A Slave to Love

Chapter 42: Be My Girlfriend, Be My Girlfriend

"Okay, there's one thing I don't get," Ace said from where he was sprawled back into the reclining armchair, long legs stretched out in front of him, hands behind his head.

"What? Your super smart vampire brain can't comprehend something? Shocking!" 

"Haha. How come you're living here?"

I swallowed hard, staring down at the mug of tea in my hands. It was my second night without Blade and I was already feeling the strain and didn't like it one bit. Ace and I were sitting in one of the living rooms, a large but surprisingly homey spot with a fireplace and cozy couches, a large ornate rug stretching across the dark wood floor. The color scheme in here was very much warm tones, dark reds, burnt oranges, browns, and it just made the whole space even cozier with the fire burning bright in the hearth.

"There was an incident."

"What kind of incident?" 

I was kind of surprised Blade hadn't told him about this yet, I figured being besties for life meant they shared everything and this seemed to be kind of a big deal.

"Um...remember the night of the dance? My dorm mate got attacked."

He sat forward so abruptly in alarm it closed the reclining footrest of his chair with a thump. "She got attacked? By who?"

"It wasn't so much a 'who' as a 'what'," I said slowly.

"Vampires."

Even though he said it as a fact not a question, I answered anyways.

"Yeah. It was really...she almost died. They..." I swallowed hard, remembering her blood pooled and smeared across the walls, the floor, the furniture. Her pale body in her ripped party dress carried out on a stretcher. "They drank from her. And wrote on the wall in her blood."

"What did they write?" 

"'You're next,'" I whispered, "It was for me. They hurt her as a warning for me. I summoned Blade because I was scared. He brought me here to live with him to keep me safe. I've been here ever since."

"That's why he didn't want to leave you alone," he said, the pieces coming together as he wiped a hand over his face with a heavy breath. "And here I thought he was just being obsessive."

"Nope. He doesn't want me to get ki...He doesn't want me to get hurt."

"Has anything happened since then? Other warnings?" he asked, getting off his reclining chair to come sit next to me where I was curled up on the couch.

I shook my head, tugging my soft blanket tighter around my shoulders.

"Nothing," I said. It's not that I didn't trust Ace; I just wanted to talk to Blade about my little incident with Jill first. And maybe find out why he hadn't mentioned the attack to Ace at all.

"I can't believe Blade didn't mention this. Aros could help with this, and even if he couldn't, Blade still should have warned me."

"How could Aros help?" 

"He's like..." he pursed his lips thoughtfully as he tried to search for an appropriate word, "He's kind of like...the boss? Like the king? It's kind of hard to explain. Either way he's very important and deals with all things vampire; enforcing rules, keeping vampires from revealing ourselves to the humans and stuff, doling out punishments, basically running everything in our world. He does a lot and one of those things is keeping rogue vampires from doing stupidities like what they did to your dorm mate and threatening you. We aren't supposed to be out here killing humans, that's against the rules, especially not making a spectacle of ourselves in such a public way that could bring attention to our existence."