I glanced back, astonished that she would say that loudly. She was out of control. Falcon shook her head. “I wouldn’t do anything to get yourself into trouble after what happened with Beast and Dred, Bonecarver.”
I certainly would not be sleepingnakednext to Vander. I paused and looked back. “If anything did happen between us, you can bet no one would know about it.” I smirked for dramatics and started off again.
Chapter 17
It was dark before Vander returned to our room. The door creaked open and I sat up. Light from the oil lamp on my bedside table gave off a subtle glow, but I’d be able to see that it was him regardless. Even if I couldn’t see in the dark, I knew his scent. I could feel his presence. Even if I went blind, I’d know him. That fact made me shift uncomfortably.
His demeanor wasn’t one of agitation and the need for escape like before. The gentle expression on his sharp features was repentant. His long legs quickly covered the ground between us, and he sat at the end of my bed. Close enough to touch me, but he didn’t.
He kept his gaze on his hands curled together on his lap. “I’m sorry for my behavior earlier. You don’t deserve that.” Then he looked at me and swallowed. The moonlight glittered in his eyes, the blue made brighter by it.
He expected me to be angry with him. I wasn’t. “I talked to Falcon earlier. She told me why you need to be alone sometimes. I understand.”
His brows pinched. “What did she tell you?” He sounded guarded.
Nerves tightened my throat. This subject needed to be handled with delicacy. “About your sister. That she was your last apprentice, and she died. Also, that Wolf didn’t make it either.”
He didn’t pull away from me and hide on the other side of the curtain like I expected. He let out a long breath, seemingly relieved. Maybe he just hadn’t wanted to be the one to tell me. “So you understand now my... aversion to training you?”
“Their deaths are not your failure. It isn’t because you didn’t train them well enough. It’s the vampires. You have to know that.” He harbored guilt he shouldn’t. But I knew what it was like to be truly responsible for someone’s death. It was a pain that was always there in the back of the mind, like a dark cloud waiting for its moment to block out the sun.
“Wolf’s death wasn’t my fault, but Oriana’s was. She never would have been here if it weren’t for me. She chose the assassins’ guild because I’m an assassin. If I’d chosen to become a scholar, she’d still be alive. If I had listened to my father...” He stood up from the bed and put his back to me.
I tugged my blanket off and put my bare feet on the floor. “You could never have known that. You did what you thought was best at the time.”
“Locke put her with me thinking she’d be safe. He trusted me,shetrusted me, and I failed them both.” He turned, eyes burning into me. “I was furious with my uncle for forcing me to be your trainer, but it had nothing to do with your potential.”
“But you still asked for someone else...”
“Because I didn’t want to watch you die because of me.”
I sat with that a moment. My heart reacted in strange ways. So he would have rather watched another apprentice die? I didn’t know what to do with that. Maybe it was what my father said to him?
“You’re going to make a great assassin. I still think you’d be better off with someone else.”
“No.” I shot off the bed, a burst of adrenaline buzzed through me. “No. I want you to train me. I don’t want anyone else.” The desperation coursing through me was alarming. Icouldn’tbe with anyone else.
“Even knowing what happened to my last two apprentices? Trust me, you should be down at Commander Ace’s door asking to be with someone else.”
“You didn’t cause their deaths, you just happened to be their trainer. People are killed by vampires every day. It’s not us, it’s them. You didn’t kill her, vampires did.” I gulped at my own words. My family had told me the same thing for years, but the guilt still clung to me like a film I couldn’t wash away. “I didn’t tell you how my grandmother died, but it was because I went outside at night. I went outside knowing I shouldn’t. She came out to rush me back in and was killed. You want to talk about fault? That is my fault.”
“You didn’t kill her, a vampire did.” He echoed my own words back to me.
“Well, maybe we should both stop blaming ourselves and take our pain and anger where it belongs. A blade into the heart of all vampires.”
He half smiled and rubbed the back of his neck, glancing away for a moment. Then he held out his hand. “A pact then. All vampires.”
I grasped his wrist and he mine. “No more blaming ourselves. We blame them, and we kill as many as we can until our hearts have stopped.”
He grinned. “No more being afraid. Be fury, Bonecarver.”
I’d had more motivation to train harder since he’d told me I could one day bring my family inside the wall. But I still hadn’twantedto kill vampires. I did now. Something had shifted with this pact. He had vengeance to take, and so did I.
Killing vampires wasn’t for the guilds or the people inside the wall that cared nothing for my people outside it. What I would do as an assassin was for our murdered loved ones, his and mine.
At home I would have run and hid for the rest of my life.
Here I would kill every vampire I encountered.
