“They killed her?” It sounded barbaric to Payne and now he could see why Elissa was so afraid. She didn’t want to suffer the same horrific fate as her sister.
“She knew they were coming... had found her. She asked me to take care of something for her and I swore that I would. I tried so hard to keep it hidden because I knew how precious it had been to Verity.”
“My grandfather took it from you though.” What had she sworn to conceal? Whatever it was, it was important to Elissa. He could see it in her eyes and now he understood why she had fought so hard to come with him to this place. She had to fulfil her promise to her dead sister and protect this item.
“And I want it back.” She glanced into his eyes and then off to his right, at the unlit fire. “I didn’t use you, Payne... and I do want you... I’m crazily attracted to you even when I know how dangerous that is.”
“Maybe you just want me because I’m dangerous.” It was a sound theory but Elissa’s frown told him that it wasn’t the case.
“I think it has more to do with your ridiculously good looks and that body.” She waved a hand down the length of him and actually smiled.
Payne’s heart missed a beat. He was glad she had found her smile again and that the sombreness in her eyes had lifted. The sight of it eased the ache in his chest and he couldn’t hold on to his anger. It slipped from his grasp and he looked her over, seeing the hint of vulnerability that still edged her eyes. She looked small as she sat alone, waiting for him to react or perhaps retaliate. He sighed and decided to be the better man and let it go. He already had enough reasons to feel angry. He didn’t need to add Elissa to the list, not when she was the one good thing in his dark world.
“I said you just wanted to get into my pants.” He grinned, gunning for charming again, and crossed the room to her. She patted the bed beside her, a peace offering that he gladly accepted. He sat down and took hold of her left arm, gently inspecting her wrist. The bone felt whole again, no sign of a break. “I’m sorry about that.”
She shrugged. “I should have explained myself better... I didn’t mean to make you feel that way.”
Elissa leaned her head against his shoulder and he slipped his fingers between hers, holding her hand. He stared down at them. Where the hell did he go from here? Elissa tied him in knots and had him on the edge all the time, looking for hidden meanings in everything she said. Did he want her to be out to use him or only in this to hurt him in some way? Why couldn’t he trust her?
“Payne?” she whispered, her soft voice warming his heart and easing the pain away. She looked up at him and then pressed her lips to his bare shoulder, lingering there.
“Elissa?” he said when he realised that she wouldn’t continue without him prompting her. She felt tense, her anxiety flowing over him, carried by her scent. What had she wanted to ask but was now too afraid to voice?
Payne gently squeezed her hand and she looked up at him again. He kept his expression soft and open, hoping it would soothe her and help her find her voice. She could ask whatever she wanted and he would answer her this time because he no longer wanted any barriers between them. He wanted to know her, wanted to break through everything that had happened in the past few minutes and find solid ground with her again.
“Why do you feel you deserve pain?” she breathed the words against his skin, her lips brushing him at the same time, stirring heat and desire in his veins.
His guard was down and he realised for the first time in his life that he ached to tell someone and share the burden. Would she turn on him if she knew? He thought that she might. She would want nothing to do with him.
But he needed to tell her.
CHAPTER 11
Payne let go of her hand and Elissa thought he would refuse to answer her. She could almost feel him distancing himself as he moved to lie on the bed, slung his left arm behind his head on the pillows and laid his right across his bare stomach. Was he going to give her the silent treatment again? He didn’t look at her. His dark grey eyes fixed on the green canopy of the four-poster bed, the flecks of blue and gold in them bright against their stony backdrop. There was a touch of red edging his irises though. What was he thinking to make them change, veering towards their vampire state?
He drew in a deep breath and sighed it out.
“I was born to an elite bloodline and my parents were very loving towards me.”
Elissa’s eyes widened. He was going to tell her. He was actually going to answer the one question that always seemed to set him on edge. Was it because she had talked about her family with him? It had hurt her to speak about her sister, even when she had kept most of the details about her hidden from Payne still. The colours of his fae markings shifted, the change beginning along the underside of his arms and working up the lines of symbols towards his shoulders. They gradually darkened to shades of ash and blood. He was angry but the distant look in his eyes said that it wasn’t directed at her.
Purple and blue bloomed along his markings, swirling and mixing with the black and the red. Hurt. How did he feel about those markings? Did he hate that they gave everything away about his feelings? She had once thought that he could control them to a degree, masking his feelings. Maybe he couldn’t, or he wasn’t as good at it as she had thought, because she could see all of his feelings in his markings.
Or maybe she was reading too far into things, and he was letting her see his feelings. If that was the case, then it touched her that he was letting his guard down.
“I should probably correct that... my parents were loving towards me at first.” He closed his eyes and exhaled again, causing his torso to shift in a beautiful wave that lured her eyes to it. She forced them back to his face, refusing to stare at him while he was opening his heart to her. He tilted his head towards her and opened his eyes. “We were a close family and my father adored my mother. He had turned her long before they decided to have a child and I loved her as deeply as my father, adoring her too.”
The warmth in his eyes and the slight tilt of his sensual lips conveyed how much he had loved his mother. She hadn’t failed to notice that he was talking past tense. Something had happened to Payne’s happy family.
“I grew up in a mansion with other families but my father was the head of the bloodline. He indulged my every whim, spoiling me and my mother.” His eyelids dropped again, shuttering his beautiful eyes, but she hadn’t missed the darkness that had entered them just a second before he had closed them, shutting her out. “I was on the verge of puberty when my fae markings appeared.”
“You weren’t born with them?” Her heart missed a beat and lodged in her throat, trembling there. Verity had been wrong. Elissa had hoped that her sister had been right and that Luca only had witch in his genes. She had prayed to the earth and the sky that Luca had inherited none of his father’s genes. Now she knew without a doubt that those prayers had gone unanswered. Luca would develop his markings when he matured.
Payne shook his head. “I tried to hide them. I was scared and I didn’t know what they meant. I didn’t understand them and why I had them. I tried to make them go away. I was scrubbing myself raw in the bath one day when a servant entered and saw them. She told my father.”
“What happened?” Elissa lay next to him on the bed and risked placing her hand over his right one where it rested on his stomach. He didn’t pull away. He spread his fingers and let her slip hers between them, her palm pressing against the back of his hand.
“I had never seen my father so angry. He was enraged and distraught, his anger flowing freely, disturbing the whole house. He dragged me from the bath and held me by the back of my neck. He marched me through the house in search of my mother.” Payne looked into Elissa’s eyes and she squeezed his hand, wishing she could do more, could take away his hurt and shame. “He found my mother in the entrance hall, just returned from riding. The whole house had gathered to stare. She was horrified that I was nude before everyone, my skin red raw. She argued with my father.”
“She thought he had hurt you.” What affectionate mother wouldn’t think such a thing on seeing her son being treated in such a disgusting way?
Payne nodded. “It was only when my father accused her of sleeping with another male and shouted that I wasn’t his that she truly looked at me. She saw the marks on my skin... I could sense her confusion... or perhaps it was my own.”
Elissa shuffled closer to him and kept quiet this time. The red edging his eyes, slowly eating away all the other colours, warned that he wouldn’t want her sympathy if she offered it. He wanted her to listen without interrupting, and she would. She would let him do this at his own pace because he clearly needed to tell her. She only hoped it was cathartic for him.
He shifted his gaze back to the canopy. The blue and gold in his eyes swirled, and he gained a distant, unfocused expression. His markings darkened again to obsidian and crimson.
“Mother swore to my father that she hadn’t betrayed him and she loved him with all of her heart. I can remember her voice and her pain, her fear. I remember it all as if it were yesterday. It haunts me. She told my father that she didn’t know why I bore my markings or what they meant.” He sighed and the hurt surfaced on those markings again, tinting them purple and blue in places and increasing the black. “Father wouldn’t listen to her. The whole family stared down at me and I was afraid they would turn on me and ask me what I was. I didn’t know. I was confused and scared, and unsure of myself. I felt alien... wrong... disgusting. An abomination. I ached for my father and mother to look down at me too and tell me that nothing had changed and they loved me still, and that together we would come to understand what the weird symbols meant and why I had them.”
He closed his eyes and a tear slipped down from the corner of his lashes. He shifted his left arm out from behind his head and threw it across his eyes, hiding them from her. Elissa tightened her grip on his hand, her heart aching for him. Her anger rose too. Payne had done nothing wrong and his parents must have felt his fear and confusion, but they had done nothing to reassure him. His father had paraded him in front of the family, shaming him and making him feel as though he was an outsider, an object to stare at with disgust. He had degraded his own son, the boy he had claimed to love.
“When my father looked at me at last, there had been only coldness in his eyes. I turned to my mother but she refused to look at me, even when I fell on my knees and begged her.”
Mother earth, what cruelty they had inflicted upon him, their boy who had looked up to them and loved them with all of his heart. He had only wanted their love in return, just as they had given it to him unconditionally before his markings had surfaced. Payne’s fingers squeezed hers, hurting her. She didn’t let her pain show. He needed to hold on to her and she wouldn’t deny him anything that would comfort him. He could break her fingers and she still wouldn’t let go of his hand. She wouldn’t let him suffer alone. Not as his parents had.
“My father ordered that I be taken out of his sight. Someone took me away. I don’t remember who. I only remember the shame that burned in me and the way everyone whispered as I passed, staring at me and my cursed markings.”
He lifted his arm and looked at her. He looked so lost and broken that she wanted to touch his cheek, needed him to know that she was here with him and that she felt for him. She managed to hold her tongue and keep still, knowing that he needed to keep going now that he had started.
“My mother tried to convince my father that she hadn’t cheated on him with another male. I heard them arguing all the time over the coming weeks. They would fall silent whenever they saw me, and would turn away, neither of them willing to listen to me. In the end, they made me remain in my quarters. I lost everything. My family turned their backs on me one by one, shunning me. My father probably ordered it.”
His gaze roamed back to the canopy above them.
Elissa’s heart went out to him. She couldn’t imagine how he must have felt. Just a boy, scared and uncertain, unsure of what he was and what his markings meant, mistreated by those he loved and relied upon. He had gone from being the centre of his parents’ world to an object of hate and disgust. He had suffered so much, had been treated so poorly, dejected and disgraced, left to struggle with the changes happening in him alone when someone should have been there to hold him and guide him, to love him.
“My father refused to believe my mother because she couldn’t offer solid proof that she hadn’t cheated on him. They argued about me for months, growing more and more distant from each other, and from me. My father moved into the other wing of the mansion, as far from my mother as he could get. He refused to speak to her or me.”
He tensed and stared in silence at the canopy, his eyes blank, as though he was miles away from her. What pain was he reliving now? Tears slipped down his temple into his sandy hair and Elissa couldn’t stop herself anymore. She moved closer to him, rolling so her chest pressed against the side of his torso, and stroked his hair with her left hand while retaining her grip on his right.
His eyes dropped to her and he looked more lost and broken than she had ever seen him.
His voice cracked as he spoke. “My final memory of my mother is of her embracing the sun.”
He swallowed hard and didn’t look as though he could continue. Struggle shone in his eyes and flickered across his face, twisting his handsome visage into a pained grimace. She stroked his hair, gently running her fingers over the tousled sandy spikes, trying to give him some peace in the midst of so much suffering. She wished she had never asked him why he had chosen to call himself Payne or why he felt he deserved to suffer now. She had never meant to inflict this hurt upon him.
It pained her to see her strong, powerful male so hurt and weak, suffering and vulnerable, wrestling with his past and his feelings. It was little wonder he despised his incubus side and couldn’t accept it, and sought pain as a remedy to his desires. He had probably never stopped hurting in the centuries that had likely passed since he had been shunned as a boy. He carried his pain with him, an eternal torment, a poison that bred doubt in his mind, making him believe that no one could feel anything positive towards him. His family had instilled in him a belief that no one could ever love him as he was because he was an abomination, something that should be detested and scorned, not cherished and adored.
She could see that now, and she hated them for it. She wanted to seek out his family and punish them all for the pain that they had inflicted upon an innocent, warping his perspective of the world and causing him to despise himself and his mixed blood.
He sucked in a sharp breath. “I hadn’t been able to sleep and had felt her pause outside my room before moving on down the hallway. I followed her down to the entrance hall and found her standing near the double doors. She looked at me with so much pain in her eyes, so much misery, and then threw open the doors to the garden and let the sunlight stream over her.” His voice hitched and cracked again, and he ground his teeth, tears streaming from the corners of his eyes and his eyebrows knitting tightly. “I tried to stop her but I failed. I was too young. My hands caught fire. I wanted to die in her place... if I couldn’t have that... then I wanted to die with her.”
Tears filled Elissa’s eyes and she sniffed them back, her heart breaking for him. He had clearly adored his mother as much as he had said, and felt responsible for her decision to commit suicide. She stroked his cheek, his cool skin damp with tears beneath her fingers. He had suffered so much because of his mixed genes. She had never anticipated, had never dreamed, that he had been through so much. It was little wonder that he hated his incubus side now and wanted nothing to do with it. She couldn’t blame him for it either. It had stripped away all that he loved and had cherished, and something told Elissa that his suffering hadn’t ended at his mother’s death.
“The next thing I remember is waking in a dark room, in my parents’ bed. I thought perhaps someone had saved my mother and I was resting with her. When my vision cleared, I saw my father
lying beside me, his arms swathed in bloodstained bandages.” He closed his eyes again and pinched the bridge of his nose. She gave him a moment to gather himself and brushed her fingers over his hair, letting him know that she was still there for him. “I was covered in bandages too. Every inch of me... all of them stained crimson. I wanted to cry but I stifled my pain and loss. When my father stirred, I expected him to make me leave. Instead, he drew me to him and told me that he had never meant for this to happen. I hated him.”
Understandable. His father had driven his mother to kill herself.
“I hated my father but I blamed myself for her death. I spent years looking for information on fae and searching for a way to clear my mother’s name. When I discovered that my mother’s bloodline had an incubus in it, her father, and that all of the children he had sired with her mother had been female and therefore not incubi, but a carrier of those genes, I grew enraged at my father.” Payne slipped his hand free of hers and wiped his eyes, clearing away his tears. Elissa looked at Payne’s markings nearest his wrist. She didn’t recognise the symbols there, at the top of his lineage. His mother’s name written in the fae tongue? “My mother hadn’t known that she had incubus blood in her. I challenged my father and my father banished me, but not before I fought him. My father swore he never wanted to see me again.”
“What happened?”
Dark and Deadly: Eight Bad Boys of Paranormal Romance Page 36
