“Three hundred and twenty years.”
Callie whistled. “Wow.”
Lucien chuckled. “I’m a youngster compared to some.”
“Wow,” she breathed, unable to fully grasp the concept. He was ayoungsterwho was alive when they founded the U.S. That wasinsaneto her.“So, vampires are immortal?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re French.”
“Yes. I am Lucien Fontaine.”
“You don’t have an accent.”
“My parents left France shortly after my birth. They traveled around Europe for a while before settling in Germany. I stayed there until their deaths, and then I came to the New World, where I met Ronan. I’ve been here for almost three hundred years.”
Callie’s eyebrows rose as he casually said the term “New World” like she said coffee break. Who still considered the United States the New World?A three hundred and twenty-year-old vampire, she reminded herself.
She suppressed a hysterical trill of laughter as she realized she was sitting beside an ancient who’d seen so much of this world.
“Who’s Ronan?” she asked.
“He and Nathan are the leaders of the Alliance. Ronan is the one who found me and turned my anger at the world into something useful.”
Ronan had directed his hatred of everyone and everything toward the Savages, but Lucien decided to omit that. She was nervous enough around him without him telling her how badly he craved killing and maiming everything that crossed his path.
The only reason he’d managed to refrain from becoming a Savage before Ronan encountered him was that he’d vowed never to become like Yannis. He’d been walking a thin, fraying line by the time Ronan entered his life.
“I’ve worked with Ronan for two hundred years. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him.”
“What about Nathan? How long have you worked with him?”
He briefly told her about the hunters and vampires joining together. He kept the details scarce to protect the others, but he told her enough for her to understand more about the way his world worked and himself.
“Why were you so angry at the world when Ronan found you?” she asked when he finished.
“Why not? By then, I’d lost my family, and I was starting to lose myself. I had no one.”
Without thinking, she rested her hand over his on top of her knee. She knew what it was like to be alone in the world except for her friends. “I lost my family too. My mom died when I was six, and my dad passed away four years ago.”
“Losing your mom at six had to be difficult.”
“Not really. She was never a constant in my life, so I didn’t really know or rely on her.”
Still, even after all these years, there were times when she pondered what might have been. But that was useless, and she tried not to get lost in the sea of melancholy such ponderings could drown her in.
“When she got pregnant with me, both my parents were pretty hardcore partiers. However, they cleaned up their acts when she got the news. My dad managed to stay sober, but she never could. My dad’s death tore my heart out. One day he was fine, and the next he was in the ICU on a ventilator.”
“What happened?”
“Massive stroke. He never woke up again.”
Callie pulled her hand from his to wipe away the tears sliding down her face. It had been four years, but the pang of his loss remained as intense as the day he died. It was no longer the constant, unrelenting grief that caused her to wake crying, but it was an ever-present thing.
One minute, she would be doing the most mundane task. Then, some memory would rise or something would remind her of him, or she would catch a whiff of his cologne, and she would find herself standing at the kitchen sink sobbing while she washed the dishes.
She’d accepted that she would never be the same again.
