Kissed the Mark by Lila Gwynn

Author:Lila Gwynn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: vampire, paranormal romance, lesbian, fairy, ff, sapphic, urban fanstasy
Publisher: Lila Gwynn

Chapter Sixteen

The Vampire and the Fairy

TO GET A NEW SET of eyes on her research, Leandra had me read over Viktor Lehmann’s first diary. I was so exhausted that it took me five minutes to realize I wasn’t comprehending the text because it was in German. The words blurred before my eyes in a big Germanic soup. When I told Leandra I didn’t speak the language, she disappointedly took the diary from me and read it aloud, translating as she went with some difficulty.

I tried my best to pay attention, but my mind wandered. It worried me that she wasn’t as concerned about Patricia; I was the one with my ass on the line, not her. The gifts still confused me—what I’d done was nice enough, I guessed, if she had been observing and only saw that I was caring for the fake version of her, but did it warrant a whole new smartphone and a personalized jacket? I was wary of jumping to conclusions about her kindness. She surely had another agenda in mind and it was only time before I got swept into it.

I was tired enough too that I only now realized I had already been swept into the agenda after she finished describing Lehmann time traveling to murder his younger self. This was the thing she wanted help with. This was actually the thing she’d wanted help with the whole time—we were just doing away with pretenses now. I watched her lips move as she read the text aloud, forehead scrunching when she got to a phrase she struggled to translate into English. She had me transcribing everything she said into a word processor but I knew I was missing some of it. Her voice was the kind they would have used in audiobooks, the kind you’d listen to before bed to have sweet dreams.

“Thanks,” she said.

“What?”

“You just complimented me.”

I hadn’t known I’d spoken aloud. “Leandra,” I said, “I’m sorry for being rude, but I don’t think I’m doing a very good job transcribing.”

“I’m recording it too,” she said, gesturing to a microphone that would be the envy of many a Twitch streamer. “So it’s okay if you don’t get everything. I’ll go over it all.”

“Um.” She had been so polite to me that it was hard to let her know I didn’t want to do it.

“Maybe we should take a break?” she offered. “You look exhausted.”

“I am,” I said.

There was a moment of awkward silence. Leandra had shown me the plush king-sized bed in her bedroom when she went to get a specific picture she’d stolen from Viktor Lehmann’s Austrian villa. We’d been acting like friends, or maybe colleagues who owed each other something, but neither of those were true. I saw my thought process reflected in her expression.

“You can go home if you like,” Leandra said finally. “But if you want to rest here, I can order you food in exchange for helping me?”

Her bed did look nicer than mine. I hated to be beholden to anyone, though.

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