Chapter Twenty
Holden
E veryone got over who Luca was within a couple of days.
He started to look better with the comfort—both physical and emotional—of the pack around him. But everyone with the supernatural senses could hear the rattling in his chest every time he coughed.
On the fourth evening, after everyone had had dinner and right before I was going to drag Rian upstairs to make sure he, too, was fed, Luca asked everyone to gather in the living room.
Once everyone was settled, he looked at us all one by one and squeezed Rian’s hand.
Cindy moseyed onto his lap and curled up there, her purring starting immediately.
“So here’s the deal. I have incurable cancer,” he started quietly.
The gasps were expected, but not all of them were surprised. He seemed to catch that and smiled sadly.
“They didn’t catch it early enough for treatments to do anything but maybe give me a few more months. Because a man my age who is fit, works out, and runs around stages for a living while singing can’t have cancer, right.” His snort was so bitter it made my heart hurt. “Then things with the band started to decline and I ignored everything for a while. I….” He looked at Cindy for a moment, then shrugged. “I guess I just wanted you all to know that this is incurable. That I won’t be getting better and to not expect me to.”
Brodie cleared his throat. “What does your advance directive say about being turned?”
Luca smiled sadly. “It used to say whoever is available can turn me. But it was for accidents, for emergencies. And for when the band was still a solid thing around me.” He gave Brodie this heartbreaking look and continued, “I never changed it, but right now… I don’t know.”
To my surprise, or maybe not, it was Ben who cleared his throat. “There’s more to life than being the lead singer of a band. It might not look that way right now, but your life doesn’t need to be over.”
I nodded solemnly. “I was turned after something went wrong at work one day and there was no choice. I ended up going from a big city cop to a small-town deputy, but I haven’t regretted it.”
Rian fidgeted a little next to Luca who turned to look at him. Everyone else noticed, too.
“I was turned in a different time,” he started quietly, not looking at anyone, his gaze locked on the coffee table. “Vampires were thought to be devils, and anyone who looked too… I guess too healthy, too pretty, was thought to be one. Wolves had it easier, they could hide in remote areas, but by the time the famine got bad, humans distrusted everyone who didn’t look like them.”
Luca squeezed his hand. “Did you know the person who turned you?”
He shook his head. “No. I’d seen him around a few times. He was a merchant’s son, I think. Handsome as hell. Kept slowing down his horse or carriage when passing our place if I was outside working.”
“Ah.” Luca grimaced. “You don’t need to talk about this if you don’t want to.”
Rian shook his head and smiled slightly. “I think maybe I should. I haven’t, not in decades.” He took in a deep breath and, while still holding onto Luca’s hand, leaned to his other side to make contact with me.
I immediately moved closer.
“My memories from the last few days as a human are hazy. I remember my mam crying. My younger siblings dying. Dad had died weeks before. We were so damn hungry….” A tremor went through his body and squeezed him to my side. “Then I remember more hunger. Different one. Waking up ravenous, but also feeling so, so much better.
“He’d taken me somewhere. A bigger building by the docks in a different town. I… I attacked someone, my instincts driving me, and then I realized what I was doing and ran. It took me days to understand what was going on with me. He’d put some money in my pocket and I made my way…. It doesn’t matter now.”
“He didn’t stay with you?” Brodie rumbled the question I was thinking about.
I made eye contact with Brodie, and I could practically feel the anger ping-ponging between us. I was shocked he didn’t already know the whole story.
“No.” Rian let out a dark chuckle. “I met him for the first time about a decade later in London. Just… bumped into him, I guess. Knew who he was instantly.” He glanced around the room at the pack. “Vampires know. There’s a bond, which these days, when people are turned for medical reasons more than anything, doesn’t mean much. But back then it was often expected that there would be a… a relationship between the two. I guess, if you’re turning your friend or lover, then that’s true still, but…. Anyway. He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong by abandoning me. He thought he’d saved me. He also told me all of my family was dead by the time he got there, but I don’t know how true that is.”
“So he took you because what? You were dying and he thought you were hot?” Carys piped up, anger in her tone.
Rian snorted, shrugging. “I guess so. His exact words were ‘I wanted to preserve your beauty.’ That said, he insisted he wasn’t into men, but we both knew it was bullshit. Not that I ever… because ew.”
His disgusted expression made everyone laugh, including Luca who then started to cough and couldn’t stop.
We all got serious again once he’d calmed down.
“I see what you’re saying, though,” Luca murmured. “Even after a few days here I can see everyone here is exactly where they belong. It’s… I don’t know. My family back in Brooklyn is pretty good with me being queer and the band thing. It’s just that some of them are pretty damn speciest.”
“Well fuck them,” Max blurted out, then blushed. “But seriously. You’ve suddenly lost a lot and yeah, living might make you lose even more, but isn’t dying like throwing everything away anyway? Choosing to die makes you lose everything that could’ve been.” Then he clamped his mouth shut and burrowed closer to his brother, dropping his gaze to his lap.
I caught Rian’s eyes and immediately knew there was more to the story than what he’d just told us. There was an undercurrent of something bubbling within him that I could sense.
“Okay. I’m taking this one upstairs for a while,” I announced and got up, pulling Rian with me.
Nobody ribbed us, even though everyone knew feeding could easily lead to more. As we walked up the stairs, we heard Carys yell “Movie night!” and chuckled.
We went to Rian’s room and I closed the door behind us.
As I turned around to look at him, I could see he was troubled.
“More to the story?” I made an educated guess.
He nodded, then tugged at his curls. “I…,” he started, but went quiet again.
“Let’s get onto the bed.” I rounded the bed to climb up and went to the middle so he could curl to my side the way he wanted as I reclined against the plush pillows.
When he joined me, there was the air of something serious still hanging within him.
He wrapped an arm around my waist and placed his head on my chest.
“Do you want a bite first?” I asked when he didn’t talk after a few minutes.
He shook his head, and I gently tugged on his curls. He smiled slightly.
“I don’t want you to think differently about me,” he whispered so quietly I almost couldn’t hear him.
“I don’t think I could,” I admitted.
He took in a deep breath. “The second time I met my sire, I was in a very bad place. I had wanted to… to die for a while. I missed my family. The simplicity of it all. This was decades after I was turned, mind you. I’d tried to find a place in the world that didn’t feel mine. I was born into this regular old Irish family. We were always dirt poor but so, so damn happy. There were struggles even before the famine, but those were the times.”
I hummed. “You didn’t know any better.”
“Exactly.” He played with the hem of my T-shirt, and I held out the hand not in his hair to give him a new stress toy. He smiled and entwined our fingers. “I was meant for a simple life. Sure, I was getting old to not be married at twenty-two, but the famine had messed up everyone’s life plans, such as they were. I would’ve married a nice girl and that would’ve been it.”
“Did you know you were queer back then?”
Snorting softly, Rian nodded. “I did. From very young. There was a neighbor who worked his fields next to our back wall. Then a friend. Then eventually, the wealthy man who rode his horse ever so slowly past our fields.”
Ah.
“What happened?” I asked gently.
“Like I said, I was done with life. I must’ve been in my seventies, maybe. I didn’t feel as if there was anything there for me left to see. I was… depressed, I guess, you’d say now.” He pulled his hand from mine and rolled onto his back to stare at the ceiling. “He appeared where I was staying one day. He’d heard from a mutual acquaintance where I was. This was in France. He started to praise me. How far I’d come. Congratulated himself on turning me, more or less. Then he said that ending my younger sister and my mother’s suffering to be able to whisk me away was worth it, and I just… it’s a blur in my mind now, but it ended up with me killing him.”
I blinked a few times, processing the information.
“My mother was close to dying, I’m sure. But my sister was only sixteen. She was a strong, sturdy girl. She was the healthiest of us and—”
“I don’t blame you. Nobody in this house would blame you for avenging them, Rian.”
I didn’t know how long he’d needed to hear those words from someone he loved, but as soon as he truly took them in, he tensed, then relaxed and began to cry in big, heaving sobs.
Turning to my side, I pulled him to me and held onto him while he let go centuries worth of anguish.
Did it change how I saw him, knowing he’d taken a life? No. Hell, he might’ve taken more than one. It wasn’t unlikely for a newly turned werewolf or a vampire to kill back in the day. Besides, the history of the whole world was violent. Violence was a fact of life, which I’d seen in my work more than I would’ve liked.
I still needed to figure out how to let go of the guilt I had over what Mikayla, Val, and the kids had gone through, but I knew Rian would help me. The whole pack would. But right now, Rian was my priority.
Once he was done crying, he was exhausted.
I handed him a tissue from the box on the bedside table. He got cleaned up and then looked so damn tired that my heart hurt for him.
“How about you have a drink and then we’ll nap while the others watch their movie?”
Rian took a deep breath, then nodded. “Okay.”
We were both wearing sweatpants and T-shirts, so getting comfortable didn’t require getting out of bed.
I took my T-shirt off, and he did the same with his. Then he straddled me and settled on top of me for a while. The skin contact was lovely, and I traced shapes on his back while he gathered himself a bit.
When he finally pushed up to embrace me, he looked much more settled.
“Like this?” I asked, tilting my head to one side.
He shook his head and scooted back enough to be able to free my cock from my sweats and underwear. Then he did the same to his own and raised a brow at me.
“Oh, I see,” I murmured. “Need a hand?”
He laughed and let me help him out. It didn't take long until both of us were hard and precum slicked our skin.
“You do your thing, I’ll take care of this,” I told him as I kept the movement of my hand going.
I didn’t need to look at what I was doing, we’d done this often enough by now that I knew exactly what his cock felt as it strained against mine. I tilted my head again and he leaned forward. His hands went to my shoulders and into my hair, and he grinned at me with his fangs showing.
Then he kissed me, and I stopped jerking us off for a moment, just squeezing us together. He pulled back from the kiss, panting as he ran his nose along my jawline, then down my throat to the spot he liked to bite.
I moved my hand again, the strokes firm and not too fast. We didn’t need fast, not with what was about to happen.
As his mouth moved on my neck, his tongue teasing my skin until goosebumps erupted all over me, his lips curled into a smile. Then a second later, the familiar sting of his fangs and the euphoria that rushed through my system took over.
His hips began to roll into my hold, and I tightened my grip, moving my fist in counterpoint to him. It took no time at all for my mind to go fuzzy and both of us to erupt in my grasp.
I went lax, panting for breath as Rian made happy noises against my neck. Then he pulled his fangs back and licked the wounds clean. He was exactly as boneless as I was, slumping on top of me.
A few minutes later, he pulled away and looked at where I’d put my cum-stained hand on the closest T-shirt next to us—mine.
“Well done,” he mumbled, then tucked our cocks away and made us more respectable. Then he rubbed my hand with the T-shirt until he deemed me clean enough. I watched him do it, sensing that he wasn’t quite there, but halfway asleep already.
I pulled him into my arms and made him the small spoon.
“Sleep, honey.”
“Mm… love you.”
“Love you, too.”