She rolled her eyes, but I knew the action didn’t fit the feeling. She was happy—happier than I’d seen her in ages.
“So, what was it Mike couldn’t handle, Em? Why did you break up?”
She sighed, looked at Blade, then moved over and took my hand. “I need to show you something.”
“O . . . kay.” I noticed her nervousness enough to check Blade's reaction, too. He was about as tense as a lamb in a field of wolves.
Emily ducked her head and lifted it again, sweeping her hair back off her shoulder. “Look.”
“I see a scar and—” I looked a bit closer, and just above the little silver scar left from the day Jase turned her was a tiny greenish-black dot—like a tattooed freckle. “A Mark?”
She drew her hair back over her shoulder. “Yes.”
“From . . . like what humans get when they have sex with a vampire?”
She nodded.
“But . . . Mike was your first and last. And he was Lilithian by the time you guys had sex. And Lilithians don’t leave—”
“Mike was not this poor girl’s first.” Blade exhaled his words.
An invisible rug came out from under my feet. “What do you mean? Who was?”
Blade cleared his throat. “Your husband.”
A vacuum slowly sucked the air from the room, my mouth going completely dry.
“Ara?” Emily stepped forward, but I waved her off, walking blindly toward the glass doors.
“Ara?” Blade tried, too, his voice going straight to my inner message bank.
David and Emily.
David and Emily.
He slept with her.
He held her like he held me.
His hands on her hips; his lips touching hers; his naked body completely wrapped up in hers.
All the images of them dancing together at my house—Emily in her green dress; David, so tall and so handsome—came rushing back to haunt me, blending and mixing with my own images of David’s naked body, scattering everything I thought I knew and replacing it with her. And him. Naked. Together.
The ground changed from wood floors to stone steps to long, swishy grass under my feet, until I reached the sunny clearing and fell to my knees a few hundred feet from my oak tree, sinking my hands into the ground to hold myself up.
“Ara?”
“Emily,” I said into the earth, watching another tear fall between my knees.
“I'm sorry you had to find out that way.” Her shadow darkened my hands as she stood over me.
I sobbed a little harder. “Was there a better way to find out?”
“I guess not.”
“Ara?” Jason’s arms wrapped my body and he swept me into his chest. “Damn it. Don't run off like that.”
“Like what?”
He leaned out, wiping his thumbs down my tear-soaked face. “I called to you several times. You just ignored me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, Ara. You just scared me, is all.”
I looked at Emily then, and the pity in her eyes made it all hurt so much more. She knew. All along. She knew what it was like to be with my husband. She lied to me. He lied to me. Why would they do that?
“How did she find out?” Jason asked Emily in a very short, almost harsh tone.
“Wait!” I pushed away from him, falling back in the grass on my palms. “You knew?”
“Only recently.” He reached for me again.
I moved away. “How recent?”
“The day I turned Em.”
“That's not really what I call recent.”
“I know. And I tried to tell you, but everything happened after that. Then I was supposedly dead. And there hasn’t really been a good moment to break your heart like that with the news, Ara. Not to mention—” He sat down on his butt with a huge sigh. “David really should have been the one to tell you.”
I bit my lips and turned my gaze on Em. “Why didn't you tell me? You could have told me from the first day we became friends, and it would’ve been okay, Emily. But you lied to me, you—”
“She didn't lie, Ara.”
“What do you mean?”
“David erased it,” Jason said, offering Emily his hand; she took it and sat down across from him. “Emily didn’t even know.”
“You didn’t know you slept with him?” I asked accusingly, drawing the rest of that spiteful attack back in since, continuing would make me a hypocrite. “But you. . .”
“She was a virgin, yes,” Jason answered the question I wanted to ask.
“Then you were—”
“Bound to him.” She nodded, resting her chin on her knee. “I was obsessed with David, Ara, believed it was love, but—”
“Then, how come you suddenly remembered? Or did David actually tell you?”
“She didn't suddenly remember,” Jase said. “When she came to me, the day I bit her, it…she was so upset. She was mad at me for what I did to you at the masquerade, but her anger went beyond caring for a friend.”
“We got in a fight about how he left me,” she added.
“And then the truth came out,” Jase said, “that she never loved me.”
“I told him I was always in love with David—that I used Jason to get past that.”
“Oh, Jase.” I cocked my head, eyes of sympathy offering him wordless condolences.
“I was okay. But it didn’t make a whole lot of sense—for her to be in love with David. She didn’t really even like him that much.” He laughed when he looked at Emily, and even she managed a small smile. “I read her mind—saw all the times she just wanted to whack him with a baseball bat.”
“I knew it was wrong to feel that way,” Em added. “To hate someone so much but find yourself crying every night because they won’t ever love you. I mean, every time he looked at me, I’d wish he’d see that I was the one for him but, inside, if I really thought about it, there was nothing I actually liked about David.”
“When I realised this, I swept her hair back and, sure enough, she was Marked,” Jason said. “I could’ve given her the memory back. I could have made her aware that this obsession was purely a spirit bind, but it would’ve eventually killed her.”
“I’d been admitted into psychiatric care already,” Emily said, her voice shaking. “When I told you I’d seen a counsellor over losing Jason, I lied—”
“It was always about David.” I nodded to myself.