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Wayren was looking at him, almost as if she could read what was in his mind. “You had the choice then, Dimitri. You made the decision of your own free will.”
“I was weak. He took advantage of my weakness,” Dimitri replied. But even to him, the words sounded hollow. Even then, he’d known there was something wrong. Something evil. He’d hesitated, yes, but then he’d allowed himself to be tricked, manipulated in a moment of desperation. For all he knew, Meg might have lived anyway. For all he knew, Luce had known it then, as well.
“Aye, Dimitri. He did. That is what the Fiend does.” Despite her words, Wayren watched him with a calm, peaceful expression. “He makes it easy to see his way. He takes advantage.”
Just as I did.
The image of Maia’s face, slack with pleasure, filled with her own sort of peace, slid into Dimitri’s mind. He shoved it away.
It was too late. He’d lied when he told Maia nothing had changed.
Everything had changed.
“And so now all of my years of self-denial are for naught,” he said. “It’s over.”
She looked at him searchingly. “Is that so?”
“Of course it’s so,” he replied, more angrily than he’d ever spoken to her. “How can I expect to break the covenant, to distance myself from the devil, if I act like the demon he turned me into? If I take from people, feed on them, pull their very life from them, how can I ever become human again?”
“So you’ve fed on a mortal, for the first time in decades, and you believe that action has destroyed your chance to be released from the Fiend? Oh, yes, I can see that a century of self-denial has already gotten you so very close to your desire.”
He glared at her mutely. She was looking at him with a sort of arch expression that he’d never seen before. “You don’t understand,” he said tightly. “I fed from a person. I drank her blood. I…” His voice trailed off as saliva filled his mouth. Even now, he could hardly control the physical reaction of his long-denied body. He could still taste it. Feel the energy, the life flowing through him. “It’s a violation. A sin.”
“But has denying yourself done anything but make you a cold, hard, empty shell? Hardly a person at all.”
To his shock and eternal mortification, Dimitri felt a stinging in his eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose fiercely before any tears could form. “My…dislike of social engagement has nothing to do with the problem at hand.
I’ve never been…particularly social.”
“Have you read the story I gave you?” Wayren asked.
Dimitri frowned, blinking hard. “The fairy tale about the beast? A bit of it. I found nothing of relevance.”
“Indeed?”
Impatience flooded him, and he made a sharp, frustrated gesture with his hand. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.
I thought…” He shook his head sharply, pressing his lips together.
“Dimitri of Corvindale,” Wayren said. Her voice had gentled. “If you want to become truly human again—no longer bound to the Fiend—first you must allow yourself to live again. To feel again.”
“I feel,” he snarled.
“Do you? Or do you snarl and growl—as you’ve done here, today—and then run in the opposite direction when ever something begins to soften your heart?”
“Earls don’t run,” he snapped, but something shifted deep inside him.
She smiled at him. “No, not this one. Instead you lock yourself away within a barricade of stone walls so that none can touch you, so that you can keep yourself from feeling anything.”
It was safer that way. Easier. Less complicated. “I lock myself away so I can study,” he said. But even to him, the words sounded false. “I don’t like to be bothered.”
Wayren gave him a sad, soft smile. “But that’s why men are here. To be bothered. To feel. To live. To love. And…to be loved. That is what makes you different from every other creature. And that is what makes man ultimately more powerful than the Fiend. Do you not see? He’s taken your soul, and with it, he’s taken your very humanity. The very part that could save you.”
His belly twisted tightly and his head throbbed. Maia’s face filtered into his memory, then was supplanted by Meg. And Lerina. He shook his head, but at the same time, something small and warm moved in his chest. Something he hadn’t felt in a long time.
Wayren was watching him. “Very well, then. Dimitri of Corvindale, I wish you all of the best.”
During the ride back to Corvindale’s residence from that of the sharp-eyed Rubey, Maia tried to keep her mind blank. She had so much to think about, so many emotions to sift through and to determine which ones to focus on, that she dared not begin it until she was in the privacy of her own chamber.
Preferably during another bath, where she might wash away the remnants of the interlude in Rubey’s parlor.
She shivered, a little flutter of heat streaking through her. That episode alone was enough to send her thoughts spiraling into confusion. But she dared not let herself think about it now. About: Nothing need change. We need tell no one.
Her lips tightened. Corvindale was addled if he thought nothing had changed.
When the carriage pulled up in front of Blackmont Hall, the first thing Maia noticed was another familiar vehicle parked there. Her stomach became a mass of fluttering bird wings.
Alexander.
As if she didn’t have enough to contend with. Biting her lip, she opened the little door behind the driver and asked him to take her around to the servants’ entrance.
It simply wasn’t done, of course, for a lady of the peerage to come through the rear entrance. But that would be preferable to trying to explain to Alexander why her hair was a mess and why there were four delicate marks on her neck. And shoulder. And on her gloveless wrist.
Thus, she slipped into the rear entrance and through the warm kitchen, down into the hallways that weren’t quite as gloomy as they had been when she and Angelica had arrived here. At least some of the windows were unsheathed from drapes now, so many weeks after their arrival.
Maia sent a message down to Alexander that she’d arrived and was safe, asking him to come back later in the afternoon, for she needed time to rest.
No sooner had she sent off her maid with that task, and to order a bath, than the door to her chamber was assaulted by an insistent knock. Before Maia had the chance to bolt the door—for she well knew her sister—said sister burst into the room.
