Chapter 29
Chapter twenty-nine
Saiden
Baylin was exactly where Saiden left him, only this time when he barged in it wasn’t irritation coursing through him. That was far too mild of an emotion. Even anger wasn’t up to snuff.
No, this was pure, unfettered rage.
“You knew!” he shouted, crossing the tech room in the blink of an eye.
Baylin didn’t even fight back when Saiden ripped him from the chair and slammed him up against the wall, knocking over a Monster energy drink in the process. His brother’s eyes slid down to the amber liquid spilling over the keyboard for a second and then he met Saiden’s piercing gaze head on.
“I tried to tell you,” he replied calmly.
Saiden didn’t know if it was the sedate tone or the words themselves that infuriated him to the point of exploding. He slammed Baylin against the wall a second time and relished in the cracked plaster that rained down like a winter snowstorm.
“You tried to tell me?” he bellowed. “You don’t try to tell someone something.
You just do. You open your mouth and say the words.
It should have been the first thing you mentioned the moment I walked through your fucking door this morning.
You don’t hide something that monumental from someone you claim to care about. ”
“Like you’re doing with your mate?” Baylin commented blandly, refusing to meet Saiden’s fury with any of his own.
The words gutted Saiden because he couldn’t deny the truth of them. At least Baylin tried to tell him. He hadn’t even attempted to let Cora in on everything he was keeping from her.
Releasing his brother, Saiden stepped back and fell roughly to his knees. “How long?” he whispered, the anger draining from his body to leave nothing but a broken male crumpled on the floor. “I know you looked into it. It’s what you do. How long does she have?”
“It’s hard to say,” Baylin began. “She has Juvenile Huntington’s Disease.
The symptoms first appeared when she was seventeen.
A comment in her chart from the most recent doctor’s visit indicated he doesn’t believe she has much beyond a couple years left.
The symptoms are progressing and will likely make it hard for her to maintain any kind of normal life within a year or so. Maybe less.”
Years. If he couldn’t convince his mate to turn, he would lose her to illness in only a few short years. And in only a single year she would no longer be his fiery, obstinate Cora. A year was nothing. A drop of water in the ocean of a vampire’s existence. There and gone in a blink.
“There’s no cure?” he asked, his eyes still shuttered since he refused to open them. The longer he kept them closed, the longer he could deny the reality unfolding before him.
“No,” Baylin confirmed, that single solemn word acting as the final nail in the coffin of Saiden’s hopes. “No cure.”
Saiden finally opened his eyes when a hand touched his shoulder, and he stared up at Baylin. There was only compassion in his brother’s storm gray eyes. Compassion and pity. It broke him, and he let out an anguished sob.
Saiden had never cried before. Not once in his life.
Not when his mother died of consumption.
Not when his little sister was abused and murdered while he was away fighting in The War of Spanish Succession.
Not even when he’d been captured and tortured for weeks by a band of rogue vampires in Marseille.
Not once did a single tear roll down his face.
Life was long and difficult and tragic things happened to everyone sooner or later. The longer you lived, the more tragedies you witnessed. In the end, all you could do was play the hand you were dealt. Getting weepy never solved a single problem.
But knowing he would spend an eternity without his mate shattered something inside him. Something he’d spent over three hundred years burying so deep that he had almost forgotten it existed.
His heart.
Saiden sobbed on the floor, tears gushing down his face in salty rivers of sorrow, and Baylin just held him through it all, knowing there was nothing he could say to ease Saiden’s suffering.
They sat there for a long time on the cold marble tiles.
One brother hurting, while the other did the only thing he could do—be there for him.
“Please tell me you aren’t giving up.”
Raven’s sharp voice cut through his cloud of despair. Saiden looked up to see her looming over him, hands on her hips, and not an ounce of compassion on her stern face.
“She said she would never want to be like us,” he choked out. “She called it a curse.”
Before, when he assumed he would have a few decades to change her mind, he’d thought there was a decent chance she’d come around.
If he spent enough time showing her that being a vampire wasn’t anything like the movies, surely she would have eventually relented.
But now? The clock was winding down, and he was no closer to his goal.
“You need to convince her then.”
Saiden wiped the tears from his eyes, not even embarrassed that she had seen him so thoroughly broken.
“A year, Raven. That’s all the time I have left before the disease starts to take her from me.”
“I know, Saiden. Baylin sent me a text.” Raven grew quiet and knelt down beside him. “And a year is still more than I got with my mate.”
The harsh biting words were a low blow, and Saiden knew she had intended it as such. The only way to get through to him.
It happened before the rest of the cadre even met her, but everyone knew the story.
She had become a cautionary tale of sorts.
Raven was nearly thirty when she’d been turned into a vampire and forever trapped at that age, but her mate was only twenty-three when she finally met him a century later.
They decided to wait a bit before turning him since he didn’t want to spend an eternity with a baby face.
After all, what was a few years compared to the millennia they had waiting for them?
Six weeks later, Raven’s mate was mugged and stabbed in the back alleys of London on his way home from the market. He bled out on the dirty cobblestone road, all because the men wanted to steal the watch on his wrist that didn’t even work.
Raven was a ghost when Saiden met her a decade later. A shell of a vampire that wanted to die so badly she picked a fight with a rogue in the hopes that someone else might end things for her.
Saiden saved her before the rogue could finish her off, then he spent years helping her find her way back to some semblance of a meaningful existence.
Now she would have to do the same for him.
“I don’t think I’ll survive if I lose her, Raven.”
“I know it feels that way now, but should it come to that, I am certain you will survive,” his cousin replied, holding out a hand to help him up. “You’ll just wish you hadn’t.”
It took Saiden’s cousins almost an hour to calm him down enough to formulate some type of plan. In the end, it was harsh words from Raven that had his agony fading and his will to fight rising.
“Are you acting like the kind of vampire who would even be worthy of a mate like her?”
It was all he needed to remember exactly who he was—one of the most feared rogue hunters in all of North America.
And the reason he was so feared, the reason he knew other vampires whispered about him in hushed tones, was because of his tenacity.
When he was on a hunt, it didn’t end until either he or the rogue was dead.
And after three hundred years, he remained undefeated.
Saiden would not let this break him. He couldn’t. The moment he accepted the situation was the moment that she was already gone. He would fight for her right up until her very last breath if that was what it took.
The first step, they’d all decided, was finding out exactly why Cora was so prepared to die. Was it that she really hated vampires that much? Or was there something else driving her decision?
If he could just convince her to turn, then he could spend the rest of his very long life trying to make her realize how perfect they could be together. He just needed that time.
“Do you really think this will work?” Saiden asked Raven and Tressa as he went over the itinerary in his hand. He trusted his cousins completely and fully understood that he knew less about women then he did about synchronized swimming, but still…
“It’s perfect,” Tressa gushed. “We took care of all the reservations and even found a pilot who can meet you at the airfield in half an hour. Trust me, women love grand gestures like this. Stick to the plan, keep everything secret until the last minute so she can be surprised, and I promise she’ll be melting into your arms before dinner. ”
“I thought I was supposed to be myself? Isn’t that what you said before, Raven?”
His cousin ran a comb through his hair, swooping the long strands artfully off to the side of his face. “Of course you should be yourself. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be yourself while indulging in a romantic evening out.”
“Okay,” he agreed reluctantly, tugging on the stiff button-down shirt they’d stolen from Derrick’s closet. He glanced at himself in the mirror and tried not to cringe.
A light blue collared shirt, black tailored pants, and shiny loafers that were at least two sizes too small.
He looked posh and refined. Exactly how one might envision those misunderstood vampires in romance novels.
And he wanted nothing more than to rip it all off and throw on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.
But love requires sacrifice—or so the girls had told him—and he would dress to the nines every day if it meant Cora would be by his very uncomfortable side.
Saiden put the mantra on repeat in his brain as he strode down the hall toward the guest bedroom where he’d left her, the tight shoes pinching his toes the entire way.
He just hoped Cora wasn’t too upset. She opened up to him about her disease, and he’d immediately made some lame excuse about a security check to race from the room.
Staying hadn’t been an option, though. Not when her words had crushed him like a boulder, burying him under an avalanche of emotion that he couldn’t possibly process in front of her.
She wouldn’t understand why he was so upset, why her words made him feel like someone had sucked all the air from the room.
He would just have to make it up to her. It was what the entire evening was about. Helping her to see him in a different light. Turning a corner and putting all that pesky kidnapping stuff behind them.
A fresh start… so long as she would allow it.
He took one last glance at the list the girls had made him promise to follow to the letter.
It had to work.
It will work, he told himself. After all, any woman would be crazy to say no to all of this.