The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (44 page)

Lia’s the complete opposite: she loves like Elena, so big and beautiful and crazy with caring that she can’t see clearly around the swell of emotion ruling her body. I want to hate my old friend, even just for long enough to drive the cheap wood of a hotel chair leg through her chest, but I can’t. Because she was trying to save me too: to give me a life where she thought I could be happy, that was full of every second chance Katherine took away when she addicted me to blood and violence and vengeance. Lia said she never wanted to hurt me and despite everything she’s done since then, I believe her, too.

I sit down right where I am, my back leaned carelessly against the end of the short hotel bed. I never bothered to turn on the light and I hardly notice. There’s nothing here I want to see.

Too soon, Lia’s neck will heal. The morphine I stole from the hospital will wear off, and Katherine’s eyes will flutter open.

The two silent women sharing this hotel room with me possess the power to ruin life as we know it for every single being on the planet.

And I don’t want to kill them.

My brother is the moral accountant in the family, tallying right and wrong with scrupulous efficiency. The columns of his personal ledger books fill one after another until the summation of his sins spills out of their leather bound prisons, grows into stacks of books he can no longer cram into that dusty armoire of his that used to serve as the graveyard of past Stefans.

Even though I don’t spend much energy on that kind of shit, I still understand right and wrong, the way you know a language you haven’t spoken in a decade or two. It is blank where the memories should be, but the words jump to your lips with surprising speed when you need them.

So right now, my brain is happy to inform me that the world would be better off without either Katherine or Lia in it. Their misguided altruism should be quarantined on the Other Side with all the others whose evil came wrapped in the bright, shiny trappings of Doing The Right Thing.

What I don’t know is if my reluctance to kill them is real or part of the Damon 2.0 upgrade that was only halfway done downloading when Katherine’s arson interrupted the process of whatever they had planned for my future visits to their lab.

My current dilemma has all the identifying features of the uniform of Augustine Mind Fucks R Us: loyalty to their queen bee, and an inexplicable tendency toward non-violence and protectiveness of human life. But it also has the distinct tailoring of something made to fit into my own wardrobe: dyed with the bright Screw You color of disregard for what the rest of the world thinks, and cut along the classically humiliating lines of I Can’t Kill People I Love.

I let my head hang on my neck, my numb knees propped up and shoes flat on the scrungy motel carpet, hands dangling limply from the forearms resting on my legs.

My body
hurts
, and I’m not sure if the pain is from the escape or a side effect of my ill-advised attempts to buck the Augustines’ neurosurgery all week.

I need to see Elena.

I need her hands to make my skin feel like my own again, need the color of her eyes to make me forget Katherine’s ever existed, need to baptize myself in the presence of someone who loves me and doesn’t want me to change.

I need to see her slender finger claimed by my ring.

When she agreed to be my wife, I wanted to give her my daylight ring.

I know the whole idea is crazy. The ring is too big and not her style, and oh yeah, I’d burst into flames and die a horrible, irreversible death the first time we went for a sunny Sunday picnic. But it’s the only thing apart from my own body that has been with me every day of my immortal existence and so it is the only object permanent enough to mark my commitment to her.

It feels like the Augustines could take a blowtorch to my brain and they still couldn’t erase what she is to me. But I won’t know for sure until I see her.

The way they set up the conditioning, it seems to be triggered by the
sight
of people: of Lia, and Elena. I don’t think they got far enough to program my reactions to anyone but the two of them, but my impressions of the brainwashing are slippery and hard to hold onto. I suppose when they’re finger painting their way across your synapses, it’s difficult to form new memories.

I know they didn’t addict me to vampire blood, but cold sweat breaks out across my temples as I consider all the other things they might have implanted in my brain about Elena. Once I see her, I might hate her, might be compelled to hurt her, to kill her. To feed from her.

I might feel nothing at all.

I can’t be trusted with Elena, not yet.

I need some time to re-wire my own brain and even once that’s done, I am going to need thick chains, both Stefan and Ric to chaperone my untrustworthy ass and enough vervain to drown a whole army of vampires.

But I will see her again. And no matter what they’ve done to who I am, I
will
love her again.

I wonder if she saw the fire on the news. It’s going to have a hell of a body count, and she’ll probably guess it had something to do with me. A curse jumps to my lips as I realize she won’t know for sure if I am a number in the body count.

I’m on my feet and beside the hotel bed before another thought has time to form. The Augustines took my phone, but Katherine will have one. She landed in a loose sprawl on her side when I dropped her and now I push her onto her back, gritting my teeth against the wave of revulsion as I dig in the pocket of her tight jeans.

She sighs, a heavily drugged sound, but doesn’t stir as I pull the device out of her pocket. My eyebrows tick upward when I notice it’s the same prepaid phone Stefan gave her. Well, her little sentimental keepsake is about to get re-possessed.

I punch in Elena’s new number from memory before I realize she would be saved in Katherine’s contacts.

My eyes squeeze closed, the soles of my shoes desperately gripping the floor as I try to keep myself from blurring toward the stolen car outside. I’m not safe. This screaming desire in me to be with her might be just another trick, the prompt for whatever abomination they want me to visit upon her.

I grit my teeth for three rings, then four. By the fifth, I’m almost to voicemail and about to grind my molars straight through my gums, and then Jeremy’s voice answers.

“Katherine,” he says, “today is not the day to mess around, okay? If this isn’t about where Damon is, we don’t have time for it.”

I can hear Ric in the background, growling something much less polite about what Katherine can do with her mocking little phone calls. My fingers twitch with relief at the sound of his voice.

He’s still here.

I knew there was a better than 50/50 chance Ric would vanish while I was a prisoner of the Augustines and I need to swallow once before I can speak as I try to process the idea that I might get to enjoy another drink with my best friend before the Other Side steals him from me again.

His voice is fading already, as if Jeremy is walking off to get more privacy for his phone call and I speak before he can get too far away. “Where’s your sister?” I say unevenly.

Jeremy goes quizzically silent, as if he doesn’t quite recognize my voice. “Is this…” he attempts, and a tiny, bloodless smile kicks up the corner of my lips at how cautious he’s being about saying my name in front of whoever’s listening.

He’s a good kid.

“Of course it’s me, shit for brains,” I growl. “Who else would light up a secret underground compound of vampires like they were an Independence Day barbecue? Now let me talk to your damn sister.”

A laugh comes snorting out of his nose and there’s a scrape of the phone against his cheek like he just turned to look at somebody. “Yeah, yeah, hold on,” he says, but then hesitates. “So, uh, you’re…okay, right?”

“What do you mean, is she okay? It’s Katherine, she’s fine. And whatever she’s saying, Jeremy, it’s probably a trick.” I hear Elena’s voice far away in the background and pride rushes through me so fast it leaves me lightheaded. Sounds like my girl is keeping everybody in line.

“I’m walking on sunshine,” I say gruffly. “How are things back at the farm?”

Jeremy laughs, but it sounds unsteady and as far from amused as you can get without leaving a blood trail. “Been better. We uh…saw there was a fire, and–” He clears his throat. “Yeah. But it’s fine.”

Shit.

“Let me talk to her.”

My voice sounds raw and too bare in the silence of the anonymous hotel room. I wonder how many people have sat in here and listened to their life unravel over the phone. Probably overdue bills and divorce and maybe a cancer diagnosis or two since the hospital’s right down the street.

Bet I’m the first one who’s been brainwashed to hate and potentially eat his fiancé.

I listen to the scuffling sound of Jeremy passing the phone over without introduction and I age two decades and three fashion paradigm changes in the space of a single second.

My fingers tighten on the receiver of Katherine’s phone, which smells like makeup. I walk over to the small table and mismatched chairs by the window and sit down with my feet on the floor and my spine against the poorly padded backrest. The first rule of controlling yourself is to decide how your body is allowed to move. If Elena’s going to be safe with post-brain-surgery me, I’m going to have to be the poster child for willpower.

“Hello?”

My eyes fall closed so I can savor the pleasure of both the syllables that just touched her tongue. The stale air of the hotel room feels softer and for the first time I realize it’s warm in here. Not hot, just lacking the faint edge of too-strong industrial air conditioning that plagued every room of the Augustine compound.

“Damon?”

I am absolutely still, scrupulously silent, but Elena recognizes me anyway.

She swallows, and her voice sounds a little scratchy like she’s been sleeping, or crying. “Damon, is that you?”

I open my mouth to answer her and nothing comes out, my lungs taking over and dragging a shaky breath of oxygen inside as if I’ve been starving for it. I keep myself sitting upright, not allowing my head to fall into my free hand that’s locked into a trembling fist in my lap.

I am in control.

Quickly, I scan my whole body, analyzing my reactions to her voice. My whole system is exploding like I jumped into a swimming pool with a live wire in my teeth streaming pure, rampant testosterone. But my only impulse is to get closer to her, to touch her. Not to drain her, not to tear her apart.

Hope flutters, buried deep within the rioting insanity of my rigidly motionless body.

Did it work? Did I actually outsmart the Augustines and all their electrodes and bone saws and computer meta-analysis of electro-chemical patterning?

Or do they just want me to
think
I outsmarted them until I see my girl again and she’s lying in pieces at my feet before I even realize what I’ve done?

On the other end of the phone, Elena begins to cry.

My heart stomps into my ribs and I find my voice again. “Don’t cry, baby,” I drawl, “I swear the guy at the pawnshop told me it was a real diamond.”

Her surprised laugh is mangled into her next sob.

“Shh, sweetheart,” I tell her, very quietly. “I’m okay.”

She just cries harder. I stare at the blackout curtains over the windows until my eyes start to burn with the need to blink, and absorb the sound of her like it belongs to me, like she’s mourning every lost day of the last week for the both of us at once.

“No,” she murmurs stuffily. “No, Cali, I’m fine I just–Oh!” She sounds surprised, but the crying pauses like she’s hugging someone, and then she sniffles one more time. “Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I know.”