CHAPTER FIFTEEN || COLE
Ihad just stepped through the door after dropping Eli off at work when I heard the crash of glass next door.
Eli’s house.
Where his sister, Sam, was home alone.
I was out the back door and over the waist-high wooden fence separating our properties in seconds. My gaze raked across Eli’s back door. It didn’t appear damaged. If there was an intruder, they’d come through the front door—or possibly a window.
I listened intently for several long moments. Time was of the essence, but it was vital to know what I was up against.
On the other side of the wood, I heard Sam sobbing.
I tried the knob and found the door unlocked. I shoved it open and barreled inside. Then I stopped dead. Sam sat on the kitchen floor, surrounded by shards of broken glass, a pool of red at her feet. Her face was streaked with tears, but her eyes widened when I burst in.
“Cole?” she asked, sounding equal parts alarmed and bewildered. She, at least, consented to call me by my modern name. Then again, she hadn’t been dreaming of me for most of her life. Presumably. She added, “What are you doing here?”
She was intoxicated—her words slurred at the edges.
“Are you injured?” I demanded, ignoring her question.
She shook her head mutely, and my gaze swept the room. Nothing came at me. No sound of movement. No telltale second heartbeat. Then again, if it had been a vampire—the whole reason I’d moved in next door—there wouldn’t have been. I turned back to Sam. “What happened? Whose blood is on the floor?”
She blinked at me in confusion. “What are you talking about?”
I pointed to the pool of scarlet at her feet.
Then, belatedly, I saw the overturned bottle a few feet away. It had rolled under the bottom lip of the cabinet. I took a delicate sniff of the air—it was wine, not blood. I relaxed a notch. “Oh.”
Sam followed my gaze and stared at it for a long moment. Then something crumpled in her expression, and her breath hitched. Another round of tears followed.
I grimaced. “Damn it.”
But my feelings for Eli—as impossible as they were—apparently extended to his sister. Because I sighed, shook my head, and settled down on the ground beside her.
To her credit, she tried to stifle both the sobs and the tears against the back of her hand. But they kept coming anyway. I sat next to her on the kitchen floor, feeling increasingly uncertain as to what I should be doing.
What would a person with a heart do in this situation? I considered calling Harris to ask, but I felt reasonably certain Sam shouldn’t be left alone in her current state.
At last, when the tears slowed, I asked, “What happened?”
She laughed—which was rather odd of her, given that tears were still pouring down her cheeks. “I dropped the bottle.”
“Ah. And the broken glass?”
“I tried to catch it. I was holding my fucking wine glass.”
“And you dropped that as well.”
Strangely, that set her off all over again.
I hesitated. “We can get you another bottle of wine. Something that doesn’t smell like vinegar.”
She shook her head vehemently, her eyes wide with horror. “No! I don’t want that!”
“Okay,” I replied, more confused than before. “We can get you wine that does smell like vinegar.”
An unusual place to draw the line, but to each their own.
Somehow, my suggestion seemed to calm her. “I don’t want another bottle of wine! I hate it. I hate this. All of it.” She gestured vaguely in front of her. I couldn’t help but notice she’d included herself in the mix.
“Ah.”
“Yeah,” Sam said bitterly. Her expression was tremulous as her gaze met mine. “I’m ruining his life. Has he told you that?”
“He doesn’t think that,” I assured her.
“Right. Well, he might not have said it, but it’s true. And I know it. And I still can’t stop. I keep promising myself today’s the day—that I’ll just have one glass of wine. And then I promise myself I’ll just have two.”
“And before you know it, the bottle’s gone,” I said, getting it. I’d never struggled with alcoholism, but I knew a thing or two about losing control of my urges.
“I’d be in good shape if it was just a bottle a day,” Sam said, shaking her head wearily. She sounded marginally more sober. And the tears had stopped. Now, she just seemed vaguely exhausted and wrung out.
“Why do you drink?”
She hesitated, avoiding my eyes. “I don’t know.”
One didn’t need supernatural senses to know she was lying—to both of us. I considered using my hypnotic gifts to ease the truth out of her, but it seemed… wrong. To force her to tell me her truth.
Odd. After all, it had never seemed wrong before now.
But then again, less than two months ago, I couldn’t have fathomed sitting on a dingy kitchen floor with a drunk, crying woman, trying to help her process her feelings.
The hesitation I felt at taking what I wanted in the moment was probably the least of it, truly.
“You don’t need to tell me if you don’t want to.”
She was quiet a long time. Then, at last, she said, “Our mom died when I was eight and Eli was five.” She paused, shaking her head. “Our dad was a drunk. I take after him, I guess. But he was… a mean drunk.” She let out a long breath that hissed between clenched teeth. “Really mean.”
“Ah,” I said again, my voice sounding strangely tight to my own ears.
A thread of heat wove through me as I pieced together the years of subtext she’d just handed over. It was a strange, unfamiliar feeling. It caused my hands to tighten into fists and my teeth to clench.
Anger, I realized after a long moment. I was feeling anger. Not at Sam, but for her. And especially for Eli. I wasn’t sure I liked the sensation. It made me feel unsteady—almost irrational.
“I spent years trying to protect Eli from him. Mostly, he ignored us and drank until he passed out. But whenever he got mean, I made sure he was mean to me and not Eli, whenever I could.”
“He laid hands on you in violence,” I said dangerously. “His own child.”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Sam said sharply, eyes wide. She shook her head slowly. “I’m not doing that with you right now. Sorry.”
I shrugged, trying to force the anger to subside so I could think properly again. If these were emotions, I wanted a refund.
“You’ll find my feelings aren’t easily hurt.”
A joke, of course. Up until I met Eli, I hadn’t realized I could have feelings about anything at all.
Though perhaps it was no longer true—as evidenced by the anger that still wouldn’t quite leave me.
Maybe, after so long without emotions, my newfound ones would be extra tender and easily hurt.
Or worse—they’d explode out of me at inopportune moments.
That was a chilling thought.
“Anyway. I promised myself I’d never turn into our dad.
That I’d never be like him. But here I am, screwing Eli’s life up, just like he did.
” She sniffed, voice growing thicker and ragged again.
“And now I’m drunk, on the kitchen floor, crying over a bottle of wine I dropped, and oversharing with my neighbor—who is also my brother’s boyfriend.
After he just broke into my house without warning. ”
I went silent, trying to make myself say the words that would let me smoothly exit this kitchen and return to the strange little slice of domestic bliss I was carving out with Eli. But I found myself hesitating—not quite wanting to leave her alone.
Perhaps the earlier version of me would have looked at the logic of the situation and realized it was smarter to fix the sister.
After all, her drinking problem was a rather wild variable that could be controlled.
It would’ve been easy to catch her eye, shove with a bit of power, and tell her not to drink alcohol anymore.
Problem solved. And more time spent with a happier version of Eli.
But that wasn’t what went through my mind.
Instead, I remembered the photograph I’d seen hanging on the wall—Sam and Eli standing in front of a roller coaster. Both of them younger and—I had thought—innocent.
But that hadn’t been true, had it?
Their father had done terrible harm to both of them. He was still hurting them, even now. Her pain was almost certainly what drove her to drink. And her situation made Eli feel helpless and afraid. Even now, Sam was suffering.
If her emotions were anything like that flash of anger I’d felt—unstoppable, uncontrollable, impossible to deny—then I understood perfectly well.
What she felt was far bigger than her ability to say no to it.
The previous version of me would’ve left the pain right where it was.
After all, it wouldn’t have been my problem.
“What if there was something you could do to change things?” I asked, deciding then and there that if she would allow it, I’d do everything in my power to help her.
“What, like rehab?”
I shook my head. “No, definitely not rehab.”
“Then what? I’ve tried therapy a couple of times. It’s never really—”
“I’m a vampire,” I said softly. The words fell between us like dead weight.
Sam stared at me, eyes widening. A moment later, outrage twisted her expression. “You should leave.”
“What?”
Of all the reactions I’d expected, that hadn’t been one of them.
“I tell you all of this shit—this deep, dark, personal shit—and you tell me you’re a vampire?
Let me guess: your mom is a witch and your cousin is Bigfoot?
” She grimaced, shaking her head. “I’m such an idiot, to think I could trust you.
I mean, who the fuck even are you? You arrive without warning and mess with Eli’s head and—”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
Sam flinched. But then her eyes narrowed in challenge. “Prove it.”
I bared my teeth and dropped my fangs.
“Those could be fake,” she said immediately, gaze glued to my canines. But a flicker of unease crossed her face. “They make retractable fangs that look really realistic.”
“My goodness, this was much easier a hundred years ago,” I muttered, reaching for a long, jagged shard of wine glass.
“Cole, wait—” Sam started.