Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(102)

“I grew up in the Old Country,” he said. “Which is England, Wales, and Scotland for you. It was my cousins, Syn and Syphon, and me for the longest time, and then with another male, Zypher. After a while, we crossed paths with a fighter who was… well, he was a force of nature. He still is.”

“Who did you fight then?”

As they drank the coffee she’d made, he told her all about the Scribe Virgin and the Omega, the Lessening Society, the innocent civilians, the aristocracy, the King who would not lead. While the words tumbled out of his mouth, he was aware of rushing through the story, and yes, he edited things out. The Band of Bastards had been no one’s heroes. They’d survived in the woods with no permanent home, fighting because they liked to, feeding because they had to, fucking when they wanted to. Back then, he’d thought it was the only existence he needed, but then they’d come to Caldwell and things had changed.

“So there are vampires still in Europe?” she asked, her expression riveted.

“Not many.”

“And the lessers are those shadows?”

“No, they’re de-souled humans. The Omega used to induct them into his society, and they served him.” He shook his head. “You want to talk about nasty. They smelled like baby powder and roadkill—”

“The farmhouse, the other sites!” She motioned in the air. “The blood everywhere, the oil stains—that’s what it smelled like. Homicide’s been called to a number of these scenes over the years, and I never knew what they were. No one knew.”

“That’s the Omega. Or was. He’s no more. He was eradicated recently, thank fuck. Although”—he lifted his mug in toast—“naturally we have someone new we’re dealing with.”

“The brunette.”

“Yup.” He took a deep breath. “So that’s my story. I serve my King and my leader—he’s the one who was with us in the surgical RV, the one with the lip? I live with them and their families—well, I did until Devina got her hooks into me and I moved out. Anyway, that’s that. Oh, and yes, I’ve stolen some things along the way.”

“And given the money to charity.”

“That’s right.”

“For which you don’t feel bad.”

“Nope.”

Instead of getting on him, she smiled a little. “I can’t condone that.”

“I know. Just as long as you don’t expect me to turn over a new leaf.”

They both laughed, but it didn’t last, and that was when he knew she was thinking the same thing he was: That their future was limited.

“Now you know everything about me.” He paused. When she didn’t say anything, he tensed a little. “Yup. Everything.”

In the quiet that followed, she seemed to age before his very eyes, her face growing drawn, her eyes getting grim.

He stayed silent, hoping she would open up to him and tell him what he already knew because he’d been inside her mind. He wanted to offer comfort in the face of her tragedy, but unless she chose to welcome him into her sacred suffering and loss, he couldn’t do that.

Her privacy needed to be respected, even after he’d unintentionally breached it. All she’d willingly shared was a date.

“Quid pro quo, huh,” she said tightly.

“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

Her head nodded slowly, in a way that he wasn’t sure he could interpret. “So what do you want to know.”

There was no beating around that bush—and if their circumstances had been different, he might have eased into the subject. Like, started out by asking her about her job. Or how long she’d lived in the townhouse.

Instead, he set them both upon a cliff. And jumped off first.

“I want to know what happened June twenty-fourth, fourteen years ago.”





CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT




There had only ever been one part of Erika’s past, it seemed. And that was not merely true from an outsider’s perspective, whether the questions from other people were generated out of pity, compassion, or morbid curiosity. For her, too, there was only one thing.

A single night, on June twenty-fourth, fourteen years ago, had wiped out all her birthdays and holidays. Her summer vacations. Good grades, bad grades. Best friends and frenemies.

Afterward? Nothing else had particularly mattered. Or would.

She’d been eliminated with the rest of them.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Balthazar repeated.

“It’s okay. I’ve run through the story a hundred times.”

Yet she struggled with where to start, which was a new one—and that was when she realized that she had a down-pat speech she gave people. The recitation was a rote A-to-B-to-C of it all, and she was prepared for the peaks and valleys of emotions that inevitably arose in her audience. She knew the places she had to steel herself against the reflexive, unsolicited empathy that would always come back at her.

And she braced herself not because such displays of human connection would make her get teary or something. It was because she really wanted to tell whoever was pulling the soppy bit to fuck off. If she could suck up the pain of going through it, they could leave their stupid compassion at the door when they merely heard the story.