With one more squeeze to my shoulder she disappeared. I cradled Adrienne’s face in my hands, running my thumbs across her cheeks before pressing my lips to both eyelids, both cheeks, and then her lips.
“Wake up, my heart. Wake up and come back to me.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Iwas back in the cell.
No, I was in the windowless room in Chynon.
Or perhaps it was the one I’d stayed in as a child.
The darkness rolled like waves, curling around my cheeks and over my lids, brushing my mouth and begging for me to let it in. Far off, the hollow chords of a song I once knew began, but the music was wrong—disjointed and out of tune. I tried to remember how it went, the feel of the keys beneath my fingertips.
“Will you play me something?” Eamon asked, and he was not the vampire I barely knew sitting beside me in Cavera lan Aiyah but the male I’d fallen in love with despite all my fears.
“I am sure you are busy, Lord Azad. I would not want to keep you.”
Eamon smiled and it was so full of warmth and longing and love it made my chest ache. He touched my face with reverence, his thumb tracing the line of my bottom lip. “There is nowhere else I would rather be.”
Time passed and yet we sat at the piano bench, the song finding its end. However, the male before me was not the resplendent immortal of before—he was now ancient in his sadness, blood tears smeared across his cheeks.
“Is that what you want?” Eamon asked.
I frowned, unsure what it was he was asking me. “It does not matter what I want.”
“It does,” he answered. Another tear fell. “It matters greatly what you want, my heart.”
“In another life perhaps,” I said, but they were just words on a page, words I once had said.
Eamon tilted my face up to his, his grip tighter than it usually was. Citrine and magic swirled in his irises; his golden-brown skin glowed with power. But grief coated my tongue, and it was agony he exhaled with every breath.
“And in that life, what is it you would want?”
We were no longer in a memory, because the Eamon of my memory had not cried. He had not held me with such desperation. And I had not allowed him so close or trusted him so much. I placed my hands over his chest and the heavy beating of his immortal heart, fingers tapping with the rhythm, finding the truth so easily now.
“You, Eamon. I would want you.”
Another blood tear fell and he blinked it away. “To have me now in this life means a transformation, my love. It means I make you into what I am.”
But I knew that, didn’t I? I’d felt the fever, the infection, known deep in my bones I was not long for this world. The moment I’d come to consciousness in that dark cell I’d accepted my fate, never once believing Eamon would find me.
“Of course I found you,” he breathed, one hand slipping to the back of my head. “You are my mate, Adrienne Valois. There is nothing I would not do for you.”
Including letting me die.
There was a part of me that wanted to die—a part of me molded by the horrors of my past and present, a part of me that whispered in my ear of the danger that would come from such a transformation. It was more than a part. Eamon was theonly immortal who had ever shown me kindness and I’d always believed that was due to the mating bond.
But that was not quite the truth, was it? I remembered Mateo and the longing he’d felt for Jules, the respect he’d had for her wishes. How, despite his love for her, he’d never once forced her hand. There was Callum and the love he’d had for Lilith, how he’d stayed away from her for fear of her safety, how he’d been willing to sacrifice himself for her again and again if it meant she was well.
Then there were the not-so-earth-shattering memories, the immortals who had patronized me throughout the years who had been considerate and kind. But I’d lived in the shadow of my mother and believed her poison as it spewed from her lips.
It did not mean I trusted vampires, nor did it mean I suddenly believed all vampires were good. But perhaps I finally understood that to be one was not a death sentence to one’s humanity or kindness.
“I am afraid,” I told Eamon.
He nodded, tugging me to his chest. The music shop around us melted away and we were sitting on the stairs of the garden the first night I’d come to his estate. Around us the air was heavy withasivaflowers in bloom and not yet bitter with the chill of winter.
“I would expect nothing less than your fear, my heart,” he answered, stroking my hair. “I, too, am afraid. As I was afraid when I was made.”
