Blood Born: Cora's Choice #2 Read Free Page B

one knew where I was. I could just vanish forever into this great house. Only my doctor and Lisette could have any idea where I’d gone, and how easy would it be for a man like Mr. Thorne to make a single, parentless girl disappear?
    “ Am I your prisoner, then?” I managed.
    “ Of course not,” he said, approaching me. “Do you really want to go, Cora? Put on your clothes, take your jacket and disappear from this place, never to see it again? Never to see me again?”
    “ Yes,” I lied reflexively. The thought of leaving was like a sickness in my stomach. I stood, transfixed, as he approached, unable to put even another foot of space between us. “What do you want from me? More blood?”
    He stopped, his body only inches from mine.
    “ Your cure—and my nourishment—is only the beginning to the changes that the conversion has wrought,” he said. “And only the beginning of what is between us.”
    “ What do you mean?” I whispered, swaying slightly as I fought the warring urges within me.
    I wouldn’t let my life be changed, whatever he said. I wouldn’t give up the very thing I’d wanted so desperately to save.
    He reached down and enclosed my unresisting hand in his own, raising it so our clasped hands were in front of my eyes. I could see a mark, like a tear-drop of blood, on his inner wrist. I stared at it uncomprehendingly, and he twisted our hands so that I was looking at my own inner wrist, and there was its mate. It looked like a port wine birthmark, not a tattoo, except it hadn’t been there before.
    “ What have you done to me?” I demanded.
    “ I have changed you,” he said. “That is the bondmark, Cora. It appears when a human survives feeding and is transformed. It shows that you belong to me now. In every way. Forever.”
    I shook my head, unable to summon the words to deny him.
    Dorian released my wrist and brushed a strand of hair back from my face, a motion I might have called tender if it had come from someone else. Some thing else.
    “ It’s a great gift, Cora. More than a cure. Not only can you never again develop cancer, but you will never suffer any other human illness. And, like me, you will never grow old.”
    I gaped at him. “I’m...immortal?”
    For some reason, the question called up a deep grief that flickered over his face before disappearing again.
    “ No,” he said. “You can die of starvation and thirst, exposure or heat or cold. And if an injury is sudden enough and catastrophic enough, it will kill you. Agelessness—isn’t that gift enough?”
    I felt dizzy. How long might I survive in that case? A hundred years? Three hundred? My Gramma had died at eighty-two. Would there be a time that I would look around and find that everyone I had known in my first fifty years of life was dead?
    Everyone except for him , of course—the creature who was now claiming me as his own.
    “ And you? Can you die?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “I, too, am not immortal, but my ability to heal is considerably greater than yours, and my ability to tolerate extremes and deprivations similarly stronger.”
    “ How old are you?”
    “Older than empires,” he said, “but memory fades.”
    The perfection of his skin no longer looked young to me. It looked ageless and hard, like the beauty of a diamond.
    “ I don’t want to forget my past,” I protested. “I don’t want to lose who I am—who I was.” I didn’t want the coldness that I felt in him.
    Again, that brief sadness. “Despite everything that I will do to protect you, it is unlikely that you will live so long.”
    I could feel his influence rolling over me, sweeping me up in it like a twig in a flood, but I pulled back, away from him.
    “No. I don’t care what some mark on my arm says. I’m not...yours. I didn’t agree to it. I don’t want it. All I want is my life back. School, a career, marriage, a nice house in the suburbs, kids.” I rattled off my list, so often rehearsed. “Normal things. Sane