Danse Macabre 3: Deadly Deception

The Sweetest Nightmare

Five

The Sweetest Nightmare

Groaning, I rolled on my side and discovered I wasn't in bed alone. No, Aleksi laid beside me, staring with his eyes open. I could feel his gaze, heavy and thick pressing against me like he was trying to see through me and peer into my mind. I swallowed and tried not to be nervous, or at least not to let it show.

"H-hey," I smiled a bit and propped myself up on my elbow to look at him. He continued to stare. Did he know? No, that would have been impossible.

"You never called me back," his words came slowly and I couldn't help but get the feeling he was trying to prod me to see if I knew something. Or maybe I was reading too much into it because I did know something... or at least I was suspicious.

I covered my face. "I'm so sorry, Aleksi. Things got away from me today. I started a book." I smirked. "Or rather I started outlining one."

"You're not going to be another Becky Erickson are you?" He lofted a brow and chuckled.

"No, it's fiction. I don't think I could tell someone how to live their lives when I hardly know how to live my own." I shrugged. The soft blue moonlight of the room made his skin almost glow in the darkness. It made me think of all the million different ways people described Sidhe Skin. Aleksi was a perfect amalgamation of every thing perfect and masculine while some how still being pretty. Guilt soured the moment as I touched his cheek, it felt the same as it always had, soft and just above room temperature with a bit of a scrape from his stubble. But those eyes that looked back at me weren't quite Aleksi's eyes. And now that I'd become more aware of it I couldn't unsee it, this wasn't the man I loved. It took every last ounce of who I was to not break down in tears.

He leaned to kiss me and I scooted away.

"I'm really not feeling well." I held my stomach and jumped up from the bed, darting for the bathroom. Closing the door I leaned against the sink as I turned on the water. He entered without asking and walked over to me, first checking my temperature with his hand on my forehead.

"You don't have a fever."

I shook my head. "I think it's just my stomach. The cold water's helping with the nausea." He stroked my back and leaned against the counter.

My conversation with Colette came back to me, it was the little things he didn't know. Like the incents burner, things that would be completely and utterly insignificant to anyone else that only mattered to Aleksi.

Swallowing I glanced up at him, he seemed so devoted, so utterly doting. "I'm almost completely certain that my stomach is all nerves. Niki is..." I shook my head. "I keep thinking about that warning you gave me when we were first getting involved."

"Vampires are dangerous, you of all people know how much that's true now." My whole body went cold. That wasn't it all. I splashed my face with water as I could hear Aleksi speak those words to me all over again. It was a Shakespeare quote, and a warning specifically about him. As I shut my eyes tight, I could hear him speak those words to me all over again "I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us." The memory seemed so vivid and the quote so painfully applicable. But there was another Shakespeare quote that popped into my head as I opened my eyes.

Hell is empty and the devils are all here.

I sobbed. "He's done too much, and I just don't think I can forgive him. I thought I could, I thought I had." I shook my head, trying to bury my tears under a heap of lies. "It hurts my heart but... I think it's over between Niki and me."