The Good Daughter

Fifteen

"Why are we back here, Nik, this town is so..." What wouldn't describe it? "Ass. This town is ass."

"Has Elijah heard her speak yet?" Rebekah threw a knowing look at Nik.

He rolled his eyes, adjusting his grip on the wheel.

I'd been demoted to babysitting in the backseat. Stefan lay unconscious beside me. Nik wanted to put him in the moving truck but I'd convinced him otherwise. It was my job to keep snapping his neck every time he stirred.

"I've already spoken to her about it and it hasn't had any sort of effect. She's gotten rebellious in her time away."

For the love of- "That's a touch dramatic. It was barely a blip in your million years."

"And yet almost half your life." Nik glanced at me in the rearview mirror.

"Good thing I'm immortal then."

"You really are in a cheeky mood." Rebekah flipped the visor down and blinked at the lights on the sides of the mirror.

"Has been since I've found her again. I'll bet she wasn't this way with Elijah."

"I'm this way with everyone, Elijah doesn't get special treatment." Even if they were right. He may allow a certain amount of snark, but he expected respect.

"I suppose we'll just have to ask him when he wakes."

"Wait, really?" I sat forward.

Oh fuck.

I tried not to let the panic show on my face.

Tyler.

My almost one night stand.

One that Nik and Elijah would quite literally maim and then kill if they ever found out that he touched me like that.

"He will be awake in a few hours, yes." Nik must have done it when we had to stop for gas. I wasn't watching him very closely.

"And where are we staying? I don't think the apartment is going to be able to accommodate us and all of the shit you've been lugging around."

"Worry not, little one. I've got everything handled."

"You know, when you guys say stuff like that, it makes me worry just a little bit more."

Rebekah laughed. "He's not trying to scare you."

"Could've fooled me with the shit he pulled in Chicago. I know you guys were just trying to get Stefan to fess up but holy fuck."

"You know as well as I that I don't drag out daggerings. If I'm going to do it, I do so quickly."

"That's only because you don't want us to fight back." Rebekah's expression soured. "You're a coward for keeping us in coffins instead of facing whatever issue is happening at the time."

Nik's chin lifted. "If I remember correctly, it was your foolishness that gave us the daggers in the first place, was it not?"

Really?

"I can't control who I fall in love with!"

"It's hardly love if it happens when a man so much as looks in your direction."

Ooh. Harsh.

Rebekah shifted in her seat, face screwed up in anger. "At least I've felt it. You can't find anyone who wants to be to let in to your dark heart. None exists that could possibly get past your defenses."

He clenched his jaw. "I have no wish to find love, even if I believed it real."

I had to say, I was with him on that one. Familial love, sure, that was real, and that extended to friendships too but love, as in the big L? Yeah, no.

That type of fiction was better saved for children's storybooks.

"You don't believe in it?" She asked quietly. "What about Aurora?"

Who the fuck was Aurora?!

"She was a mistake. One that nearly cost our entire family. Mikael almost caught us because I'd- it doesn't matter. She is in the past."

"Wait, wait, wait. Nik had a girlfriend?!" He'd had flings in the past, but never anything serious. They were always dead and drained or gone before the sun rose. "Aurora?"

It was kind of hard not to know the coming and going of strangers in a home where very few were let inside while there wasn't a party going on.

"Forget that name." He snapped. "She is not to be spoken of."

Alright...

"He's only touchy about it because she was the first woman after Tatia broke his heart." Rebekah whispered beside her hand.

"Oh yeah! I forgot there was a doppelgänger Elijah and Nik had. Well, another one." It still grossed me out that Kathrine once caught Elijah's eye. Thankfully Nik was only using her for the sacrifice and was pretending to fall for her, but Elijah?

He actually tried to save her.

Sometimes I wish she had died in that sacrifice, that my brothers and I lived until we were old and long after Giuseppe was buried.

But that wasn't reality.

I'd forever be a vampire.

Stefan began to stir, and I reached over to snap his neck but Nik stopped me. "I had another witch do a tracking spell and it lead us here." He threw the car into park. In front of us loomed Mystic Falls High School. "I want to see his reaction. It'll be all too telling."