Page 80 of Sold to the Dark Vampire Prince

Sera was silent for a long moment. “I’d forgotten that. But yes. Mom would help Isabella because she always loved to twirl, even when she was very small. I was always calling over to her to look at my spins. I was such a little brat.”

“He used to hug us back then, do you remember? It feels strange thinking of it now.”

“I used to wonder why he stopped. If it was fear and trauma over Mom getting sick, or something else.” Sera considered this. “I think his magic doesn’t automatically drain family members. I know I never saw him worried that he’d accidentally hurt her. They were always touching. Always laughing. He went so much longer back then between the bad spells.”

“Sometimes it would be so long, I would forget I would need to hide in my closet until it was too late.”

Sera nodded sadly. “I have so many memories of him holding my hand when I was little when we would go out in public and I was nervous in front of the press. But now, looking back, I wonder if when she began to get sick, he must have blamed himself, must have silently believed that despite whatever the doctors told him about the transition being the cause, it was somehow him at fault in the end.”

“His blood was used to change her,” Alex pointed out. “He could have believed that it was something fundamental about its chemistry, or sustained contact with him, that caused her transition to fail.”

Sera nodded. “That his body was strong enough to withstand it, but because the change had been forced on her, rather than being a result of the virus, hers was not.”

Alex was silent for a long moment. “Is it naïve of me that I sometimes wonder if he could ever be removed from power peacefully, put forcibly into treatment? Dante and Isabella are too young to have strong memories of him from before things got bad, but you and I remember. After it became clear that there was no way to save her, the abuse got so much worse.”

“Losing a mate is catastrophic. Males especially sometimes aren’t able to recover. They bond very deeply.” Sera hugged her knees, staring into the fire. “When patients can’t cope after a trauma, they seek any method available to numb the pain. For some, that’s alcohol or drugs. Father became addicted to blood, and to the high he gets from draining life energies while he feeds. He’s been doing it for so long that it’s altered the patterns in his brain.”

“So there’s no hope?”

“The first step in recovery is patient willingness. No one can force this on him. He has to want to take the first step.”

Alex sighed. He’d expected as much. “And on that note, I need to tell you what Henri and I found down in the dungeons.”

It was hours later, as Alex was lying in bed, staring out at the falling snow, utterly unable to sleep, that he finally gave in and texted Daniela.

Alex: Are you awake?

Dani: Two cups of tea and three chapters of War and Peace, and I’m no closer to falling asleep than I was an hour ago. Whatever Finneas put in that draught is certainly potent.

Alexander swiped and pressed the button to call her.

“I took my first dose,” he said when she picked up.

He rubbed his temples. The headache was back and the shaking in his hands with it. He needed to feed from Dani again. He desperately wanted to go to her, to feel her hungry fingers in his hair and relish her soft cries of pleasure as he sucked greedily from her throat.

Wanting him.

Only him.

But if they were going to end this, if this was the only way to keep her and her sisters safe, he had to find a way to ignore the cravings for her blood. That thought was small comfort to him when his fangs felt so sharp and tender. He was of half a mind to go down to the palace kitchens and find a raw, cold steak to chew on to soothe the ache away.

And to tell her any of that would have been horribly unfair.

“I missed the sound of your voice,” he said instead. “Would you just… talk to me for a little while? Just about anything. Tell me what you and your sisters did this evening.”

“I must warn you, Your Highness, it involves rather a lot of swooning over figure skaters.” Her tone turned teasing. “And Ava’s request that Evan draw a comic of Cinder as a magical winged cat that flies throughout the sector, perching on rooftops and generally getting up to no good.”

“Wait, I thought you said this was a work of fiction?”

She went quiet for a minute, and Alex wished he could see her, wished they could have had this conversation with her head pillowed against his shoulder while she gradually drifted off to sleep and he ran his fingers through her hair.

“The last few days have been hard, with Nadine being back. Ava always struggles when her blood sugar fluctuates and she can’t get it stabilized. She’s told me that during the bad spells, sometimes she fears she’ll never feel good again. I’m glad we had this night to reconnect. One thing losing my parents taught me is to never take a single day for granted. Tonight, we were together, happy and safe, and that has to be enough.”

There were so many things he wanted to tell her, and all of them would only make their bond harder to sever. He stared down at the mark on his wrist, wondering how he would ever be able to go through with cutting the connection to Daniela in less than a week’s time.

“Will you… stay here, on the phone with me?” he asked roughly. “Just for a little while. Just until we fall asleep?”

“Close your eyes,” she said softly. And as he lay back down and tucked the phone close to his ear, she said, “Can you hear the snow whispering against the eaves?”