Her lips tighten. "Because you're not a damned worksheet."
"Ah-ah-ah," I taunt, tucking a hand behind my head, because I'm not above a little stalling. "No name calling, young lady."
"Look, Damon, even if we're married for a hundred years, or two hundred years, we probably won't know every little thing about each other's past." She tilts her head and smiles at me. "We'll probably end up like you and Stefan, grouchily drinking bourbon together and insulting each other from across the room by just twitching our eyebrows."
I scrunch my eyebrows down ominously, just because I'm a sucker and I want to see her smile one more time.
She giggles, her eyes sparkling at me. "No name calling, young man."
And just like that, all the humor falls out of my body because I'm not young. Not by years or experience. And she needs to know that because I won't let my girl marry a lie.
"Damon, don't," she whispers, seeing the change in my expression. Her eyes are almost desperate. "Please. We don't need a bump. Not right now, not with everything that's going on."
I take her hand and drape it gracefully across my palm, pressing my lips to her knuckles as if were 1856, the year I went to my first dance and learned to execute a proper bow. My father claimed I never really made the movement with the appropriate deference but if he could see my head now, bent over Elena's hand, I think even he might change his mind.
"Let me tell you a story, my love," I say softly. "About how I escaped from prison."
Chapter 10: Truth or Dare
DAMON
I urge Elena to lie back against the pillows, but I have to sit up, my wrists cocked across my knees. I usually don’t like to be still while I tell a story, but I don't want to be too far away from her. Because after she hears the truth, I sincerely doubt we’re going to be naked and cuddling in bed.
"Damon, I don't care what you had to do to break out of the Augustines' lab." She sits up and lets the sheet slip to her waist. "I know what they did to you and I'm sure it wasn't easy to escape but I couldn't care less what you had to do because it means you're here with me. It was worth it."
I agree, but only because I'm a cold-hearted bastard. I doubt she’ll be so forgiving once I tell her the whole story.
"I wasn't alone in the cells," I tell her. "There were lots of vampires coming and going as they made us sire more, and some were killed off from the experiments." She pales and I squeeze her knee through the sheet, giving her a little half-smile. "Come on, you already peeked at the end of the story, don't go biting your nails too much."
She just presses her lips together, anxiety written in every line of her face.
"Anyway, after the first six months they put a new vampire in the cell next to mine. I’m a cynical bastard at the best of times, and by then, I had been trying to escape every day for weeks. I was starting to lose hope."
"But you made a friend?" Elena ventures.
My girl, forever the optimist. Which is exactly why I will have to crush every one of her hopes and dreams before I ever let her weight her finger with my ring. Because once she puts it on, I’m not going to be able to stand it if she wants to take it off.
"I made a friend," I agree bitterly. "Her name was Lia." I hear the stutter in Elena's breathing even though she tries to disguise it. "Yup," I say with a smirk that feels stiff on my face. "She was a girl."
Elena nods, her eyes steady. "And?"
I feel a rush of pride, along with relief that she’s not going to get all jealous even though this happened forty years before she was even born.
"Lia talked to me, through the bars. I was being a nasty little bitch at first, and she just kept talking. Eventually, I started talking back. They—" I suck back half a breath to steady my voice because it feels cowardly as hell to admit this bothered me, but if she's going to understand, I can't start editing now. "They called us by numbers. Mine was 21051.”
I hate the way it still rolls off my tongue without even having to think. I wish I could forget every digit.
“Not number one?” she teases. “No wonder you were mad.”
My gaze jerks back to her, surprised, and her eyes are dark but she’s forcing a smile anyway, trying to cheer me up. It makes something in my chest throb like a bruise.
“Yeah, well, I told you the Augustines were idiots, didn’t I?” I scrape up a cocky smirk.
She reaches out and touches my arm. “It must have been hard,” she says, very quietly. “Being called a number, like an animal. I’m glad you had a friend.”
I glance down at my hand, dangling over my knee, and I flex my left hand. "I carved my initials in the cell wall and I had a D on my ring and some days, I would stare at them until the shapes meant nothing anymore."
"Damon…" She says my name slow and aching and I close my eyes. Back in that cell, I would have killed and died and prayed for someone to say my name like that. Like they knew me. Like they cared.
I shake my head, hard, even as her hand slides up to my shoulder. It feels hot against the chill of my skin, like all my body heat went somewhere else.
"Look," she says, ducking her head to catch my eyes. "I know why you're doing this. Today was..." Her cheeks flush pink, and she smiles at me. "It was the best day I can remember. And I know sometimes it feels like when we're happy, something terrible is about to happen. But it doesn't have to be that way,” she says fervently and fuck do I love her for it.
I want to buy her a house near the ocean surrounded by heaps of flowers and a breeze that’s never anything but gentle and I want to disappear there with her for decades.
But this time she’s wrong. I can’t let her think all the bad things I’ve done were when my switch was off. I can’t let her think my sins were anything but my own fault.
“You don't have to dredge up all these things that hurt you." Her eyes glow luminously. "If it helps to talk about this, I’ll listen. Today, tomorrow, every day you ever have something to say. But you don't have to. You can let today be good. That's okay, too.”
I can't help but laugh a little, and it rattles like it hurts, an ugly, small sound. "That's just what Lia would say," I tell her.
Elena sits back and wraps her arms around her knees, the sheet pulled carelessly across her legs. "Okay," she says, and I love how strong her voice is. "Tell me."
I take a breath. "We told each other stories. One for every piece the Augustines cut out of us. One for every time it grew back. One for every time someone called us by our number and not our name. One for every time we took blood from another vampire."
"Did you—" Elena snaps off the words as if she never meant to say them and I refuse to flinch.
"One," I tell her, very gently, "for every time we drank blood from each other."
We're both staring at the sheets now, breathing like the air is too thick.
I told Lia things that even Stefan doesn't know. About things I never intended to put into words, thoughts I wish I hadn't had, people I wish I hadn't killed. She knew about every single thing that had ever made me happy and we talked about those things over and over again. For four and a half years, we did nothing but talk.
I never had a friend like her, not even when I was human. And it was better because Lia was a vampire. She was sweeter than most, but she’d still killed, many times, and she didn’t blame me for doing the same.
Elena blows out a long breath. "Please just say it. I know how this story ends," she says, and I can hear how hard she’s struggling to sound unaffected. "Just say that you loved her."
I chuckle. Almost soundlessly, because I haven't felt so sick since Ric was gasping in my arms and I was seeing two faces die right in front of me, one in my eyes and one in my mind. But even so, it's funny to me that Elena thinks that's all this is. That I loved another woman. I wish that's all it was too.
"Nope," I tell her. "’Fraid not. I'm kind of a one-woman guy."
Her hands clench on her knees and she won’t look at me. I shift my calf over so it bumps hers.
"I didn't love her," I tell Elena, because if I know anything about women, I know she needs to hear that out loud. "She was my friend, and I thought we were going to die together, in there. I thought our secrets would die with us and so it wouldn’t matter. But then things started to change.”
"What do you mean?" Elena says, her brow creasing.
"Remember how I told you that some of the vampires got addicted to the blood shares?" My lips twist. "Well, Lia was one of them. The worst of them, probably, because she was like you."
"Like me?" Elena sounds like she's not sure if she loves or hates that thought.
"She cared about everyone,” I say, my eyes dropping as I remember the horror of a person like Lia in a place like that. “They were barely feeding us any longer, to force more and more bloodshares," I explain without inflection. “They set us on each other, the fights part of the test to see how their weird enhancement cocktails were working.”
“You said you thought they might be the reason you can compel animals,” Elena says. “Is that why you can do the thing with the fog, too?”
“I’ve never been sure if it was the treatments they were always giving us, or if I just spent so much time inside my head in that cell that I learned to use powers I might have always had.” I shrug, frowning. “If I concentrate, and I have enough blood, I can do a lot of things. The fog, the raven. I can get inside people’s waking minds sometimes, almost like compulsion, even if I’m not looking at them. I’m faster.” I look up at her. “Even when we’re both on human blood, I’m always just the smallest bit stronger than Stefan. I think that might be because of the Augustines. They obviously perfected that one after I escaped, but they were already working on it in the fifties.”
“So they starved you hoping you’d fight and attack each other for blood so they could see how all their experiments were working,” Elena says. “That’s awful…”
A corner of my mouth kicks up in a sour smile. “It wasn’t exactly summer camp, Elena.”
It’s not like we wanted to fight. Shit, not even I wanted to fight, not when I’d heard every one of them screaming from the exam rooms just like me. But if you lost once, you were weaker the next time you went into the ring. And losing meant having your blood taken, which always felt like one of those dreams where you're stripped naked and every one of your sins is fed over a loudspeaker in front of your parents, your first girlfriend, your basketball buddies and your Sunday School teacher. It would leave even centuries-old vampires curled up on the floor, weeping and begging for it to stop.
And somehow, being the one still on your feet was even worse. Sometimes I’d give in, just so I wouldn’t have to know what I’d done to them.
I swallow, but my voice scrapes like someone is hauling the words through splinters and dust.
“Lia changed everything. One day, she won her fight, and she knelt down and gave blood back to the guy she beat, and then she held him in her arms until the guards dragged her off. Other people saw, and they did it, too, but when Lia did it…”
I don’t know how to explain it to Elena. Giving your blood lays you bare, and when Lia fed from you, she loved you for it. Forgave you, for everything she saw. It’s why she reminds me so much of Elena. It’s why it hurts so much to think of her now.
“People loved it. Loved her,” I say simply. “Everyone started volunteering to get in the ring with her. Everyone but me. She was so excited about how different the bloodshares felt, and she was my best friend. She convinced me to try one, late at night through the bars of our cell when no one was watching.”
I can see Elena’s shoulders shrinking, see how much she hates hearing about me with another girl, but she doesn’t get what I’m saying.
“I freaked the fuck out,” I say bluntly. “She was my best friend but I couldn’t—” I blow a breath out.
“I don’t understand,” Elena says. “If she was your friend, if you did it willingly, why didn’t it feel good, like it does with us?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I think maybe it’s something screwed up in me.”
I will never tell Elena this, not if we’re married for six centuries, but when I bit my hand in the Grill and held it out to her, I was piss-my-pants freaking scared. Not just of what it would feel like, but that I’d flip out and hurt her by accident.
“Anyway,” I push on, “the vampires stopped fighting in the rings and started sharing blood willingly. Most of them still hated it, if it wasn’t with Lia, but it didn’t hurt like it did when they fought. The docs were going apeshit for it, because they thought it was finally working, that they’d taught us to crave each other’s blood.”
“What about you?” Elena asks softly, scooting a little closer. “How were you feeding?”
“I wasn’t. We were all slowly starving, because you can’t live on just vampire blood, but I was worse off than the rest. I wouldn’t give anybody my blood, so I tried not to take theirs. Sometimes I’d lose control,” I make myself tell her. “I’d get so hungry I’d attack even if I tried not to and Lia would lecture me half to death for it. But I was closer to desiccation every day and she decided she had to get me out of there. There was a guard and we…convinced him to move just the two of us to a remote part of the lab away from the other cells.”
I pause, giving Elena a sidelong look.
"We tricked him into the cell and killed him, stole the keys,” I tell her. “But another guard heard us and hit the alarm. I found a back way out, but we could hear more guards coming. We could have made it, just barely."
I close my eyes, because I can still see Lia's frantic face, how unnaturally bright her grey-green eyes were the last time she looked back at me. The idea had been to steal the keys, to share the guard’s blood and overpower the others once we were strong again. We were supposed to save everyone.
"She wouldn't leave them," I say hoarsely into the darkness behind my own eyes. "She loved them. All of them. I told her we'd come back, once we were fed up on more human blood and we could take the guards by surprise. But she wouldn't go. She went back for them and I didn't."
I open my eyes and I can barely feel Elena's hand squeezing my arm.
"She was like you. And I wasn't. I left them and I left her."
"Damon..."
I shake my head almost viciously, not letting her interrupt. "I dragged myself back to Mystic Falls, and Stefan told me what I already knew. I was a monster, no better than any one of the Augustines. I saved my own ass the first time I had a chance."
I get up, pulling away from the touch of her hand. I started this story for her, but I need to finish it for me. I haven't thought about any of this in more than five decades and part of me needs to hear the truth out loud, in my own voice. Because I'm a lot of things, and a monster is one of them. But I'm not a liar.
"I flipped my switch, and then I didn't care about saving Lia, or any of the rest of them. What I did care about was revenge." I stop, my back to the bed. "I went back. Two days after my escape. I planned the shit out of it, didn't sleep a minute of either of those days. The Augustines underestimated me. They doubled security but they didn't move the lab. All I needed was a couple days of human blood and a flak jacket that made it tough for them to nail me with their vervain needles."
My fangs prickle fiercely at the memory, and my hands clench.
"After I drained every last guard, I let the prisoners out.”
I don’t say it, but the worst part is how close I came to not letting the other prisoners go before I started the fire. They were just meat to me once I turned my humanity off, but I didn’t particularly need revenge on them. I opened the first lock on a whim, but the impulse could have easily gone the other way.
I take a breath. “I found the member lists, and I lit the whole place up like one big memorial lantern."
"But Lia wasn't there," Elena finishes, her eyes achingly sad.
"Nope. She was two days dead." When I say the words, I feel it like a punch in the stomach, like it’s
the first time anyone has ever told me the news. I stay very still until I can be sure I won't flinch.
Elena doesn't say anything else, and I wish I were surprised at her reaction. But how could she not be horrified? Elena never knew I had a best friend, much less that I’m the reason she’s dead.
I go and retrieve my bourbon from my bag and take a plastic cup from the bathroom, the plastic crackling as I unwrap it.
I set the cup on the table.
I unpeel the foil from the bottle and the cork makes a little sucking sound as I pull off the cap.
I pour the cup full.
The backs of my eyes sting, but saltwater isn't the kind of liquid I want to toast Lia with. I drink the cup down, and beside the sound of each swallow, I can hear the rhythm of Elena breathing from where she sits on the bed across the room.
The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) Page 13
