“You love the hunt so much you’re willing to be feared and ostracized by your family?” she challenged.
His brows lifted. “What makes you think I’m an outcast?”
“I’m not stupid, Tane.” She folded her arms around her waist, a familiar ache settling in the center of her heart. She knew all about shunning. And the pain of always being seen as a threat, no matter how hard she tried to prove herself. “I could see how Victor’s clan treated you. Half of them looked like they wanted to crawl in the nearest hole when you walked into the room and the other half looked like they wanted to plant a stake in your back.”
With a smooth motion he turned to pace toward the heavy desk, but not before Laylah glimpsed the wounds that darkened the beautiful honey eyes.
Wounds so raw she shuddered in horror.
“My power is great enough I’ll always be feared regardless if I’m a Charon or not.” He kept his back turned, his voice stripped of the emotions that festered deep inside him. “And to be honest, I don’t give a shit about the assholes who want to see me dead. I’m not here to win friends and influence vampires.”
Laylah ignored the rigid stiffness of his shoulders and the don’t-screw-with-me vibe he was throwing off in pulses of frigid air.
She’d been pissing Tane off since the moment they met. Why stop now?
“Don’t do this.” She moved to stand directly before him. “Not to me.”
He refused to meet her gaze. “Do what?”
“Pretend that it doesn’t matter that you’re treated like a leper by those who have no right to judge you.” She reached up to touch the hard line of his jaw. “That you hide away from the world that doesn’t want you. That you’re so alone it makes your soul ache.”
He froze at her light touch, his expression wary.
“Laylah?”
“I don’t have any say in my fate, but you …” She slowly shook her head. “You could be a part of a clan. Even have a mate.”
“Mate?” His sharp laugh rasped across her nerves. “Can you see me in a cottage with a white picket fence?”
She lowered her hand, pretending she didn’t give a shit he was shutting her out.
“Fine, keep your secrets,” she snapped. “It’s not like it matters to me.”
She was taking her first step away when Tane reached out to lightly touch her shoulder.
“She was my maker.”
She turned back, meeting Tane’s bleak gaze. “What?”
“Sung Li.” His hand absently stroked over the bare skin of her shoulder, but she sensed his thoughts were far away. “She transformed me into a vampire.”
“So she’s your mother?” she asked, a queasy sensation rolling through her stomach.
She’d insisted that he reveal his pain.
As if she had the right to share his deepest secrets.
Now she realized that she was forcing him to stir up memories he’d fought to bury.
“Every relationship between a foundling and his maker is different. Sometimes it can be a parent and child connection, other times it can be sexual.” His voice was ruthlessly controlled. “Usually there’s nothing that holds them together. Until the past century most vampire foundlings were abandoned by their maker and rarely made it past their first year. Now Styx is trying to make certain any new vampire is brought directly into a clan.”
At any other time Laylah would have been fascinated by the glimpse into vampire politics.
For all their power, they were careful to keep their world shrouded in secrecy.
But there were far more important matters to occupy her mind.
“What about you and Sung Li?”
“She was my lover.”
“Your mate?” she rasped.
“No, but we were … close.”
Even braced for the revelation, Laylah jerked as if she’d been slapped. Sung Li.
She sounded … exotic. And no doubt beautiful, like all vampires. She wanted to slap the bitch without knowing another thing about her. “You said were.” “She’s dead.”
“How?”
“I cut off her head.”
Regret slammed into her. “Shit. I’m sorry. I should never have pushed.” She lifted her hand to touch him, only to pull it back at his tight expression. He was hanging on by a thread and she didn’t want to be the one to snap it. She’d done enough damage for one night, thank you very much. “It’s none of my business.”
A choking tension filled the room. “Don’t you want to know why?”
She shuddered. Not out of shock at his confession, but in horror at the anguish he must have suffered at being forced to kill his lover.
“I …” She licked her dry lips. “I don’t want to make you go back there.”
His hand slid to cup the back of her neck, his thumb stroking the line of her jugular. Almost as if it comforted him.
“Sung Li was ancient even before she made me,” he said, his voice a rough whisper. “And like many she had grown bored with her existence.”
Laylah frowned. “She changed you for entertainment?”
“I suppose that’s one way of putting it.”