“Dorian?” she whispered, her heart skipping, arms hovering in the space between them, still waiting for his touch.
But Dorian was unmoved.
It didn’t make sense. Even when they were total strangers, he could barely keep his hands to himself. Now, after everything they’d shared—after last night’s brushes with death—he was cold-shouldering her?
“Take a seat, Charlotte.” He stalked past her and headed for the glass doors on the other side of the room. “We need to talk, and I prefer not to complicate matters with emotional outbursts.”
Emotional outbursts?
She folded her arms across her chest, doing her best to hide the sting of his comments. “But I thought—”
“Sitdown,” he said again.
The seriousness in his tone left no room for argument, so Charley did as he asked, taking a seat at the head of the table in a stiff, high-backed chair, waiting for him to continue.
It felt like hours before he finally spoke again, and when he did, he kept his back to her, gaze fixed on the rose garden outside.
“That day in the mountains,” he said, “you asked how I came to be a vampire.”
Charley’s breath caught, her heart thudding ominously. As badly as she’d wanted to know this part of Dorian’s long, dark history, something about his tone and the tight set of his shoulders told her this wasn’t the right time—not for either of them.
“Dorian, we don’t have to talk about this.”
“Oh, but we do.” He finally turned to face her. The ice had melted from his gaze, but now it held fire, a sharp anger simmering in their golden depths. “You need to understand how we got here, Charlotte. HowIgot here. And how everything that happens after this moment, for good or ill, can be traced back to a single point in time, long before the parents of your parents were even born.”
The ferocity in his eyes silenced her protests, and she sat back in the chair and held her breath, waiting for him to unleash the terrible truth.
“I was betrothed,” he began. “Before.”
Charley’s eyes widened, a flicker of jealousy flashing through her heart. “Before?”
“When I was human. Her name was Evelyn—Evie.”
“Wow. I… I had no idea.” A million new questions exploded in Charley’s mind. Betrothed… Did that mean they never actually married? Did she pass away? Did he love her?
Did he touch her the way he touched Charley?
Silently, she cursed herself, ashamed that her mind had even gone there. But she couldn’t help it. She missed that touch, now more than ever.
“Evie was passionate and exuberant,” he said, “but also evasive and prone to bouts of deep, dark melancholy. Being with her… Sometimes it felt as if I were standing on the shoreline just out of reach, watching her drown, knowing there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to save her.”
He lowered his eyes and shook his head, and Charley let out a broken sigh, wishing she could savehim.But she knew all too well that no one could save you from your own darkness. All she could do now was keep the lights on and wait for him to return—to be here for him when he did.
Ifhe did.
“She’d always told me she was estranged from her family,” Dorian said. “In those days, it was odd for a woman of noble birth to be on her own, but I took her at her word, never pushing for the details of a situation that so clearly upset her. But if Ihad…” He let out a bitter laugh. “Seems I’ve yet to learn that particular lesson.”
Charley swallowed the tightness in her throat, her mind connecting the dots. “Your fiancée… Evie… She’s the one who turned you?”
She couldn’t even imagine the pain of something like that. No wonder he didn’t like to talk about it.
But Dorian shook his head.
“Evie didn’t turn me. She merely lied to me.” He glanced up again at the roses, sighing against the glass. “She was a vampire, Charlotte, as I’m sure you’ve deduced. But not just any vampire—the sole daughter of the king. I was ignorant, of course—too smitten to poke round themanyholes in her story. Father wasn’t fooled, though. As I learned later, he was quick to uncover her secrets.”
“What did he do?” she whispered.
“What any doctor long obsessed with outrunning his own mortality would do. He tracked down her estranged family and brokered a deal with the vampire king: Grant the Redthornes the gift of immortality, and in exchange, the Redthornes would serve the king’s house—House Kendrick—for ten years.”
