Page 138 of Bought for Blood
“Serenity—”
“You do the right thing, and then you go and stand in a room alone so nobody can catch you at it. You’ve done it every singletime. I’m tired of it.” Her chin comes up. “And I’d like you to stop telling me who I’m allowed to love.”
Love.
She said it first.
“There’s a wolf in me,” she goes on without stopping. “You’ve never asked about her. She chose you at that compound, before I’d decided anything, and she was right. And wolves choose once, Bastien. Nobody tells you that part. There is no second one. So there’s no better man waiting for me somewhere. There’s you, or there’s nobody, for the rest of my life.”
I didn’t know that. She’s telling the truth, and I can’t argue that.
So I retreat again, and this time I hear myself doing it.
“Then it’s worse than I thought,” I say. “Because there’s a whole life I can’t give you. A family. Children. Vampires don’t make them. There is no amount of money that changes it. You could have had a man who grows old beside you, and children on the stairs, and I took the choice away the day I paid for you. I gave you back so you could have it.”
“What life is that, exactly?” She doesn’t raise her voice this time. “My mother died running. I grew up learning to be invisible. Then a cell, for a year, while men priced my blood. Show me the part where the husband and the children were on the table. That life was never mine. You keep trying to hand me back something I never had. And my wolf doesn’t want it either. She chose you, and she knew exactly what you were when she did it.”
I have no reasons left to hand her, and she knows it before I do.
“That’s three,” she says. “Safety. Your conscience. My children. Every time I take one reason away, you hand me another. That’s how I know none of them is the true one.” She’s close enough now to touch. “Say what you’re really hiding from.”
The room is very quiet.
“I have buried everyone I ever kept,” I say. “Three hundred years is a long list. I stopped adding names to it a long time ago, because I know what it costs. With you it would be worse than all of them together. There are two ways I lose you. The years take you, slowly, while I watch. Or somebody walks through a door and carries you out of it, because they worked out what you’re worth to me.”
“So you sent me away before either one could happen.”
“Yes.”
“And then you came up here.” She looks past me, at the open door, at the gray coming into the sky behind it. “I saw it from the path, Bastien. A vampire on a ridge. Door facing east. No shutters. You weren’t going with Crowe, and you weren’t going home either.”
I don’t answer.
“Say what you were doing.”
“Waiting.”
Her breath goes out of her. She takes the front of my shirt in both hands, and this time it isn’t anger.
“Then your plan doesn’t even work,” she says. “Look at where we are. You gave me up so losing me couldn’t hurt you, and four days later you’re sitting at an open door waiting for the sun. You were losing me anyway. You just weren’t getting to have me first.”
I put my hands over hers. They’re not steady, and I let her feel it.
“There’s one more thing I did without asking you,” I say. “The night I gave you my blood, it didn’t just bring you back. It’s still in you, and it’s still doing something. A wound like that should have taken you a month. It took days, and the doctor stopped asking me questions about it.” I make myself say the rest plainly. “Nobody can tell me what that means for how long you’ll live.Not Faine. Not anyone. It might mean nothing at all. It might mean you outlast every person you know. I changed something in you that night, and I don’t know how big the change is, and you never got a say in it.”
She takes that in. I watch her work through it, and I wait.
“You did it because I was dying,” she says.
“Yes.”
“If you had asked me, what would I have said?”
“You’d have said yes.”
“I’d have said yes.” She nods once. “So I forgive that. You saved my life. There was no time to ask, and you already knew the answer. That’s not the same as what you did afterward.”
“Serenity—”
