Always.He almost said the word out loud, but he caught himself in time. However, it took him a minute to respond as shock over what he’d almost said stole his breath. “Yes. I’m getting you out of here.”
“Freedom,” she whispered.
But would she ever truly be free? These bastards would hunt her for the rest of her days, and how did she evade a horde of the undead? And what about her father? While they still held him, they would always be able to control him, but how did she, a mere mortal, free him from the bastards who’d done this to him?
It would be almost impossible. No, not almost, it would be impossible to free her father from them, but she was damn sure going to try, and if she died in the process, so be it. Because one thing was for sure, she wouldneverlet the Savages have control of her again; she would die before that happened.
Chapter Thirteen
The distressed lookon Elyse’s face caused Saxon to reach out and squeeze her hand. When she lifted her eyes to his, something in his chest clenched.
“Where are your parents now?” she asked.
“They were killed by Savages when I was seventy-five,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“It was years ago.”
But that didn’t mean he didn’t still miss them. They’d been his parents, but they were also his friends and his support system. As turned vampires, they hadn’t understood what he was going through as a pureblood. They’d always been there for him, and they’d tried to understand why sex became the driving force in his life.
“I was out that night.” He’d been searching for a woman while they slaughtered his parents. “And when I returned home, I found them. What they did to them….”
His words trailed off as he shook his head. He would never get the sight of their mangled bodies out of his mind. Never forget the sorrow twisting inside his chest or the tears falling when he knelt over his mother’s brutalized body and held her against his chest. Her blood covered him, but he hadn’t cared.
The unexpected urge to cry gripped Elyse as Saxon stared at the wall. His face remained impassive, but sadness resonated from him.
“That must have been terrible,” she murmured.
“It was,” he confirmed. “The worst was knowing that if I’d been there, I could have stopped it.”
“Or you could have been killed too.”
That was a possibility; judging by the footprints in the blood, at least six Savages descended on his parents. Those monsters could have killed him too. He was strong then, but he wasn’t trained to fight and kill. However, over the thousands of times he replayed what could have happened that night in his mind, he was always able to save his parents.
“What did you do after they died?” she asked.
“Before their death, I’d known there were vamps out there who slaughtered for fun, but I didn’t care. To each their own.” And he was too busy struggling to keep himself from becoming one of them to give much thought to the havoc they created. “Afterward, I became determined to hunt them down and kill as many of them as I could. My new mission gave me something else to focus on, besides sex. I was one hundred when Ronan found me.”
“Who’s Ronan?” she asked.
“He’s our king; though, at the time, he didn’t want to be king. That’s a more recent development.”
“The vampires have a king?”
“We do now. But back then, he was the leader of the Defenders; a group of purebreds who worked to keep the Savage population under control. He’d heard about what I was doing with the Savages and asked me to join them. It had been years since I felt like I belonged anywhere, but the Defenders became my new family. Because they were all purebloods, they also understood what I was going through, even if they sought something other than sex to keep them from going over the edge.”
“Wow,” she breathed, fascinated by this new insight into the vampire world. “And these Defenders are still around?”
“Now we are the Alliance; we’ve joined with the hunters to fight the growing threat the Savages represent.”
“That’s just… amazing.”
He smiled as he folded his hands behind his head. “And what about you, Elyse?”
“What about me?”
“What was your life like pre-Savage?”
