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“If we’d bonded, and you’d revealed all of this afterward, I swear I would have killed you, or myself if need be, in order to be free of such a despicable connection. Now get out of my sight before I do something I’m sure at some point I’ll regret.”
Rosamunde stared at him for a long moment. “If you need me, Stone, I’m here for you. I know you don’t believe me, but you’re wrong about this.”
“Get out!” He shouted so loud that her ears rang.
Chapter Thirteen
Stone stared at the empty bed for a long, long moment.
His entire body vibrated with rage.
Sweet Goddess, he couldn’t believe how many different ways he’d made love to Rosamunde last night and right now he regretted it all. He felt as though he’d slept with a demoness, a woman who had tricked him with one set of seductive behaviors, yet all the while she’d been the real reason his adopted troll parents had died.
He should have stuck with his initial instincts about Rosamunde as a woman lacking courage and action. Her life might have been uncomfortably secluded, but it had been a soft existence. She hadn’t learned how to really do battle in a world constantly harassed by wraith-pairs.
And her story about Margetta forcing these visions on her yet making it impossible for her to act rang false to his warrior ears. If she’d really cared about all the realm-folk who’d died, she would have alerted the ruling mastyrs. She would have done something. A failure to act was as damning as anything else in this situation.
He dressed for the night in battle gear, as usual. Though like Ian, he’d left off wearing the woven shirts. He liked seeing his tattoos in the mirror as he wrestled his black mane into the woven clasp. Each time a major catastrophe had happened, he’d added a tattoo so that every single ink blade point on his body reminded him why he fought as he did.
He pulled the leather Guardsman coat aside and touched the point nearest his heart. He’d gotten it a year after the death of his parents, a reminder of why he would always serve as a Guardsman. He would battle for the safety of the Nine Realms until the day he died.
Grief swelled over him suddenly and so profound that he had to catch himself with both hands on the edge of the sink or he would have fallen forward and crashed into the mirror.
Sweat beaded up on his forehead.
He could recall the night he learned of the attack on Charborne as though it was yesterday and not three hundred years ago. He’d been as far from the village and the family farm as he could have been in Tannisford. He’d flown faster than ever before, but it had still taken him twenty minutes to get there.
By the time he arrived at Charborne, several Vampire Guard squads were in play taking care of business. Dozens of wraith-pairs lay dead on the cobbled streets of the village and the rest were being run to earth.
He’d sped the remaining distance to the family farm, but the house was on fire as were the haystacks scattered through the pasture. He found his parents already dead and lying in a ditch near their vegetable garden along with two female dairy workers and three field hands. The wraith-pairs had been in such a frenzy, they’d slaughtered forty head of cattle as well.
He’d carried his mother to a quiet, untouched place in their peach orchard, then gone back for his father and the others. He’d spent the rest of the night preparing funeral pyres. Relatives of the dead had come from miles around to mourn the loss.
His best friends, Harris and Cole, had stayed with him until dawn. He’d wept unceasingly. He’d always known that he’d been a shield of protection for Charborne. Wraith-pairs had attacked the village at least once-a-year and because of his ability, he’d fought them off from the time he’d learned to ply his battle frequency.
Though he’d had the current ruling mastyr of Tannisford drill the village in security maneuvers and some of the Guard had even trained the more stalwart trolls, elves and fae how to fight, no one could have predicted such a large number of wraith-pairs descending all at once on Charborne.
Except … Rosamunde.
Unbidden tears fell from his eyes, only what he felt wasn’t just the grief of having lost his family three centuries ago or even that their deaths could have been prevented. But in this moment, he’d also lost a woman he’d come to love.
Earlier, while making coffee and preparing ingredients for a frittata, he’d come to a decision to bond with her. He’d even taken a few minutes to mentally lay in all the arguments he would use to persuade her.
He’d shaved and showered, wishing she’d wake up so they could discuss the immediate future.
Now, he felt as though her revelations about Margetta’s visions had set his whole life on fire, burning it down to embers, and there was nothing he could do about it.
He could only return to the Communication Center and get back to work.
~ ~ ~
As Rosamunde showered in her castle bathroom, she felt numb from head to foot. She’d been a fool not to address the issue of Margetta’s visions much earlier in her relationship with Stone. In fact, the best time would have been when she’d served cocktails before the gala and both Vojalie and Davido had been present. They could have supported her claims.
But when she thought back to the scope of Davido’s revelations, she recalled the state of shock Stone had been in. He’d learned Davido wasn’t just his biological father, but an elf-lord as well. She couldn’t have layered yet another explosive piece of news on top of his parentage. It had seemed way too much at the time.
Yet without Davido’s support of her position, all Stone saw was her supposed weakness.
She realized she was emotionally worn out from the last three nights. Leaning her forearm against the tile and as the warm water beat down on her, she gave herself to the tears that had tightened her throat.
