“I know.” He agreed, and tears fell onto his cheeks again at the admittance. “It was like I wasn’t me. Or I was a different version of myself.” I soothed a pattern on his thigh, quietly telling him that I was still on his side. “But anyway, when I was coming out of my sobriety, if you want to call it that, Exo surprised me. We’d grown quite close, obviously, over the year I was recovering from my manic state. He told me that I was more than welcome to continue staying with him if I so chose, but he had a gift for me that would allow me to relocate to anywhere in the world that I wanted. To celebrate how far I’d come in winning the war against myself, Exo presented me with access to a bank account.” My eyes widened, hearing the final clicking of things coming into place. “It was an overwhelming amount of money. I questioned how the hell he’d gotten this money, because although his condo in D.C. was very lovely, I knew he rented it and worked in construction so things weren’t adding up.”
“He got the money from everyone that you’d killed?”
With a desperate sigh, Kroven nodded. “I was irate. I’d asked him to explain how he managed to clear their accounts to which he responded that I didn’t need to worry about it, that it was done. I told him to give it back, and he claimed there was no way to do that without raising suspicion. So after completely going off on him, I left. I kept the money, but like I mentioned, I shed a lot of it throughout the years, as often as I can.”
“And then you stumbled upon Piper?”
He nodded again. “I settled into the community, buyingmyself an apartment in the Orb part of town. Eventually, I started volunteering at local soup kitchens on the human side of town until there was a little bit too much animosity about Orbs being so integrated into human spaces. By chance one day, I ended up walking into an antique shop that Grey worked at and he was so charming and so open to Orbs that we struck up a friendship. Over the years, we stayed close friends and, well, you know how I got the house.”
Silence somersaulted around us, and Kroven took a chaste breath as he finished. It was definitely a lot to stomach, but at least I had the knowledge. Kroven had been through so much. Losing Jargenne, leaving his parents and their community, feeling so abandoned and like he didn’t belong. I understood how he’d wanted to make other people hurt to get rid of his own. There had been a part of me that had felt that way after my grandma died. She was the last family that I had, and it hurt to be alone without any support. That’s why Thayer meant so much to me.
But Kroven didn’t have anyone when he needed them most. He only had his pain and a need to rid himself of it. My heart hurt for him as much as it did for the people he’d killed. It was hard to weigh those against each other. Those people didn’t deserve to die simply because Kroven hadn’t been able to regulate what he’d gone through. But Kroven also didn’t deserve to be condemned for the rest of his life for it either.
Taking a deep breath, I turned Kroven’s face toward me, letting my palm caress the side of his hairless face. “I’m not going anywhere, okay? I’ll admit it’s a lot to digest, but I still care about you. Thank you for trusting me enough to tell me.”
New tears replaced the old ones on his face, one of them beading on the back of my hand as it slid along my knuckles. Kroven placed his hand over mine and leaned into my touch.
“I don’t deserve you.”
“You deserve a second chance to be better and that’s exactlywhat you’ve done.” I reiterated. “Look at me.” When he set his crimson irises opposite my blue ones, I nodded. “You’re not a monster. You’re my boyfriend.”
His face crumpled in on itself as he let out a sob, pulling me into a kiss in appreciation of my decency. When he pulled back, he ran a hand through my hair. “I promise I’ll never do anything to hurt you, Bas. I care too much about you.”
“I know you won’t.” I beamed, giddy from his touch. “How about we relax from the heaviness you just freed yourself from and watch some TV?”
“Only if we pick up where we left off on Sailor Moon,” Kroven agreed. “It’s actually quite good and I want to see more of it.”
Laughing at that, I positioned myself so I could lean my head on his shoulder as I set up the screen in front of us. I relaxed into the chair even more when Kroven leaned his head on mine, telling me that he knew that everything between us was going to be okay.
Chapter 23
Returningto Piper felt like landing into a comfortable but itchy blanket. I knew that we hadn’t exactly accomplished much in our trip to D.C. but Kroven assured me that if Exo and Wallace said they were coming to Piper, then they were coming here to see how bad the blood centers were for themselves. The only thing we had to do was wait.
Which sucked, by the way. Two weeks went by before Kroven had heard word that Exo and Wallace were finally making their way to Piper. In that time, I’d been working a lot because there were sangamar that were braving the blood center, despite the protestors growing larger and larger in size. They were still scared, of course, but I was covering shifts in both the Orb and human wing, since there weren’t quite enough Orbs to warrant all of us working full-time yet.
The day before Exo and Wallace were coming to Piper, I was at home after a rigorous twelve hour shift. I’d been working a lot of those because I wanted to help as much as I could, something Babs wouldn’t stop praising me for. I updated her on Wallace coming to Piper. That was partly why I felt like she keptputting me on the schedule and kept asking me to work late, so she wouldn’t miss a single notice about Wallace’s impending trip to our city in need.
Kroven and I hadn’t had much time together. We’d shared dinner at his place once, gone through a stroll in the park, and fucked back at my place one night when he’d surprised me after work. It’d been a little over a week since I’d seen him and I had to admit that I was craving my Kroven.
A knock on the door broke me out of the book I was reading on my iPad while lounging on the couch. Thayer was working, so I had the place to myself like usual, which had been a godsend lately with all the late hours I’d been working. I made my way over to the door, looking through the peephole and smiling wide. As if summoned from the confines of my thoughts, Kroven was waiting outside my door.
With a stupid grin on my face, I unlocked the door and opened it to see him beaming back at me.
“Hey, stranger.”
“Come in.” I laughed, gesturing for him to hurry up and get over to me. I wrapped him in a hug, throwing my arms around him as I ambled backward away from the door. He shut it quickly and started kissing my neck “I see someone’s missed me.”
“Always,” He purred, holding my chin in his hand so he could kiss my jaw. “I know you’ve been working crazy hours and I thought I’d see just how tired you were.”
“Oh never too tired for that.” I started shucking off the lounge shorts I had on, but Kroven started losing it, laughing and helping me pull them back up.
“As much as I would love a quick date with you and your bedsheets, I was thinking about an actual date.”
“Oh.” I flushed, my face burning with embarrassment. I covered my face. “Way to jump the gun, Bas.”
“It’s fine,” Kroven snickered. “But I was wondering if you’d indulge me by going on one of those classic human dates of going to the movies with me.”
“A movie sounds wonderful.” It was still early enough that we could grab dinner, but a part of me just wanted to pig out and eat junk food at the movie theater with my boyfriend. “There’s a new horror movie playing that I’ve had my eye on. Let me get dressed real quick and we can go.”
