“Out with it, Aiden,” he said.
“We never talked about what happened.” Aiden met his gaze, his eyes full of some new darkness. “After, I mean. With your brothers.”
“No need. They abandoned me. Not that I can fault them—I certainly gave them good reason.”
Aiden lowered his eyes and blew out a breath. “Your family is a tangled web of secrets, Dori. It always has been—long before the devils of House Kendrick turned us all into vampires.”
Dorian nodded. His had been a noble family—six children, their parents wedded in a strategic alliance that had nothing to do with love, let alone mutual respect. Material wealth and status had never quite compensated for an absentee father and a doting mother who’d done her best with the cards life had dealt her.
“You’ve always treated me like a brother,” Aiden continued. “Since that first day you caught me sleeping in your stables, pathetic little shite that I was.” Aiden smiled at the memory, as did Dorian. “Even when the princelings saw fit to ignore me, you never looked at me as lesser.”
“Because you never were.”
“No, but Iwasan outsider. In some ways, I still am. It’s granted me a unique perspective on your family—an observational distance, you might say.”
“And what, pray tell, have you observed?”
Again, the silence gathered between them. Dorian sipped his scotch and gazed into the fire, searching the flames for answers they simply couldn’t offer.
Gabriel’s words taunted him.
Fuck off, brother. We’re all monsters, carved in our father’s image, just as he intended…
Aiden rose from his chair and poured himself another scotch, then handed the half-spent bottle to Dorian before settling back in. After a long, deep drink, he said, “When you were at your worst—when there was no talking to you—you’d vanish for days at a time. Weeks, even. All of us were mad with worry. It was the one time in our long, complicated history when your brothers and I managed to set aside our differences and unite under a common banner.”
“Whatcommon banner? My brothers turned tail and ran, while you stayed behind and dragged me back from the pits of hell.”
It was something Dorian would never forget; no matter how deeply he’d wanted to forgive his brothers, no matter how desperately he’d wanted to bring them back together as the royal vampire family, no matter how much he’d wanted to blame himself for their actions, the echo of that ancient betrayal was always whispering in his heart. Always reminding him he could never fully trust them—his own blood.
Yes, Dorianhadbeen at his worst in those days. And of all his so-called brothers, only Aiden had stayed.
“Colin,” Aiden continued, as if Dorian hadn’t said anything, “followed a lead to Colorado, where he was able to use his medical credentials to get access to a lab. He spent months searching for a way to cure your bloodlust—a quest that eludes him even now, though not for lack of trying.”
Dorian pictured Colin in a white lab coat, his hair tied back, his eyes glazed as he spent hours compiling data and looking at blood samples through a microscope, much like he was doing now. The thought tightened his chest, though he still couldn’t bring himself to truly forgive him for leaving.
Dorian shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Aiden, that’s hardly a—”
“Malcolm walked away from his life in New York in a vain effort to ask your father for assistance. He followed Augustus halfway round the world, imploring him to return to Ravenswood and help his eldest son. Augustus—who insisted the Crimson City Devil’s only mistake had been his lack of discretion—thought Malcolm should be ashamed of himself, begging for help like a worthless child. He beat your brother to within an inch of his life, waited for the wounds to heal, and did it again. And again. And again, for two long, excruciating months. ‘A vampire is a violent creature,’ he’d told Malcolm. ‘He must make peace with his nature, or he will forever be dominated by it.’ Yet still, Malcolm didn’t give up trying to convince your father to return with him. Not until Augustus finally slipped away to Buenos Aires, and Malcolm lost his trail.”
A pain lanced Dorian’s heart, and he grabbed the bottle of scotch and took a deep swallow, desperate to numb himself, to block out Aiden’s words, to convince himself it was all just another nightmare.
But in the end, neither alcohol nor denial could erase the truth from Aiden’s eyes.
Bloody hell, Mac. I wasn’t worth it.
“Which brings us to Gabriel,” Aiden said.
Dorian closed his eyes and shook his head. Gabriel’s part, at least, would offer no surprises. Since their reunion after their father’s death, he and Gabriel had gone from sworn enemies to a somewhat tolerable nuisance in one another’s lives, back to enemies once again. Under the threats of their common adversaries, they’d temporarily found some neutral ground, but Dorian wasn’t fool enough to believe his little brother held any respect for him.
Especially not after what had transpired in the dining room.
Do you think I don’t know what it feels like to look in the mirror andhatethe man staring back at me?
“You don’t have to say it,” Dorian said, opening his eyes. “I know how Gabriel feels about me. I’ve brought him nothing but disappointment and agony, and every moment we spend in each other’s presence only drives him further away. I’ll be shocked if he’s not gone by sunrise.”
A heavy sigh escaped Aiden’s lips.
“I love you, Dori,” he said in a rare moment of complete seriousness. “You’ve been my brother and best mate for nearly the entirety of my life. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. No stake I wouldn’t step in front of, no fight I wouldn’t wade into, no half-baked scheme I wouldn’t volunteer for if it offered even achanceat easing your burden. But—”
