Her smile dropped.
“Even when I was human, I didn’t have this same passion. I was empty. You have more humanity in your pinky finger than I’ve ever had in my whole body. It’s why I have protected you and coddled you and tried to keep you alive. I never wanted to see that light go out. I never wanted you to become the ruthless killer that I was. To lose the optimism that only someone so young and human could ever feel.”
Tears pricked at Reyna’s eyes, and she tried to tamp them down.
“It’s hard to explain without telling you my whole past. My parents were young and came from nothing and I had my eyes on the stars. I left everything behind to become something great, but instead of going to space I ended up in business. I found that I was good at building things, destroying things.” He looked at his bloody hands. “At dismantling the world and having people rally behind me as I did it. Except my parents. They never saw value in me. And in the end they were right.”
“Becks,” she whispered.
“No, Reyna, I became a vampire by choice. I thought it was the next great bid for power. The next step in taking over the world, which I did efficiently for years afterward.” He met her gaze head-on. “And when I became a vampire, I wanted to bring pain to those who hurt me, who refused to believe in me. So how did I repay my parents? I tortured Bronwyn. She was young and innocent, and I was a sadistic vampire. I took everythingfrom her that she loved, put her through immense physical pain, and shattered her mind. Then I fed her madness with brutality, taught her the ways of war, shaping her into a proper soldier. When she could take no more, right before her whole spirit would be broken, I turned her. Then I tested her loyalty by unleashing her on our parents. I thought their misery would be worse if she did it. I loaded the gun and pulled the trigger. She was the bullet that snuffed out their existence. She passed. I made her my own unfeeling second-in-command and gave her an army to feast on.” He tilted his chin up. “And I enjoyed it. Reveled in it. It was all I was ever good at.”
“That’s not true,” Reyna whispered.
“Oh no. It’s as true as could be. Until you. You made me want to be better, but the truth is that I am not better.”
Something cracked within Beckham. A chasm that was more than sixty years in the making. He was broken. He’d finally broken. He couldn’t keep going with the crushing weight of his kills on his shoulders. And there were so many.
“You are,” Reyna said. She put a gentle hand on his arm. “You are better, Becks. The fact that you feel this way shows that you’re a different man.”
“Did you not see what I saw tonight? I killed Penelope with my own two hands.” He looked down at them covered in blood. “And I felt nothing.”
“She was going to hurt me. Or you. And she had turned us in to Harrington. It was a trap, Becks.”
“It could have been you,” he said in a barely audible voice.
“Me?” she whispered. “You’d never hurt me.”
“I would!” he roared. It exploded out of him as if he’d been holding on to it for so long. “I have.”
“No. You have always been there and protected me and saved me. Even when I didn’t want to be saved.”
“Reyna, the only thing that I am is a killer. The night we sawthat fucking bastard, I’d neverfeltso strongly in my life. All I could think the entire time driving back to the house was how to control my rage. I was so deep in it, I could’ve hurt you.”
Reyna stared at him, stunned. “But I felt your emotions that night. I didn’t feel anything like that.”
“It was after the healing,” he explained. “I was jealous and pissed, but I worried that if I stayed with all those emotions roiling through me, the only outlet I had was the only thing I was good at. So I left. I left to keep you alive.”
“Oh Becks,” she whispered, stepping into his space again. She put her hand on his cheek. “All this time I thought that you were mad at me. But really you were protecting me. Again.”
“I’m not a hero.”
“You’re so very wrong.”
Then she pressed her lips against his. His hands landed on her waist tentatively and grasped her with vigor as the kiss deepened. Beckham was broken. He feared himself so much that he’d disappeared to protect her. And he couldn’t even see it. He couldn’t even fathom that he was the good guy in this. So shattered by his past that a moment of vulnerability wrecked him and made him think he would revert into the only thing he believed he was capable of.
“You’re not just a killer,” she whispered against his lips. “You have subdued the monster and the reason you feel like this is because you are embracing the man.”
He responded by picking her up, sliding her legs around his waist, and putting her ass down on the sink. Her hands went to his pants, jerking free the remaining tattered material. His cock lengthening in her hand.
“We are connected by more than our blood. We are united through our souls. You would sooner die than harm me. I believe that beyond words.”
“I never doubted us. Just me.”
Reyna sighed at the words. “No more doubts.”
He stripped her from the waist down and plunged deep inside her body. Their souls connecting as all barriers disintegrated around them. Together they embraced the moon and landed among the stars.
Killer, savior, monster, man.
