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Hunter made a soft sound in his throat. “Well, shadow-girl, looks like you weren’t quite alone, even then.”
Seems that way…Everything twisted around me. The darkness stretched, like a picture bent and folded, and I couldn’t find ground beneath my feet. I reached, clutching for something, anything, to hold on to, but found nothing.
It seemed Hunter had unstuck me, had given me what I needed to yank free from the hold. Still, I couldn’t find him anywhere, as if he hadn’t come with me any farther. Did that mean he’d made it through? I had to hope.
Across the way, a hazy image appeared.
Kase?
He knelt, with the space around him colorless but there. I went toward him, unsure how I even moved when I couldn’t find ground.
“Kase?” I shouted but with no luck.
Was this Kase’s memory? The part of him that tied him to purgatory, the piece of him that he couldn’t seem to move past?
He looked like he always had to me yet…different.
He didn’t wear a suit, but rather a simple tunic, one that opened in the center, just below the neck, and had two hanging strings. Dark pants covered his legs, simple and seemingly made of hide.
“Kase?” The smooth voice of another came from the darkness, from the space I couldn’t see into.
Kase turned, and I’d never seen an expression like that on his face before.
Fear.
It was all-consuming, an absolute terror that didn’t fit at all with the man I knew.
Still, Kase swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing before he rose to his feet. “Yes, Master, I am here.”
Master?Was this the vampire who had made him, the one who had abused and tortured him?
My hands tingled as if I could rip him apart myself.
But he wasn’t here. This was only a memory, only a place in Kase’s mind where he trapped himself with doubts and regrets and fear.
I tried to follow as Kase walked out of the light, following the one who had made him, but I couldn’t. Screams came from the darkness, sickening ones that chilled me to the core. They were Kase’s, and they were full of agony, of helplessness.
I rushed blindly through the darkness, trying to find him, needing to intervene even if it was in something that had happened so long ago.
The screams faded away before another sight took its place.
A figure I didn’t recognize—a man—walked away from Kase had been. He held his hands out, as if studying them, and they were covered in the dark blood I recognized as vampire. It dripped from his fingers, some running down his forearms.
“He’s rather soft,” a different voice said.
“Yes, he is,” the man with the bloodied hands answered. “But there are some benefits to that.”
“If he survives long, I suppose. Still, there’s something there, in his eyes sometimes—a fire. I would watch him carefully.”
The man with the blood turned, as if planning to return to the room where he’d come from. “You’ll see—Kase will be the most interesting of my children.”
Everything shifted again, but this time Kase stood there as the man I knew. He wore a suit, one that fit him as I was used to, that showed power and self-control. His hair was perfect, his face without any hint of hesitation.
Even with his screams still echoing in my ears, a sound I wasn’t sure I’d ever shake, there was no denying thatthisKase was the one I knew. This was the man I’d fallen for.
A man knelt, shoulders slumped forward, trembling. “I’m sorry,” he babbled around tears.
Kase’s expression didn’t soften. “You knew the rules. You knew the consequences. You chose to break them and force my hand. Apologies and pleading have no place here.”
