The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (18 page)

"What?" she whispers, and I swallow. She tips her head back, alarmed. "Damon, what's wrong?"

"There's something I need to tell you."

She rolls off me, her movements quick and frustrated as she pulls herself up to a cross-legged position beside me. "No."

Even with the cold weight in my stomach, I have to smile at that. "Oh come on, isn't that every girl's day dream? A guy who
wants
to talk?"

"Not like this," she informs me. "I know that face. That's the high-and-annoying-road face and I'm done with it." She sighs, her eyes softening. "Damon, we've been through this. I know who I'm marrying."

Her words hit me like a jolt of pure, sweet adrenaline. My skin flashes cold, then hot and viciously sensitive as every thread in the sheets imprints itself into my back and my memory.

Humiliatingly, I have to clear my throat once, then twice before I can speak. Elena's fingers cuddle around my wrist, her knuckles brushing my bare hipbone.

"Yeah, you kinda don't," I finally manage to say, the tenderness of her touch giving me my guts back because I'm doing this for her. I'm way too selfish to do it just on my own account. "You couldn't even match up a list of continents with decades if I gave you the worksheet a la Damon Salvatore."

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."

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.