Then she's gone, and I'm alone again.
I sink onto the edge of the bed, suddenly exhausted despite having slept all day. My body is healed, but everything else feels raw and wounded.
Elena's words circle through my mind.
I think about the study. The firelight. The letters he'd kept forcenturies, preserved because they were all he had left of who he used to be. The way he'd looked at me when I talked about my sister, like he understood loss in a way that went beyond words.
The way he'd touched my face. The way he'd pulled back, afraid of something I couldn't name.
We were building something in those stolen moments between training sessions and strategy meetings. Something fragile and undefined, but real. I felt it when he looked at me. Felt it when he leaned close during sparring and his breath ghosted across my neck. Felt it when he saidI haven't been interested in anything for a very long timeand looked at me like I was the exception to centuries of emptiness.
And now it's shattered.
Not because of the ambush. I could have forgiven that, eventually. Could have understood the tactical reasoning, even if I hated the execution. Could have found my way back to trusting him if he'd shown me that he trusted me in return.
But he didn't. Instead of treating me like a partner, he treated me like something to protect. Something fragile. Something that couldn't be trusted to make her own decisions about her own life.
I stand up and move to the window. The grounds are dark, lit only by security lights along the paths. Somewhere out there, Konstantin is planning his next move. The blood crisis is getting worse. Vampires are going feral from contaminated blood, and Maximus is executing them one by one in that room with the drain in the floor.
And I'm supposed to just sit here, safe and useless, while everyone else fights.
No.
I don't care what Maximus decided. I'm not going to be sidelined. I'll find a way to be useful, with or without his permission. I didn't survive eight months alone, didn't claw my way through theunderground to find clean blood, didn't survive six of Konstantin's vampires just to become someone's protected pet.
If he wants to control me, he'll have to do better than walking away.
But even as I think it, even as the anger hardens into resolve, there's something underneath it. Something that aches.
I think about his face in the firelight. The vulnerability he showed me, rare and precious. The way he saidI wanted to know youlike it was a confession he'd never intended to make.
I think about what we might have been in a different world. One where he trusted me as much as I had started to trust him.
No, I don't feel guilty for what I said. He needed to hear it. But I feel the loss of something that never quite existed, the possibility of us, crushed under the weight of his fear and my fury.
Maybe it was always going to end like this. Maybe two broken people can't build something whole.
I head for the door.
Whatever we were, whatever we could have been, I can't think about it now. I have work to do.
Time to find out exactly what "benched" means around here.
Chapter
Sixteen
Idon't remember leaving the medical wing.
One moment I'm standing in that room, her words echoing through me. The next I'm in the east corridor, then the north wing, then somewhere else entirely, moving through my own compound without direction or purpose, just the desperate need to be elsewhere.
You told me about Luciano. How he controlled you, used you, treated you like property. You told me that, and then you turned around and did the same thing to me.
My legs carry me to the training room.
I don't realize where I'm going until I'm there, standing in the doorway, staring at the mats where I first tested her. Where she moved with that fierce precision, adapting to my attacks, refusing to be intimidated by my age or power. Where I first understood that she was something extraordinary.
The room is empty now. Silent. But I can see her everywhere, ducking under my strike, countering with that sharp elbow, the flash of satisfaction in her eyes when she almost took me down.
