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Rebekah rose onto her knees, preparing to leave and steal back to her own tent, when something incongruous caught her eye. There was something resting on the ground beside Eric’s bed. Picking it up, she saw that it was an intricate gold locket, left open to reveal a miniature portrait within.
The flaxen-haired woman it depicted was lovely, and Rebekah was surprised to feel hot jealousy rising in her throat. It might be Eric’s mother or his sister, she reminded herself. And it didn’t matter anyway, because Eric had been sent across an ocean to find and destroy her. If the woman in the portrait was his wife, then as far as Rebekah was concerned, she could keep him.
She realized she had stayed too long. There was no sound from Felix or the battle. Her expedition had given her a great deal to think about, and probably enough evidence to leave this place and report back to her brothers. She was, after all, surrounded by the army of a vampire hunter and shouldn’t risk any more spying when she was almost certainly being watched.
But she needed to know more. The evidence of Eric’s obsession was troubling, but there could be ugly consequences to assuming she knew what it meant. If she let her brothers get hurt because she did not want to believe...if she let Eric get hurt because she believed too easily...She could not accept either risk. She wouldn’t tell Elijah or Klaus what she’d found yet, but she owed it to them to investigate fully.
Rebekah smoothed the blankets and plumped the pillow, trying to angle the locket exactly as it had been—although perhaps a little farther away from the bedroll than she had found it. She slipped through the outer chamber and poked her head out of the tent to find Felix still waiting. At least that one thing had gone as expected.
“Felix,” she whispered, and he turned attentively. “We must return to my tent now,” she told him, ensnaring him again with the power of her voice. “Once I have gone inside, you will forget that we ever left. You will know only that you followed your captain’s orders and guarded me throughout the battle.”
“I always follow my orders,” Felix told her amiably, and she had no doubt that he meant it.
CHAPTER TEN
KLAUS KEPT TO the walls, watching the garden for the first sign of movement. Any stirring might be Vivia
Klaus reread the note clutched in his left hand for the thousandth time. He was in the right place, and while he had arrived early, she was now late. Vivia
Without his meaning to, his gaze drifted to the vine-covered walls where he had tried to conceal the body of the unfortunate serving girl he’d fed on that same night. Solomon Navarro had learned of that little incident all too quickly, and Vivia
Surely she would come.
He heard the sound of soft footfalls on the grass, and he knew it was not an ambush. Vivia
He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this way about a woman—a century? More? She’d asked to see him, and now she was here...If Mikael had been standing behind him with a white oak stake at that exact moment, Klaus might have died a happy man. Better than that, though, was to live—to live in the astonishing glow of this remarkable young woman, and to know that it was within his reach to win her over.
“I could not have stayed away,” he murmured, speaking the absolute truth. He had never seen her handwriting before that evening, but he had recognized it on sight. Nothing could have kept him from this meeting, not even the very real possibility that it might have been a trap.
He had never truly believed that, though, not really. This was not Klaus’s first midnight rendezvous with a woman, and they usually all had the same purpose. Crickets sang nearby, and the scent of honeysuckle wafted toward them from the vines that climbed the garden wall. It was perfect.
“I needed to see you again,” she breathed, so softly that at first he thought he had misheard her. Then she lifted her face to gaze at him earnestly, and he knew there had been no mistake. “I thought I knew who you were before I even met you, Niklaus Mikaelson,” she told him, “but every time we speak I seem to learn something new. There is depth to you, and passion of course, and a kind of honor I didn’t expect to find. I am more drawn you to every time I see you, but we could never be together. Now that I’ve come to know you a bit more fully, I feel it’s only right to tell you so myself, face-to-face. I have asked you here tonight to make you understand that you must let me go.”
Klaus found himself at a rare loss for words. So he kissed her instead, his lips pressing firmly against her warm ones and his hand gently holding the back of her head in place. She kissed him back, tentative but curious. When she pulled back she rested her dark head against his chest, and he could feel her heart racing. He could have stood there just that way for the rest of the night, if she would agree to it.
“Niklaus, I’m engaged,” she reminded him. Her voice was a bit muffled against the collar of his shirt, but to his keen ear she sounded confused and indecisive. Then she straightened, ru
It was unsettling that she chose the past tense when speaking of him, but he did not feel that hope was lost. “Nothing needs to be decided tonight,” he urged gently. “You are not yet married—there is time to consider.”
“It’s not just that.” Vivia
“Tell me,” he insisted, and he saw her shiver.
“They want me to change,” she whispered. “The Navarros. They say I was raised as a witch, and so I need to become equally werewolf.”
Of course they did. Klaus understood it all immediately. If Vivia
Her answering nod was small, and she glanced over her shoulder at the villa behind her. She knew something was wrong with this request, no matter how much she wanted to believe that neither family would let her come to harm. She was young, and for all of her steely intelligence, she was also naive. She did not yet understand how vulnerable her sweetness made her, and so it would fall to Klaus to rip the throats out of anyone who attempted to use it against her.