They chained me, beat me, whipped me, cut me, broke me, starved me, burned me. They left me in the elements when I’d just learned to walk. They ripped out hair and fingernails.”

“Did they…?” She didn’t say the word rape aloud, but her meaning was clear enough to him.

He shook his head. “One small mercy.”

“Your parents never found out? You never told them?”

“It was what I knew. It was how life was. I had no idea things should be different, and it was either a blessing or a curse that I healed before the Ancients could see the evidence.”

“How long?”

“Twelve years. Until I was old enough and strong enough to fight back.” He closed his eyes, his mind taking him back to a barbaric moment in time, a time he didn’t want her to see reflected in his expression. “That first day was a bloody massacre. I bathed in it. I fed better than I had my entire life, even until now. That day I learned the truth of things, that I am the predator and they, the prey. The Ancients found out and had the others executed, the ones I hadn’t yet slain.”

Her gorgeous emerald eyes grew damp. “Kade.” She didn’t say anything more. Perhaps he should have been offended—he was the wrong sort of vampire to find tolerance for pity—but it wasn’t really pity he saw in her. It was heartache over what he’d endured. She felt for him in a way no person, vampire or human, had ever shown him. Before he realized what he was about, he swept his thumb along her lower lashes.

“Are those for me?” he murmured. Her empathy shocked him and then settled over him like the warmth that had been denied him as a child. “You’re crying for me?”

She captured his wrist before he could pull away. “For the boy you were.”

Aw, hell. She always had a way of dragging a smile to his lips. “He’s still in here, Val. Where do you think my foul mouth comes from?”

“Maybe it’s a good thing you don’t get rid of that then,” she said with a wobbly grin. She brushed tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. The innocence of the gesture hooked its barbs into what little tender bits of his heart existed.

Again she pinned him with that hung-the-stars look. A sharp twinge of longing lanced through him. She made him want to be the man she imagined him to be. If only he could be that man, but she couldn’t be more wrong. He’d done terrible, f*cked-up things to humans in his long life. He was still doing terrible, f*cked-up things, the kinds of things that would destroy any warmth she had for him.

He’d never see that look on her face again if she knew what he hid from her. The thought of caring about a human’s perception of him should make his skin crawl. Nevertheless, the image of her repulsion and her disappointment was a jagged, rusty spike shoved right up into no man’s land.

Dangerous emotions. May as well roll over and expose his belly to a pack of starving wolves. Humans were vulnerable, short-lived, and fundamentally different when it came to ethics and morality. No upside existed in dealing with them, and caring for one invited pain and conflict through the front door. There was a reason he never learned the names of his subjugates before they were turned, no matter how well they served him. A vamp never knew how long a human would last in the life.

He’d already made a mistake by opening up to her with his past. Goddamn. He had to stop. She could get him killed. F*ck’s sake, she could get herself killed. If he had to stifle his crushing need to touch her and tie her to his side in order to keep them both safe, then he’d eat the bullet and do whatever was necessary. He would keep on lying to her despite the backlash of his regret.

…

When Kade’s gentle touch dropped from her face, Val mourned the loss. Only days ago being close and nearly intimate with a vampire would have been a nightmare to her. But Kade wasn’t just a vampire. He was a whole person. He had a dark past and feelings and opinions and a keen intellect. She wanted to know his dreams. She wanted to heal his soul the way he’d tried to heal hers. At the moment, though, time was ticking, the night wasting, and they had work to do.

“You’re thinking about getting to work, aren’t you?” he asked. Psychic.

She let her hand trail down his chest. “Uh-hmm. Thinking about it.” His chest moved with laughter beneath her palm, and then he groaned.

“I feel something, Val, right under your hand. It kinda hurts. Think I might have caught something.”

She tipped her head back to look at him and lost her breath. Raw emotion and the velvety-red glow of his gaze softened his features. He cupped her cheek and brought his lips to hers. His kiss brought tears to her eyes. He lingered, his touch soft and tender, and firing off her nerve endings. She could spend all night basking in kisses like this and it would never be enough. His eyes were still closed when he pulled back. She ran her fingers through his hair, loving the satiny texture against her skin.

“Thank you,” he said. He opened his eyes and winked. “See? I’m learning.”

“Don’t look so happy with yourself. You’re far from housebroken.”

With a grin, he headed toward the bathroom, tugging her off the sofa as he went. They freshened up their disheveled appearances, using separate bathrooms in spite of his efforts to talk her into sharing. They wouldn’t get any interviews done if they kept that up. It was entirely too easy to lose her head with him.

Shortly, they were on their way to a suburban residence of a Legion vampire named Wallace Dannon. The vampire had witnessed the aftermath of a more recent blooding near Lake Washington.

This blooding, along with the one at Gas Works Park, were body dumps—the crime had been committed at some other unknown site. Unease rippled through her. Deranged weren’t known to cover up their crimes. They were too far beyond logical reasoning. Maybe she’d catch a break, and they’d have as much luck with this Legion as they’d had with Ptolomy and Selene.

“Ready for this?” He flashed her a smile with a shot of fang.

She huffed. “You are dying to light into someone, aren’t you?”

A wicked laugh was his answer. He laced his fingers with hers and led her up the walkway. A demure young female subjugate, greeting him properly, allowed them entry and guided them to an office to await the Legion.

Val admired Kade’s profile as he watched out the window. The night was loving toward him, the moonlight highlighting the dip and swell of his muscles, sharpening the angles of his face. Even from halfway across the room, the faint, spicy scent of him sent a kaleidoscope of images through her mind. His touch, his kiss, that terrible, sexy mouth, the way his hips fit perfectly between her legs. She pressed her hands to her cheeks, trying to cool them. She was behaving like a teen in the throes of her first crush.

Wallace broke her train of thought with a noisy entrance. After tripping over obstacles in his office, the clumsy, robust man addressed them.

“Ahem. How may I serve, my lord?”

Kade turned from the window, a smile hinted at the corners of his lips, but then it was gone. His eyes widened and then narrowed. “You!”

Wallace collapsed to his knees, his hands over his head. “Mercy! I beg you, my lord.”

“Like you showed me?” Kade’s voice thundered throughout the small room.

The man cowered in a whimpering heap.

“Kade, who is he?”

“Someone who should be dead.” His voice rose with each word until he was bellowing at the Legion. “Why aren’t you dead? Are the others alive?”

“Yes, my lord.”

Kade turned away and roared with the rage of an erupting volcano. He upended a massive mahogany desk and tossed it across the room, missing the window by mere inches. Val’s hands flew to her ears to shield against the racket and terrible fear stabbed through her in a sharp wave.

He whirled toward the Legion and drew a wicked-looking knife from behind his back. How could he hide something that large? Had he been wearing that the whole time? When he advanced on the cowering vampire, she launched herself in front of him, but he brushed her to the side without a glance. Her heart raced madly. He was really going to kill Dannon.

“Kade, no.” She latched onto his arm. “No!”