She shot upright. “That’s rich, when you’re the specter of death come to hunt us and take us captive!”
He crossed his arms and gave her a look powerful enough to send warriors scurrying for cover. She didn’t change expression.
“Judge me for honoring my blood-sworn duty,” he said at last. “But I never lied to you.”
“I never said I wasn’t a vampire,” she mumbled half-heartedly, then glanced away as if no longer able to meet his gaze.
Ellie slid off the bed and to her feet. She snatched up her discarded gown as if she could hide behind the rumpled silk.
She would quickly learn there was nowhere to hide. No matter how furious she made him, he would never let her go. He had spent centuries hunting the wrong thing.
Love was the only thing worth spending one’s life chasing. And Ellie was the only person he wished to spend eternity with. She was more important than the mission. In fact, she changed the mission. He still had contact with several members of the clan.
Cain would do whatever it took to keep Ellie safe.
Not that she had done badly herself.
“How did you manage to conceal the truth?” he asked in bafflement. “You seem—seemed—so convincingly human.”
“I am human,” she insisted, tugging at her laces. “Sort of.”
Cain couldn’t believe his ears. “You are a vampire!”
“Well, how was I supposed to know?” she burst out, staring up at him beseechingly.
“I don’t know,” he said sarcastically. “Perchance the fangs and the bloodlust might have been clues?”
Ellie backed into the bedside table. “That just started this week.”
Cain stared at her in disbelief. “How old are you? Truly?”
Her lower lip wobbled. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
She lifted a shoulder as if this were a mundane detail only a pedant would concern himself with, but her eyes shone as if battling tears. “Mother... Mother says I was born sometime last century.”
“Sometime last...” Cain gaped at her. “Are you saying Aggie Munro is your birth mother?”
Ellie’s chin rose. “I’ve never said otherwise.”
“You’ve never said anything, confound it!” He tried to reconcile what he thought he knew with what he saw before him. “But if that’s true, your father...”
“Was human.” She ran a finger over the marble bust of one of the Breckenridge ancestors. “I would appear to be half-blood.”
He rocked backward. No wonder she’d smelled human, sounded human, acted human. That side of her heritage would always be part of her. As would that of vampire. It was amazing.
She was amazing.
“Mixed-blood offspring,” Cain breathed, unable to fathom being in the presence of something so rare as to be legendary, yet unable to dispute the truth of it. He hurried forward, reaching out for her in his excitement. “When the Elders find out?—”
She moved so quickly, he didn’t have a chance to process the trajectory of the marble bust slamming into his head.
Blackness.
Chapter 13
“Mama!”
