“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.”
Yep. Super bitch.
“How long were you together?”
“Almost three hundred years.”
The stinging pain she felt was not jealousy. That would be … insane. Freaking nuts.
It was something else. Something not jealousy.
“Well no one can claim you aren’t in it for the long haul,” she muttered.
An emotion that might have been satisfaction ghosted over his beautiful face at the edge in her voice. Then, the bitter memories returned, shadowing his eyes.
“Time has little meaning for an immortal.”
“Maybe not, but you must have loved her very much to have stayed together so long.”
“Love?” He grimaced. “No. I was her disciple who worshipped at her feet. There was no true affection. If there had been I might have …”
That strange emotion gripping her heart eased, only to be replaced with a deeper, more worrisome desire to wrap herself tight against Tane and offer him … what? A comfort she didn’t understand and that he would no doubt reject?
She cleared her throat. “You might have what?” “I might have accepted the truth of her growing instability.”
It took a minute for his words to sink into her brain. “Oh.” She gave herself a mental head slap. She should have seen this coming a mile away. “She was …”
“An addict.”
She frowned at the regret that burned in the honey eyes. “That’s not your fault.”
“Not her addiction, but I was certainly her enabler.”
“She was a powerful vampire, Tane, not a second rate celebrity on Dr. Drew. I doubt any intervention in the world could have helped.”
With a muttered curse he paced across the room, his movements jerky.
“There’s only one intervention when a vampire goes rogue and it sure the hell doesn’t include any touchy-feely shit.” His voice was rough with ancient pain. “But I was weak. I cleaned up her ‘accidents’ and pretended I didn’t notice her erratic mood swings. I didn’t want to admit, even to myself, she was spiraling into bloodlust.”
Laylah bit her bottom lip. She didn’t need to be a mind reader to know this story didn’t have a happy ending.
“What happened?”
His head bent downward, his body held so rigidly it looked like it might shatter. “Exactly what you would expect.” “How many?”
She shivered, the terrifying image of a crazed vampire drenched in the blood of others making her stomach roll.
“She wiped out our entire clan and several human villages before I managed to corner her in the mountains of Peru.”
She hesitated before moving to stand directly behind him. She didn’t want to push, but it was obvious that his habit of keeping his memories buried hadn’t helped him heal. Maybe if he shared the horror he could lance the festering pain.
“Why didn’t she kill you with the rest of the clan?”
His sharp laugh bounced off the walls. “In her demented mind she wanted someone to admire her glorious path of destruction.”
Gods. Tane not only witnessed the woman he loved plunge into madness, but he had to watch her gory meltdown in full living color.
That would scar anyone.
“And it never occurred to her that you might put a stop to her rampage?”
“Why should she?” He slowly turned, revealing his stark expression. “I had been her loyal sycophant for countless years.”
She reached up and framed his face in her hands. His skin was cool and deliciously smooth. Perfect.
But his eyes were filled with a pain that made her heart bleed.
“And now you carry the guilt of those she killed?”
“Not killed.” He grasped her forearms, gripping her as if caught between the urge to shove her away or haul her against his chest. “They were slaughtered, Laylah. Ruthlessly, savagely slaughtered.”
She welcomed the pressure of his fingers that dug into her flesh. He’d been smothering his emotions for so long. It was a wonder he hadn’t exploded.
“You’re not to blame.”
“That’s my call to make.”
Laylah swallowed her words of protest. He’d decided it was his fault, and for now there was no arguing with him. Typical male.
“Did Styx know your history when he asked you to become a Charon?” she instead demanded.
He hesitated, his gaze narrowing with suspicion at her abrupt change of subject.
“Yes.”
“Bastard.”
He tugged her close, his gaze instinctively flashing toward the closed door.
“Take care, my sweet, Styx has played the gracious host so far, but make no mistake he is a very bad enemy,” he warned.
She leaned against the broad strength of his chest, feeling the usual flare of excitement stirring in the pit of her stomach. Along with far more dangerous sensations.