Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 84864 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 424(@200wpm)___ 339(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84864 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 424(@200wpm)___ 339(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
A growl erupted from my throat.
“Nope.” Gabriel put a set of scans up on a lighted board. “Being alone with a newly marked mate? Even worse. Sorry, but that male of yours is going to be a territorial asshole for the better part of a few months.”
“I won’t be alive in a few months.” She said it with a finality that hit me like a punch to the gut. “And how did you get my scans?”
“Medical records are digital and networks are easy to hack when you have Ransom living with you.” Gabriel locked eyes with me, then looked back to the scans. “I can see you have an aggressive glioblastoma. From the scans it looks like it shrank a bit in the past month, though, which isn’t just odd…it’s miraculous. What did you do?”
“Nothing.” She shrugged.
“Drank my blood,” I answered at the same time.
Gabriel paused, then turned slowly to face us. “You…exchanged?”
I nodded. “Twice. I know the rules.” Three times would transition or kill her.
He looked at the scans side-by-side. “A full transfusion? Or—”
“Full,” I answered.
Gabriel’s shoulders dipped. “The small bit of good it did probably bought her a week, but nothing more.” He looked at Grace. “You’ve refused treatment from the human doctors?”
She nodded. “I watched my mother spend her last months in complete and utter misery. I want to still be me at the end of my own life. Besides,” she smiled up at me, her hair sliding back over her shoulders. “The hallucinations are too good to give up.”
Gabriel cocked his head at me.
I sighed, and rubbed my forehead. “She thinks this is all a hallucination.”
“Duh.” Grace pointed to the room around us. “I’m surrounded by vampires, somehow attached to this sex god of a man, and then there’s this.” She tugged down the neckline of the shirt Lyric had loaned her, displaying her mating mark. “Tattoos just don’t magically appear because you’re having the best orgasms of your life.”
Gabriel looked at me in pure confusion.
“I know.” I could only shrug. “I’ve tried telling her. And I get how aggressive the tumor is, I really do, but here’s the thing. She’s a quarter vampire according to Cassandra.”
“I’m guessing it would be my father’s side. They seemed like the disappearing kind, if you know what I mean.” Grace joked.
She fucking joked because she still thought this was all in her head.
“I can turn her, right?” I asked Gabriel. “She should be completely healed in the transition.”
“Turn me into what?” Grace shook her head at me.
“One of us. A vampire.” I cupped her cheek, looking at her with every ounce of hope in my body. “We found each other at this time in our lives for this purpose, Grace. I know it. I can save you. We can be together for every night of our lives.”
She sighed and leaned into my palm, then turned toward Gabriel. “See? It’s the best hallucination ever. Not only is he constantly telling me I’m his, but now he thinks he can save me.”
Gabriel looked at the scans, then toward me, and finally Grace. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Grace.”
“Just say it. I’m used to getting bad news at this point.” She leaned into my side and I wrapped my arm around her waist.
“See this area here?” He pointed to a clear area on her scans.
“Yep.”
“That’s where we’d expect to see a tumor if you were suffering from hallucinations. But yours is here.” He moved the pointer. “So as hard as this is to absorb…” Sympathy lined his features as he looked back at Grace. “You can’t be hallucinating. This is all very real.”
Grace’s mouth opened, then shut, then opened again, and her eyes flew wide as she looked up at me. “You’re saying that all of this—him, you, the house…it’s all real? I’m surrounded by…vampires?”
I nodded. “That’s exactly what he’s saying, baby.”
“Oh…God.”
She pushed away from me with all her strength and my chest cracked in two.
12
GRACE
“My boyfriend is a vampire,” I said, my heart climbing up my throat as my mind shifted on its axis.
This is real.
This is all totally and one hundred percent real.
“Mate,” Ajax corrected me, his eyes full of concern as he studied the lines of my face.
I held up a hand toward him, indicating I needed a second.
A lifetime, maybe. That’s what it would take for me to fully wrap my head around the fact that everything I thought was some sort of stellar death knell these past few weeks was actually all real.
Ajax. His hunter brothers. The men trying to kill me.
“Grace,” Gabriel—the king’s vampire doctor—said in that calming way only super intellectual people like doctors can manage. “You’re safe. I want you to try and take a few deep breaths for me, please.”
I almost laughed because the vampire looked like he could’ve walked right off of that vampire show True Blood. Did they all have to be so magnificent looking when I was totally ordinary?