“Oh, Tai.”
“They’re old-school purists, Claire. No, they’re worse than that. I found out…” He closed his eyes a long moment, then stared at the vista in front of them as if trying to find something out there, or someone. “My father’s great-grandparents participated in multiple bloodfiend executions, and some of my relatives are still freaking proud of it, including my dad. Murder isn’t a stain on the family legacy, but my existence is.”
Claire could find no response. She could only be here to hold his words as they kept coming, finally, for the first time.
“I don’t miss them or need them anymore, and people like that aren’t really much of a loss anyway, but I still…”
He didn’t even glance down at her, kept gazing out at the beauty in front of them as if he needed to see it, needed to know the mountains heard him as well as Claire. But his grip tightened on her hand, and she gripped back.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I still miss her. I wish I could play a new composition for her. I wish she could know me now, know that yes, I’m a bloodfiend, but I fight it, and I’ve never hurt anyone. I don’t think she’d have kicked me out, Claire. I think I’d still have her.”
“I think so too,” Claire said. “And you get to miss her. You get to feel it all, Tai, everything you’ve lost.”
His face crinkled up, and his mouth pulled into a grimace as though he were suddenly fighting tears. Claire pressed her arm to his, close but giving him space to keep his eyes on the mountains.
Quietly he said, “Laurence calls me son.”
After every awful thing he’d told her, these were the four words that broke him. Tai covered his face with both hands, and his body bowed over as his shoulders silently heaved.
“Don’t fight it, Tai. Let it out. All of it, today, it’s time to let everything out.”
A loud sob broke from him, then another. Claire took him in her arms and held him while he wept. After a few moments, he wrapped his arms around her too, holding on tight, his tears dampening her shirt at one shoulder.
A faint tingling traveled down her spine. This had happened before. No, she had seen it before it happened. Her future-sight glimpse of Tai—she hadn’t been visible, but this was the day she’d seen. He’d been wearing this red shirt, hiding his face in his hands in the moment before she held him. A turning point, a healing point.
In a few minutes, Tai’s sobbing began to quiet. By then Claire supported most of his weight as he clung to her. He sat up slowly, seeming to realize that he’d collapsed against her. He met her eyes, and she set a finger on his lips.
“Do not apologize,” she said.
“I was going to,” he whispered against her finger.
“I know you were, Tai Aksel. Now don’t.”
“Okay.”
“Your trust is an honor. Your story is a gift.Youare a gift to so many people. And you are a gift to me.”
He took her face between his strong, beautiful, musical hands. He pushed his fingers through her hair at her temples. He took her mouth with his, and the kiss was salty and sweet, and Claire sank her fingers into the muscles of his back and deepened the kiss to leave no doubt in his mind that he was hers, even more so today than yesterday. She hitched herself over to sit across his lap. They kissed and kissed on the edge of the cliff, and when her lips traveled down his neck to the dip of his shoulder, Claire’s body surged and sang with something brand new. An urgent longing to bite.
“Claire,” he said, the word almost a gasp.
“I want to,” she said.
“I’m sorry you can’t.”
“I’m not going to be first. You’re first, when you’re ready. Only when you’re ready.”
He lowered his forehead to rest on her shoulder. “I love you. But I can’t.”
“It doesn’t have to be today.”
“Please don’t think this is going to change.”
“You’ll trust yourself one day, Tai. I have no doubt.”
“No. I need you to accept it.” He pushed his hand through her hair, and his eyes were shiny with…fear? “I need to know we’re enough today, just as we are.”
“Of course we are. We belong together, no matter what.” But also… “Did you just say…?”
