“Brother?” Thierry asked hesitantly. His voice wavered. He still didn’t understand what had just happened or why.
But when Nicolas turned to his twin, there was a wide smile on his face and a vast emptiness in his heart.
Thierry recoiled.
And then Magnus laughed, his eyes lighting up with sick pleasure at what he had done.
Revulsion filled me, and I pulled Nicolas close. I felt his pain keenly as his heart broke all over again.
I chose this,Nicolas whispered, sounding stunned.There was a moment when I could have denied it, but I didn’t.
You didn’t know what you were choosing. This wasn’t your fault,I told him fiercely.It was never your fault. Magnus did this.
The pain Nicolas felt in that moment—the loss of everything that could have been—tore through both of us. I held him through it, wrapping my arms around him while he wept. And though something within him was breaking, I knew, deep in my bones, that something else was breaking free.
The person he had always been, buried underneath everything else. The man—hardly more than a boy—that I had fallen in love with at first sight, lifetimes ago.
Faces surged through our shared memory, and I somehow knew they were the faces of his victims. The first few, after Magnus had released him, were all innocent people.
His guilt was a crushing thing, and he tried to shield me from that too.Don’t look, Eli. Please.
Loving you means accepting the good and the bad.I held him tighter, putting every ounce of conviction I could into my words.This is who you were, Nicolas. It’s what you were made into. You didn’t choose this. It isn’t who you are now.
Then I saw Nicolas, early in his transformation, as he stalked the shadows of alleyways in the middle of the night, searching for prey to slake his thirst. Then a woman’s voice split the night as she cried out for help.
It was cut off suddenly.
Nicolas moved forward silently, drawn to the sound, scarcely aware of what he was doing or why.
He turned a corner and watched as a drunken man pressed himself against a frightened young woman in the filthy alleyway. He had one hand over her mouth, and his other was trying to pull up her skirts.
In that instant, the predator in Nicolas saw an opportunity to dominate another beast. He moved in a blur of speed, wrenching the man off the young woman and flinging him to the ground.
The woman fled at once, running through the alleyway. Nicolas considered going after her but decided against it. Her blood would have satisfied his appetite, but not the deeper desire that had suddenly taken root in him—of turning another predator into his prey.
The man climbed to his hands and knees, blood oozing from his lip. Nicolas’s gaze zeroed in on it, his fangs dropping.
The man, not understanding the danger he was in, drew a dagger and darted forward.
Nicolas sidestepped him easily. A cold smile twisted across his lips. There was something immensely satisfying about prey that fought back, wasn’t there?
The man turned and lunged at him again with a grunt of fury.
Nicolas caught him by the shoulders, his grip hard enough to crush bone, and backed him into the wall—exactly where he had held the young woman. The man let out a sharp cry of pain, abruptly helpless in the adamantine clutches of a hungry vampire.
The dagger clattered to the ground.
His wide, disbelieving eyes met Nicolas’s in the darkness. His lips parted—perhaps to scream—but Nicolas clamped his palm over the man’s mouth.
And then he drank.
That was the first time I realized I preferred to feed from dangerous humans.Nicolas’s mental voice was tight withguilt and grief.Eventually, my criteria became far more… discerning.
I caught the bitter tone of his thoughts.You probably saved that young woman’s life,I assured him.Or at least spared her from experiencing something vile.
Does that make it right?Nicolas wondered.I took his life, Eli. I killed him in that filthy alleyway. And I didn’t do it out of a sense of justice. I did it because I enjoyed it.
If you hadn’t stopped him, he would have hurt her—and probably would have done it again and again, until someone else eventually stopped him.
