Nine
Nine
HIM
When we get home, my entire body is taut with energy. I step out of the car, and my fingertips burn with the need to clench, then go eight rounds with a bag. But I keep my face expressionless, my discoveries secret as I signal Khalid to follow me. Stopping down by the lake on our property, away from all ears, I fill him in on how many vampires are left in the city. I don’t tell him about the traitor. Don’t tell him about Aleric’s demand for a picture of Mother. And I sure as hel don’t tell him about potentially being a hybrid or about being Aleric’s son. I trust Khalid with my life as Boss of the Shadow Domain. But as a hybrid? As an abomination that is hunted before they’re even born? I don’t trust anyone.
When Khalid leaves me, I don’t head back to the house. I know Mother will find her way here, too fucking worried about what Aleric might have said to me. So I stay by the lake, soaking in the peace and quiet of the lapping shore. I do not have to wait long before I catch her scent in the breeze.
My lips tight, I turn to face her as she reaches me. Her eyes tell me everything I need to know, but I ask anyway, wanting to hear what fucking lies she comes up with this time.
“Is he my father?” I ask softly. “And do not fucking ask me who.”
Her lips purse together, and she turns her head towards the house. Looking back at me, she then gestures further down the lake. She doesn’t wait for me to follow, her legs as restless as mine, perhaps, despite the grace she still moves with.
We walk for fifteen minutes, heading along the water in heavy silence. Just as my patience starts to evaporate in the heat of my anger, she whispers, “Did he tell you he was?”
“Answer my question.” I’m not in any mood to play any of her games, to give her anything in exchange for what she gives me. She can suffer over her lies.
“Varius –”
“Answer,” I say softly. “The. Fucking –”
“Yes.”
I stop, then move again, too restless to stay still. I knew it. I figured it out in the car, but even still, hearing her say it. Hearing her admit that she’s lied to me all this time. Lied to me again when I asked her for the truth a few months ago.
“He doesn’t know,” she says as she walks alongside me. Her voice is light, hard to hear even with my hearing, even with us being this close. “I’ve been so afraid since he found all your blood in the alley, that he might recognize it even with my magic.” She trails off. Takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry I lied to you, but I did it to protect you.”
“Because I’m a hybrid.”
“Yes.”
My throat suddenly feels swollen. “Can I have kids?” I ask, swallowing down the rest of the question, the real one. Will I ever be able to marry Micha?
“Yes.”
I scoff. Hybrids are infertile. “Another fucking lie –”
“It’s not. I realized you were a hybrid in my womb, and I…” She trails off. Stops. Turns to stare out at the lake as she wraps her arms around herself. Her eyes are distant. I want to keep moving. Need to give this burning energy inside me a way out, but I stop too.
“You what?” I demand.
“I changed everything about you.” She swallows. “Your face so you wouldn’t grow up looking like him. The smell of your blood so he wouldn’t be able to identify you as his. I even changed your DNA slightly. Not a lot, just enough so you could conceive. You know it’s the absence of one little gene for hybrids…”
“I don’t fucking believe you.” My entire body is vibrating, and I clench my fists with a need to destroy something, but I bite back that anger, control it. I need to think, to make sure she isn’t just telling me more lies. To hide something even worse. “Shit like that requires dark magic,” I say.
She folds in on herself. Her right arm slips down so her palm presses flat against her stomach. She says something, her lips moving, but I can’t hear it.
“Mother,” I growl, the first show of anger in my voice.
She flinches. “You were a twin,” she says loud enough for me to hear.
“What?” I rasp. I swallow hard, work my tongue around my mouth to try to get the sudden ash-taste out of it.
“I had to make a choice – lose you both or save one of you.”
“So you killed him.”
“Her,” she whispers. “Her name was Uri, and I gave birth to her before you. Your father was so broken when he saw her come out dead. I think he might’ve suspected since then that you two weren’t his. She looked so much like him even then, but Caden loved you. He loved you so much, he didn’t care.”
“Then why did he leave?”
She flinches.
“Why?”
“Not because of you,” she says.
“But he couldn’t look at me when he came back.”
“It wasn’t because of you. He just saw you after we had a fight. He left –” She swallows, takes a moment. “He left because we completed a blood bond, and it broke us. After everything we went through, he couldn’t handle…” A bitter note hits her voice.
My blood stills, but I don’t push her. My thoughts fly to Micha. Every blood bond requires a sacrifice; what if we do not survive it either?
The silence stretches between us. Not quite as heavy as it was before we started, but it’s still thick and muggy and crushing on our shoulders. The truth can only lift it so much when the lies have piled on year after year after year.
“What are the limits of my curse?” I finally ask.
“You can’t use magic in any form. You can’t phase. You will never grow fangs. You will age and scar. The only time you can feed on blood is if you’re dying.” She glances at the two rings I have on my hands. The ones that give me the strength of a vampire. “And those are just placebos; you don’t need them to do what you do.”
I glance down at them, feeling the weight of their lies.
“And you can never fall in love.”
My head jerks up. “What?”
“If you do, the curse lifts.”
I stare at her, more shocked about this than anything she’s said so far. “You chose a fucking fairy tale as the curse breaker. Why? So I would be happy even when my world is falling to shit?”
“Because you’re firstborn,” she says simply. “We don’t get the luxury of knowing what real love is. We are too paranoid, too targeted, too fucked up by our position. It is something that will never happen.”
I stare at her in disbelief. “But you love us.” And I love Micha.
Her heart breaks in her eyes. “I love you as much as I know how. But I’ve lost so many children that I fear giving you all I have.” A dry laugh leaves her lips. “I don’t even know if I have it in me to give. Caden didn’t think so at the end...”
She hesitates for a moment, her eyes wet, her lips tight. Then, “The type of love that will break your curse is the type that will utterly destroy you if they get hurt. I have to divide my love across multiple children. Have had to choose between who to save first… To try to save… And you’ll have to make those same choices as Boss. You can’t ever know what love is. Our responsibility does not allow it; you can’t break over one death when you have others to watch out for. I’m sorry.”
“But you loved Caden enough to start a blood bond.”
Her shoulders sag, and she is the oldest I have ever seen her. “I loved him as much as I knew how. But I was given to him when I was a child. He named me. Owned me before I even knew the meaning of that word. Of any word. And then he was all I knew. After what Antonio did to me… I latched onto him because he was all that remained of my old life. All my brothers and sisters were dead. And my mother had raised me to love him before that. She’d built him up as this great prince… this great honor…
“I did love him. I still do. I gave him everything I had; it just wasn’t enough. I never learned to love him like he loved me.”
“But he was Boss and a firstborn,” I counter.
“And he loved me as an obsession, only giving his love as long as I was his. The love I cursed you with is one without restriction, without conditions. You love regardless of how they love you, how they treat you. If Caden loved me like that, he never would have cursed me when he learned –”
She stops.
Hugs herself again.
There is a difference to her silence this time, though, less guilt directed at me. Whatever she’s hiding, it is her secret, not mine.
But I am not ready to give her the trust of my ignorance again. Not ready to let her keep her secrets.
“When he learned what?”
“Varius, please, don’t push this.”
“You lied to me for decades. You lied to me about what I am.”
She turns to me and drops her arms. Then she lifts her chin. “I did it to protect you. I am not sorry for that, and I will not suffer for doing what I thought was best to save my child. I am simply sorry you have to deal with the sins of your father. That you have to keep a secret so big from the people you care about.”
My body stills.
If T found out…
He’d hate me so much, he’d side with the wolves.
Antonio might be breeding hybrids, but he’s doing it to use them, to torture them. He’s not treating them as if they are humans.
Volatile energy burns up inside me as more pieces of the puzzle slot together.
“One of them already knows,” I say. “Someone’s been blackmailing Micha for the ledger. Now why would any of my brothers do that when their crimes are in there too?” My gaze turns venomous, my blood to ice. “Unless they want to use it as an in into another Family. Give us up in exchange for their favor and a high position in their ranks.”
“No one would trust them if they betrayed their own.”
“Antonio doesn’t need to trust them to use them.”
Her jaw clenches as she glares at me, and for a moment, I see the Reaper of the Sired, the one who took on Aleric’s gang all on her own, right in the heart of their territory, and nearly succeeded in killing them all. I see the future Aleric said we could have had she been allowed to lead.
She forced peace on this broken city.
What more could she have done if she had been trained from birth? If she had been seen as something more than a breedmare?
“Antonio,” she spits, “will not deal with him. He wants nothing for this family but for us to suffer for what I did to him.”
“And yet, he lets Talon into his brothels when no other witch can enter.”
“Your brother is not trying to steal the ledger,” she hisses. “It won’t give him any leverage over what he already has in his head.”
I bite my tongue, unable to deny the accuracy of that statement even in my anger. Talon has his fingers in nearly every section of the Family. He might not know everything that’s in the ledger, but he has more than enough to take to Antonio.
All my brothers do.
“But think about it, Varius,” she pushes. “There’s only one person in the house who will benefit from selling it to the highest bidder.”
I still even though every nerve inside me explodes with motion, an itch beneath the skin that wants out.
Micha.
No, she wouldn’t…
But the fucking seed is already there, its roots shooting deep. The plant budding. Growing. Blossoming into a thorn-lined rose.
Why would she start a blood bond if she’s planning on stealing from me? I argue with myself. With us bonded, I’ll always be able to find her. There will be nowhere for her to run.
No, Mother is wrong. She’s fucking meddling, trying to split us apart so I never fall in love.
“I can’t fucking trust you,” I growl.
“Then don’t,” she says without hesitation. “Look into her yourself.”
Bordering on the edge of desperation, I do. I search for the bond Micha claims to have started. To prove that she is mine. That she would never –
My heart trips.
Tumbles all the way down to my fucking feet.
There is nothing there.
No bond.
No connection.
Nothing at fucking all.
It’s because we’re too far apart, I decide. We didn’t share much blood. We didn’t share enough to cross the distance from the house to here.
I look towards the two-story mansion lying behind the field of flowers. Then I start walking towards it, every step a mix of hope and fear. Hope that with the next step, I’ll feel the bond. Fear that I haven’t yet. That I never will.
Because it isn’t there.
Because she lied to me.
Is planning on stealing the ledger.
When I get to the house and still feel no bond between us, I storm up to my office. I spend the rest of the day and all of the next looking for the traitor, for someone to blame other than my little monster.
Everything I find, though, points to Micha Black.
To my chosen mate.
To the woman I thought I could trust.
Because there’s only one person who isn’t in the ledger, so they won’t be burned if it’s handed in to the police.
Only one person who doesn’t have the intel already in it, so they need the physical copy to sell.
Only one person whose account ID on a black market site matches the one that accepted the job to steal our ledger two weeks ago.
And only one fucking person who doesn’t love Khalid, who’d be okay with framing him to get what she wants.
My vision growing red, I yank open my office door. As much as I want to punish Micha myself, to deal with her as is my fucking right as her mate, I am duty bound to inform the reaper of her sins.
So I cross the hall and knock on his door, not caring that it’s well after midnight. That he’s probably asleep or in the middle of fucking his girl – who he brought in this morning, unconscious in his arms while he bled from multiple holes in his body. He made another fucking mess for me to clean up, having blown up a human’s house, but at least his girl is here now, under his protection so there is hopefully no one else for him to kill.
When Khalid opens his door, naked and without shame, I ease into telling him about Micha being the traitor.
“I’m sorry,” he says, but I force my agony down, keep my pain hidden. If he knows I have claimed her as mine, he will not do the duty he is required to do. That I need him to do because I’m pretty sure I fucking can’t.
“Her life does not matter,” I lie. “But if her dad planted her, then this will mean war with the Blacks.”
I say that to remind myself just how much she needs to be punished. Although we do not need the Blacks’ support in our war against Antonio, if we have to fight both of them at once, we might not survive. Throw in whatever gang or police force she sells the ledger to – whether for money or a clean slate, and we’re fucked.
Khalid’s jaw tightens as he looks over at his girl. She’s asleep in his bed, and I know he wants to go to her. But he wants to protect her more, and there is a traitor in the place she sleeps.
Terrified he might go after Micha now, I order, “Get some rest. I will look further into Micha and let you know when I need you.”
I shut the door behind me, closing him off, blocking his path to my girl. But in the loneliness of the hall, where there is no one she needs to be protected from, I clench my fists.
I need to punish her for her sins.
Hurt her like she’s fucking hurting me.
Stalking down the hall, I head to her room, where my little traitor is fast asleep.