My eyes open just as Kole’s hand slips away, leaving me aching for his touch.
“Are you sure? I don’t want you to feel like you have to tell me.”
His left dimple peeks out, making my heart skitter. “Yes, Grey. I want you to know.” He exhales a weighted breath, mentally preparing to relive the past. “Our mother was mated to my father. It’s basically the human equivalent of marriage. One day, a few vampires in my mother’s coven had gone rogue and attacked a werewolf pack. Their Alpha, Thane’s father, sought out vengeance, but when he saw my mother, he didn’t kill her. Long story short, our mother ended up cheating on my father. She fell deeply in love with the werewolf Alpha, but when Thane was born and she saw he was a hybrid, she told Thane’s father their affair was a mistake. She came running back to my father, begging for forgiveness, and he took her back, but my mother wanted a redo, so she and my father got pregnant with me.”
“She just left Thane?” I ask, not hiding my disdain after being abandoned myself.
“Yes. She went about her life as if he never existed. But Thane’s father wasn’t going to just let her do that. He watched her and my father live their happy little life with their normal vampire baby. You see, Thane’s father was said to have always been a twisted kind of man, but my mother’s betrayal turned him into a different kind of beast. One night, when I was stilla baby, my mother and father had been asleep.” He pauses to swallow, and I brace myself for what he’s going to say next. “My mother woke in the middle of the night to find my father lying next to her, dead. There was blood everywhere, and his head had been severed from his body. My mother ran to the crib to see if I was okay and found my hands wrapped around my father’s bloody heart as if it were a teddy bear.”
“Oh my god!” I shoot up in horror. I knew this story was going to take a dark turn, but nothing could’ve prepared me for that.
“Luckily, I was just a baby and have no recollection of any of it, but my mother had to live with the image of it. When I was finally old enough, she told me what happened, and I could hear the overwhelming heartache she still felt. Even though she had an affair, she really did love my father.”
“So, what happened after his death?” I ask, knowing there must be more to the story.
“Thane’s father told my mother they were going to be together, or he would kill me too. It wasn’t even because he loved her. He just wanted her to suffer. My mother knew she couldn’t run, and she couldn’t outmatch him, so she went to her coven about it, but vampires aren’t like werewolves. Covens are more like coworkers, whereas the werewolf packs are like family. In the end, she didn’t have much of a choice. Over the years, I’ve heard stories about the woman who was full of life and dreams, but the only version I ever saw was the one hollowed by the horrors of what had happened. She was a shell of the person others once knew. Part of me wishes I had known her before it all, but I think maybe that would’ve made it harder for me. Instead, I almost resent the woman who was my mother. Mostly because she wasn’t a mother at all. Shedidn’t nurture or protect me. She sat by with her void eyes and threw me to the wolves… or really just one wolf.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say, settling my head back down on the pillow.
There’s so much pain written on his face that I almost consider telling him to stop, but I know he won’t. He wants me to hear this, and I know that I need to. I need to understand why Thane is the way he is and how their relationship with each other came to be.
“Thane had it worse. His father blamed him for my mother leaving. He saw Thane as an abomination, but he was an Alpha, and no son of his was going to be seen as anything other than someone of strength and power. Once Thane turned six years old, the beatings began. His father called it “training,” but that’s not what it was. The older Thane got, the worse the beatings became. Thane and I were forced to fight each other and not the brotherly kind of fights—the kind that didn’t end until one of us was lying bloody and unconscious. Being that Thane was a hybrid and older, that was usually me. We grew to hate one another. It was impossible not to. But while Thane’s father was focused on punishing Thane for our mother’s actions, Thane was focused on becoming strong enough to take on his father. One day, when we were seventeen, Thane and I were in the middle of one of our fights when he suddenly whirled around and attacked his father. They went blow for blow, beating into each other with equal loathing. If it had been anyone else, they wouldn’t have stood a chance, but Thane was a hybrid. He had the strength and agility of both species on his side. By the end, he had his father on his knees, and I thought for sure he was going to kill him right then and there, but he didn’t. The three of us knew who won, and thatwas enough for Thane. He turned his back, showing mercy to a man who never deserved it.”
Thane? Mercy? That doesn’t sound like him at all.
“As Thane began to walk away, Thane’s father shifted into his wolf and pinned Thane to the ground. Before Thane could even counter his attack, his father clawed half of his face off and then took off. By the time we made it back home, it was too late. Thane’s father had killed our mother, leaving her disemboweled body hanging on the front door.”
My jaw falls open as a tear slips from the corner of my eye onto the pillow.
“Kole,” I breathe, reaching for him. He catches my hand in his and pulls it to his lips, kissing my knuckles as if I were the one reliving the tragedies of the past.
“It was a long time ago. I’m okay now. I promise.”
I shake my head. “How can anyone be okay after that?”
“Haven’t you heard the saying, ‘Time heals all wounds’?”
“That’s bullshit. It doesn’t heal them. It just makes them hurt a little less.”
He blows out a hollow laugh and squeezes my hand in his. “Okay, so maybe I’m not healed, but I am okay. Besides, after spending fifty-six years looking for his father, Thane and I finally got our vengeance.”
“He’s dead?”
“Oh, yeah. We made sure to draw it out, though.”
“Normally, I wouldn’t find joy in someone’s death, but I think I can make an exception,” I say with a smile that seems to make the lines on Kole’s face finally soften. “So is that where Thane’s scar comes from? His father?”
“Yeah. It took Thane time to heal, but when he did, he decided to leave one scar as a reminder of what happens when you show mercy.”
Everything about Thane makes so much more sense now. If I had grown up the way he had, I’m not sure what kind of person I would’ve turned out to be either.
“Wait,” I say, trying to do the math in my head. “When you say you were seventeen, do you mean vampire seventeen or like the human equivalent?”
“The human equivalent. I thought you’d be thrown off if I had said we were sixty-five.”
That shouldn’t make me laugh, but it does, and Kole laughs too.
“The whole aging thing is so weird,” I say, looking at Kole with disgust, thinking about how he’s like a really old grandpa in a really hot twenty-eight-year-old body.
