The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (19 page)

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.

Lia would have loved Elena. She would have teased the shit out of me when I first met her, though.

As much of a sanctimonious bitch as Lexi was, that blonde always reminded me a little of Lia, too, just the easy way Lexi knew Stefan's history, how they could laugh about it together. Nobody would believe me if I told them, but I had that, too. Once.

When I drove a stake through Lexi's heart, it wasn't because I needed a vampire scapegoat for the council. And it also wasn't just because I didn't want to remember a New York rooftop, another manipulative seduction, another girl I left behind. I’d never say it out loud, but the biggest reason I killed Lexi was just so I didn't have to watch her and Stefan. I didn’t want to see how nice it was to have an old friend, because I knew I couldn't be trusted with one.

There's another crinkle of plastic, and a cup lands on the table in front of me, just before Elena slides into the other chair. Her tangled hair is swept over her shoulder and it riots wild and beautiful over her pale skin. She still flinches when she takes her shirt off at night, but right now she sits in front of me, stark naked and looking completely composed. She nods silently at the cup.

My heart in my throat, I fill it, half-wondering if she's going to throw it in my face. I have no idea what she might say to me.

She waits until I fill mine, too, and then she tips her cup toward me. "To Lia," she says. "May she rest in peace."

She takes a sip and I take a gulp, holding it on my tongue so the fumes scorch all the way through my sinuses before I swallow.

Elena looks me squarely in the eye. "And fuck you, for thinking I would rather have had you sacrifice yourself for her, when it means I never would have met you. I'm sorry, Damon, but I'm
not
that selfless."

My head recoils so quickly the tendons in my neck creak. I have never in my life heard Elena Gilbert use that word, but that’s not the shock running like ice water through my veins.

I shove away from the table, my chair tipping over behind me. "What? Are you kidding me? You drowned yourself to save your
ex-
boyfriend and if you think I don't know how terrified you were of drowning you obviously have no clue how many times I snuck into your dreams before Stefan hung his antique vervain albatross around your neck.
You
did that, Elena, and yet to save my best friend I wouldn't even face a bunch of guards that I ended up killing a couple days later anyway. How can you possibly delude yourself into thinking we're the same? That two people like us should ever be married?"

My knees quake when I hit the last word and I almost have to grab the table to steady myself because this is the shadow that has been dogging my thoughts all day. When I saw that cupcake, when she kissed her answer to my proposal into my lips. God help me, even when we were in bed, every letter of my name dirty and delicious in her gasped moans.

There's no way I deserve a girl like this.

I may be a monster, but I'm not Stefan. I
don't
hate myself for it, and I don't even really care that much that I probably should. I know who I am and I know what I've been and I damned well
know
I don't deserve Elena. Not who I am today, not fifty years ago, maybe not even that last sunny day before I signed my body and my life over to the Confederate army and put on the scratchy grey wool that allowed them to make me their killer.

"I made my choice in that truck," Elena says, pushing away from the table and stepping closer to me. "And Lia made her choice in that dungeon. We both made the wrong choice."

"
What
?" Her words don't even make sense. We've argued a thousand times about how she should have let Donovan die and she's never budged an inch.

"I was confused, and I was freaking out, and I've hated myself for it ever since," she confesses. "I thought you were all going to die, and Stefan and everyone in Mystic Falls had each other. I loved all of you and I thought that I had to make a choice of who to love the most and in the end, I copped out. I just couldn't justify choosing you over everyone I knew. I left you to die alone and that's the only reason we were on that bridge the night we crashed."

There are tears in her eyes, and only now do I realize there are dried streaks on her cheeks as well. I made her cry and I didn't even notice. I’m such a dick.

"I told Stefan to save Matt, but it's my fault he was in danger in the first place and if
you'd
actually died I don’t know—" Her face crumples and I'm dying to reach for her. I'd pay anything, give anything,
be
anything to be able to comfort her right now but that's the thing. It has to be her choice. And so I can't touch her.

She swallows and straightens her still-shaking shoulders.

"But all that isn’t the point right now," she says. "I made the wrong choice, and I have to live with that. Lia made the wrong choice, and she died for it. But it was still her choice, Damon."

I just stare at her. The Elena Gilbert I know would run into a burning building to save a tumor-ridden hamster, much less a dozen or so fellow prisoners. How can she be taking
my
side?

"Do you know why I'm alive right now, Damon?” she asks. “Because you took a crossbow arrow in the back for me. Because you fought the Originals for me, even when you knew you couldn’t possibly win. Because you turned Bonnie's mom into a witch to save me. Because you make the hard choices. Lia? Would be alive today if she'd gone with you. Just like all the other vampires that you saved and she
failed
to save," Elena says with iron determination.