“Anton wouldn’t give you a blond streak.”
“I thought Vincent knew what he was doing, but he was reading instructions from the internet. Josefina claims she didn’t know any better either.” Roger motioned at the empty space on the bed. “May I sit?”
“Not like I could stop you,” Dmitri muttered.
Raw, terrible pain filled Dmitri’s voice, and Roger hated how it echoed through him and struck a familiar note. For three hundred years, they had suffered side by side and yet never spoken a word of what haunted their waking hours.
Because Roger had laughed and drank and pretended that his life was not so miserable. He had never told anyone of the nights he had crawled into bed and cried like this. To the best of his ability, he’d made himself forget them, too. If the pain wasn’t felt, it couldn’t be real. Yet that only left him with gaping woundsthat had only recently begun to heal. His lovers had done that for him.
Dmitri had been his lover. They’d tried to make a relationship work again and again, only to break each other’s hearts over and over.Or perhaps we were already too broken and our jagged edges cut one another too deeply.
Roger remained at the edge of the bed, but he knelt so Dmitri would not have to raise his gaze so high. “I won’t crowd you. I want to care for you. That’s all.”
Slowly, Dmitri slid his hand along the bed, reaching for him. “You came for me. That’s enough.”
Guilt made Roger hesitate.
Some facet of his anguish must have crossed his features because Dmitri frowned. “You didn’t?”
The pressure of centuries of failure threatened to drag Roger down. With a careful, light touch, he put his hand in Dmitri’s and let him feel the depth of his regret. “I thought you were dead and beyond reach. Had I known … I won’t lie to you, Dmitri. I don’t know what I might have done. But once I saw you, I couldn’t leave you behind.”
“How long did they have me?” Dmitri asked.
“A few weeks. Much has happened.” Roger quickly sketched out the details of what had occurred, lingering on how Anton had told him at the ball about the wager. “He claimed the bet was settled, then took that back during the attack on the hotel suite. Do you have any idea what he meant?”
Dmitri closed his eyes, then tightened them further. “He … he kept bringing in these tools. I thought he was preparing me for the draining ritual, but if he’s let me go, then he must have been doing something else.”
Trying to remember was clearly distressing Dmitri. Roger brushed his fingers through Dmitri’s dark hair. “Let’s not worry about that now.”
Anger twisted Dmitri’s frown into a scowl as he opened his eyes. He sat up, pulling away from Roger, and the blanket puddled over his lap. Though Nathaniel had set out clothes for him, Dmitri hadn’t put them on. He was still naked. The red marks from the silver wires had healed. His skin was smooth and perfect again. Outwardly, he seemed better.
Inwardly, Dmitri had always struggled. Depression created a vicious cycle he had never broken in life, let alone in his immortality. “That is your specialty, isn’t it? Ignore the pain.Running.”
The accusation was one of the oldest between them. Roger had never faced the truth of the stinging word.
Because when Seamus and Anton had descended on Dmitri and Roger behind the tavern, Roger had slipped Seamus’s grasp. At least, he’d believed he had. Seamus had been playing a fatal game and allowed him those ten steps. Ten awful footfalls where Roger had abandoned the man he had claimed to love with all his heart and ran.
He had left Dmitri.
He had abandoned him yet again on that horrible stage in the modern Devil’s Cove.
That didn’t feel like something he would do now, but he wouldn’t have believed himself such a coward before those pivotal moments. Had he changed at all? Had he grown more craven through the years? Less? Could he manage any bravery?
Old pain would not deliver a new future. Roger cleared his throat. “Dmitri?—”
“He did something to me,” Dmitri hissed. “Besides his usual ‘fun.’ And you would ignore it.”
Roger moved to the far side of the room from him. It wasn’t much space, but the distance was enough to clear his mind of Dmitri’s swirling fears. He had always been a tempest, and Roger had always sought calm seas. His own anger bubbled, butDmitri hadn’t truly hurt him. Not in a way that deserved his rage. Oh, how his lungs wanted to vent all his vitriol upon Dmitri and shred open old wounds from their past love.
But he would be a better man. He would not cause harm upon someone who did not deserve it.
Roger took one step forward, then stopped himself and remained in the corner. In one of their more recent arguments, Dmitri had called him the same as Seamus. Another cruel and violent creature. Roger wouldn’t be that. Not toward those he cared about. “Just because I choose to smile instead of howl does not mean I am without injuries. You are not the only one they have tortured.”
“You had another set of toys taken away from you? How terrible,” Dmitri replied.
“I love them.”
“You claim it’s that, but I’ve heard you utter such pretty words before.” Dmitri slid to the edge of the bed, the blanket covering his lap. “You don’t know how to love, Roger. No vampire does.”
