The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (50 page)

For the following three days, I kept Katherine sleeping the peaceful sleep of the heavily morphined while I waited for the vervain to pass out of her system. Meanwhile, I alternated between playing boozy, profanity-laden gin rummy with Ric and pacing the too-short hallways of the Motel 6, yammering on the phone to Elena at all hours of the day and night like a teenage girl. I didn’t want to talk about what I was going to do with Katherine, or when I’d be home, but I had to hear her voice so I’d talk about
anything
else.

During those phone calls, Elena got stories of my past out of me that I haven’t thought about in decades, I listened to her impassioned summation of why
One Tree Hill
was so much more than a soap opera, we argued philosophies of taxation, disagreed about what colors cars should be painted, and she made me laugh so loudly that Ric came out to check on me after she did a little one-woman show satirizing all the making up and making out that was going on all around the vacation house they apparently rented after I got kidnapped.

I smirk at the memory and check my phone again, but there’s no word from Ric.

Dick.

He probably forgot about picking me up and is drunk in front of
Wheel of Fortune
, shouting out the wrong answers to all the word puzzles and cursing at the contestants for being mentally impaired.

The airport terminal stretches out before me and I lengthen my stride, wishing I could risk a little kick of vampire speed because there are acres of industrial carpet and gift shops between me and the taxi stand, then a three-hour drive to their vacation rental. Except I can’t exactly go there if Ric’s not sober enough to play temporary restraining order for me. Stefan could probably handle it if I gave him a weapon, but I can’t gamble Elena’s safety on that possibility.

Besides, Stefan’s still a little whiny at me for appointing him deputy to Ric’s sheriff’s badge for the extended search and destroy mission we’ve got planned to mop up the last few Augustines. I figured that Stefan’s always responded well to some healthy competition, and both of them could benefit from a little purpose in their aimless lives.

Otherwise, Ric’s going to bankrupt his meager bank account on whiskey and self-help books with titles like
Cunnilicious
and
Wham, Bam, You Da Man
that he thinks I don’t know he’s been ordering off his Amazon app all week.

Plus, Ric loves all that detective shit, and it’s going to be a righteous bitch tracking down all the members of the Augustines who survived the fire or weren’t there when Katherine lit the match.

Delegation, bitches. It’s the new lazy.

Besides, once I’m sure I can touch Elena without wanting to go all vampire-hating-minion on her beautiful ass, I’m going to be Otherwise Occupied. By marrying her about forty-two times, and having three times as many wedding nights, and then seeing how long we can live naked on a beach before we run out of tourists to eat.

Rounding the corner, I see the rat-maze of airport security ahead of me, complete with tiny yapping dogs and glitter-encrusted teenage girls with bored eyes, tiny shorts, and big cell phones standing behind their paunchy, suspicious-faced daddies.

Home freaking stretch.

There’s no security for those of us headed out into the wild, dangerous world, so I blow by the body scanners and wand-toting Rent-a-Gropers and into the bypass lane that heads straight to my bright yellow ride home. Except shit, I’d better hit an ATM, because no way am I carrying enough cash to tip on a three-hour cab ride unless I do it in the kind of sexual favors that don’t come up until Chapter 15 of Ric’s latest Amazon purchase.

Not that I peeked or anything.

I scan for one of the ubiquitous grey banking machines and what I see instead has me stopping dead, the double-wide stroller behind me riding right up into my Achilles tendon until the exhausted mom piloting it backs off with a muttered, “Sorry, sorry.”

There’s no way he’s stupid enough to do this here.

Except that calm brown eyes and a steady jaw assure me that he is. Ric’s standing front and center of the waiting area on the other side of the security bypass. And as if two dozen jumpy airport guards weren’t enough of an audience for testing out what kind of kamikaze craziness the Augustines might have wired into my brain, Ric brought the whole damn home team.

Tweedle-hates-me-for-kissing-his-girlfriend-dee and Tweedle-the-blue-haired-girlfriend-in-question-dum are standing off to the side in front of a row of empty chairs. In the middle is Ric, accompanied by a woman who currently scares me more than an entire army of flamethrower-armed-Augustines. And on the right we have Brother Dearest and his ultimate match in styling products usage, Vampire Barbie.

Strangely, Baby Gilbert is wearing the guilty eyes and stiff jaw that usually means he’s in trouble, not the other way around. And the punk rock princess beside him lifts a hand in a simple little two finger wave of welcome.

What in the actual fuck?

I cough once and start walking again, making my way over to the waiting area and the chairs where my family waits, because there’s no point in making a scene. At least not before I lose my brainwashed shit and strangle the only girl I ever loved in sight of my brother, God and the FAA because Lia’s best neurosurgeon told me to.

“Your appropriate-time-and-place app needs updating,” I growl at Ric, glaring at him across the careful twenty-foot buffer I’ve left myself.

In my peripheral vision, Elena’s silhouette burns. Slim shoulders and luscious hips, an impatient tilt to her head.

She’s destroying me, and I haven’t even glanced her way yet.

“Damon…” Elena says softly, and I almost run. God help me, in front of every one of these cameras and cell phones and I would blow the top clean off what they think human speed can be.

But Ric and Stefan both take a step forward like they can hear my panic in the silence, and I meet Ric’s dark eyes and remind myself of how fast he moved when the Augustines attacked. I remember all the times I’ve snapped his neck for him, to stop him from doing something he couldn’t forgive himself for.

Ric jerks his chin at me once in greeting, and my brother just waits quietly. Anger flares through me as I see that Stefan’s hands are relaxed, like he has no intention of doing anything.

Stefan should be more on guard, damn him. It’s Elena’s safety at stake here, and I know that means something to him. But he rocks his weight into his heels and gives me one of his mild, knowing looks that makes me want to punch him straight through the concrete pillar at his back. Right now is so not the time for him to start trusting me.

If I were smart, I’d walk away from this whole thing and set up another meeting with Elena, with more bodyguards and less potential human witnesses.

But because I’m a perverse son of a bitch and nearly two centuries of bad habits are hard to kick, I do the wrong thing.

I look at Elena.

And immediately get déjà vu. Because I just left Katherine in a hospital bed in San Francisco, with a carefully calibrated concussion, thirty thousand dollars in an account that matches the name on the fake ID in her purse, and no clue who she is or what she’s done with the twenty years of life that her new birth date tells her that she’s experienced.

Katherine’s going to get what she always should have had: a normal life as a beautiful woman. This time, all her choices will be her own and if she turns out to be a selfish, brilliantly manipulative bitch all over again, at least it won’t be because there’s a vindictive hybrid with an indeterminate accent chasing after her. It is a gift, and a uniquely cruel punishment, and exactly the kind of imperfect redemption she’s earned.

Right before I took off, I turned back for one last look at the woman who gave me my immortal existence and did her best to ruin it, and I felt absolutely nothing.

Which is what I feel now.

Disorientation tornadoes through me and I take one unsteady step, planting my feet a touch wider to keep my balance as a name falls from my lips, my eyes slipping to Stefan’s when the word becomes a question.

“Elena?”

He gives me one bare nod, his eyes darkening, and I make myself look at her again.

Earrings dangling little silver hearts. The daylight ring I designed twisted sideways on her finger like she’s been playing with it. Wearing the new ankle boots that she told me over the phone that she loves, but that pinch her left foot and she can’t figure out why.

It’s Elena, it couldn’t be anyone else, but I wait for my body to respond like it has every time I’ve laid eyes on her for the past two years and instead all I hear is the slow, steady beat of my own vampire heartbeat.

This can’t be happening.

I have forgotten hundreds upon thousands of moments that I’ve lived through. Happily. And then others play over and over again through my tired mind, whether I want them to or not.

Right now, I know I’m seeing this moment for only the first of many painful replays, because I’m staring at the love of my life and I feel like I don’t know her. The Augustines have ruined me.

I sit down.

“Are you okay?” Elena’s eyes are paragraphs of worry, pages of possibilities of all the things that could have gone wrong in the time since we’ve been apart.

Her voice.

My heart jolts into overdrive as I realize her soft tone carries every familiarity that was screamingly missing from my reaction to her beautiful face. I close my eyes and bite my tongue so I won’t beg her to keep talking, to baptize me in the soundtrack of everything that I adore.

Her voice is the sound of our future re-opening into a thousand imagined days behind my closed lids, all rich with the possibilities the Augustines couldn’t take from us.

They only had pictures to work with, so they trained me not to respond to the sight of her, to make it easier to transfer all my loyalty to Lia. But I love Elena with so much more than just my eyes.

Ric moves behind my chair and his hands come to rest on my shoulders, lightly, but I can feel the comfort of their strength because he’s reassuring me that he can stop me if I need him to.

“Are you okay?” he asks, the question echoing darker when he says it. “Damon?”

Now that I know the glitch in my reaction is only in my sight, not in my heart or my dangerous hands, I’m caught by the idea that they all came here together. To keep Elena safe, but also to meet me after all the days I’ve been gone. So I wouldn’t have to sit through a three-hour drive before I could see them, or maybe, bizarrely, so they wouldn’t have to wait that long to see me.

I sit very still, because I’m still trying to process the fact that if I go crazy, every person surrounding me will move to stop me, but none of them would ever truly hurt me. It’s a feeling I’ve never had before, not once in my very long life.

I open my eyes.

“I am,” I tell the people who love me, “every kind of okay.”

Elena takes a step closer and I catch her scent, rich vanilla sugar and tart peaches with just a touch of something darker that she began to wear at the same time as her daylight ring. It’s like a wave of everything beautiful that’s left in this wide world all at once, and I know that whatever connections the Augustines erased in my mind, she can put them back in place, given time. And for Elena? I have all the time in the world.

I smile crookedly at my brother, who is starting to look a little nervous about my reaction.

“The layovers were a bitch on this trip,” I drawl. “That’s all.” The lines around Stefan’s eyes relax and Caroline takes a half step closer to him until their shoulders bump and the backs of their fingers tease across each other without ever really catching.

He smiles back at me and I nod knowingly, because it seems like Vampire Barbie might have finally nabbed him after all these years of flirting and “just friends.” He looks better, and I’m glad. I don’t care if she wants to curse me for everything from puppy-hating to improperly sorting my recycling and hate me for the next ten centuries, as long as she takes good care of my brother.