Chapter twenty-nine
Saiden
Baylin was exactly where Saiden left him, only this time when he barged in it wasn’t irritation coursing through him. That was far too mild of an emotion. Even anger wasn’t up to snuff.
No, this was pure, unfettered rage.
“You knew!” he shouted, crossing the tech room in the blink of an eye.
Baylin didn’t even fight back when Saiden ripped him from the chair and slammed him up against the wall, knocking over a Monster energy drink in the process. His brother’s eyes slid down to the amber liquid spilling over the keyboard for a second and then he met Saiden’s piercing gaze head on.
“I tried to tell you,” he replied calmly.
Saiden didn’t know if it was the sedate tone or the words themselves that infuriated him to the point of exploding. He slammed Baylin against the wall a second time and relished in the cracked plaster that rained down like a winter snowstorm.
“You tried to tell me?” he bellowed. “You don’t try to tell someone something. You just do. You open your mouth and say the words. Itshould have been the first thing you mentioned the moment I walked through your fucking door this morning. You don’t hide something that monumental from someone you claim to care about.”
“Like you’re doing with your mate?” Baylin commented blandly, refusing to meet Saiden’s fury with any of his own.
The words gutted Saiden because he couldn’t deny the truth of them. At least Baylintriedto tell him. He hadn’t even attempted to let Cora in on everything he was keeping from her.
Releasing his brother, Saiden stepped back and fell roughly to his knees. “How long?” he whispered, the anger draining from his body to leave nothing but a broken male crumpled on the floor. “I know you looked into it. It’s what you do. How long does she have?”
“It’s hard to say,” Baylin began. “She has Juvenile Huntington’s Disease. The symptoms first appeared when she was seventeen. A comment in her chart from the most recent doctor’s visit indicated he doesn’t believe she has much beyond a couple years left. The symptoms are progressing and will likely make it hard for her to maintain any kind of normal life within a year or so. Maybe less.”
Years. If he couldn’t convince his mate to turn, he would lose her to illness in only a few short years. And in only a single year she would no longer be his fiery, obstinate Cora. A year was nothing. A drop of water in the ocean of a vampire’s existence. There and gone in a blink.
“There’s no cure?” he asked, his eyes still shuttered since he refused to open them. The longer he kept them closed, the longer he could deny the reality unfolding before him.
“No,” Baylin confirmed, that single solemn word acting as the final nail in the coffin of Saiden’s hopes. “No cure.”
Saiden finally opened his eyes when a hand touched his shoulder, and he stared up at Baylin. There was only compassion in his brother’s storm gray eyes. Compassion and pity. Itbroke him, and he let out an anguished sob.
Saiden had never cried before. Not once in his life. Not when his mother died of consumption. Not when his little sister was abused and murdered while he was away fighting in The War of Spanish Succession. Not even when he’d been captured and tortured for weeks by a band of rogue vampires in Marseille. Not once did a single tear roll down his face.
Life was long and difficult and tragic things happened to everyone sooner or later. The longer you lived, the more tragedies you witnessed. In the end, all you could do was play the hand you were dealt. Getting weepy never solved a single problem.
But knowing he would spend an eternity without his mate shattered something inside him. Something he’d spent over three hundred years burying so deep that he had almost forgotten it existed.
His heart.
Saiden sobbed on the floor, tears gushing down his face in salty rivers of sorrow, and Baylin just held him through it all, knowing there was nothing he could say to ease Saiden’s suffering. They sat there for a long time on the cold marble tiles. One brother hurting, while the other did the only thing he could do—be there for him.
“Please tell me you aren’t giving up.”
Raven’s sharp voice cut through his cloud of despair. Saiden looked up to see her looming over him, hands on her hips, and not an ounce of compassion on her stern face.
“She said she would never want to be like us,” he choked out. “She called it a curse.”
Before, when he assumed he would have a few decades to change her mind, he’d thought there was a decent chance she’d come around. If he spent enough time showing her that being a vampire wasn’t anything like the movies, surely she would have eventually relented. But now?The clock was winding down, and he was no closer to his goal.
“You need to convince her then.”
Saiden wiped the tears from his eyes, not even embarrassed that she had seen him so thoroughly broken.
“A year, Raven. That’s all the time I have left before the disease starts to take her from me.”
“I know, Saiden. Baylin sent me a text.” Raven grew quiet and knelt down beside him. “And a year is still more than I got with my mate.”
