“I fed on them.” Breathe. “My brothers, the ones who survived, who begged me to fight back.” Breathe through it, just breathe. “I… I tore them apart.”
Her fingers brush mine, caressing me in a soft, barely there touch, like she doesn’t see the monster I’m revealing. Then she shifts closer, her thumb stroking steady circles over my hand.
And Goddesses help me, I need it. I needher.
“I don’t know what to say.” Her voice wavers, eyes still locked on mine. “You lost everything, and then… you lost yourself too.”
I close my eyes and exhale the kind of pain that never really leaves. I don’t deserve her compassion, her understanding, but I can’t deny how good it feels.
“Do you miss him?” her soft touches never stop as she asks.
I nod, then add, “I miss who he was before.”
Before power twisted him, before grief carved him hollow, before he stopped being my brother and became something else entirely.
But I can’t escape blame. We both stepped into hell together. He simply left it sooner.
She leans in, even closer, so close the warmth of her knee brushes mine. “You don’t have to tell me more,” she says gently, too kind, so stark after what I’ve just revealed. “But I just need to know… did you find her? The woman who…”
The woman who turned me. Damned me. Killed my brother. Left me to feed on mine.
I turn my hand beneath hers, palm up and open. Waiting to see what she’ll do… and when she laces her fingers through mine like it’s the easiest thing in the world, my heart thuds.
I shake my head. “I never saw her again.”
“And you were alone.” Her words trail off, soft as dusk. “After all of that, you were just… on your own?”
I study her expression, trying desperately to imagine what she’s thinking. Wishing she would drop her mental wall, just for a moment.
“For the first few decades, yes. But it was a haze.” A blur of bloodlust, an unrelenting, feverish hunger gnawing at me.“Newly turned vampires often struggle with their needs, and I was no exception. I needed the solitude.”
Couldn’t risk being around others. Didn’t believe I deserved it.
“In time, cruelty became my nature too, just like my father.” Her fingers twitch around mine. “I lost most of my humanity. I indulged every whim and took what I desired, without consequence. The only sin I didn’t commit, was forcefully turning another. It seemed I had some… morality left in me.”
“Maybe it was your mother,” she whispers.
I stare at Jasmine, hearing the words but not understanding. The suggestion that my mother’s kindness still lingers in me… it feels like a lie.
But Jasmine believes it, I see it in her burning gaze, daring me to defy her, and somehow, that belief unmoors me more than any blade ever could.
“I also find it hard to believe someone so cruel, soevil”—her voice lowers, turning faintly mocking—“would save a random fae. A complete stranger.” She raises her brows at me, waiting for argument.
But I won’t, especially not when she’s holding my hand.
Satisfied by my silence, she gives a small smirk before asking, “When did you meet Sai?”
There’s something in the way she says it, like she doesn’t see the monster I just shared with her, like she wants me to see what she does.
“I spent long stretches in the Dark Realm, observing the chaos, but when the Dark War began, I left. I began wandering the Earth Realm—countries, districts—for a few decades. Until one day, I felt… a pull.”
The same pull I felt the night we changed our route to The Inferno.
“It was to a realm I couldn’t enter alone. But by then, I knew how. I visited Purgatory, seduced a high fae, persuaded her to invite me. And there I found… Sai.”
Chapter 25: Julien
After so many lifetimes, this memory always remains, and in it, Sai is barely a man.
