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“Sound a little more thrilled about the idea, why don’t you?” Anya mutters.
There’s another clank of glass, and Reid sighs. “I’ll hold that.” After a moment, he adds, “Is that something you’d be open to?”
More footsteps echo around the room until Anya paces into view outside the very last row, three bottles of wine tucked in her arms. She looks Reid up and down with narrowed eyes. “On one condition.”
Reid shifts the bottle he’s already holding for her and offers his other hand as she fishes out another. “Which is?”
She hands him the bottle and lifts a single eyebrow. “Have you ever been in love, Reginald?”
My chest constricts, every ounce of my attention zeroed in on them now.
“I—excuse me?”
Anya walks out of view as she paces down the rest of the aisle. “If you want me to consider tying myself to you for the rest of my life in order to help you all clean up this mess, then what I want in return is for you to answer my question. Have you ever been in love?”
The following silence stretches on forever, or maybe it just feels that way as I hold my breath, my heartbeat twice as loud in my chest.
Finally, Reid murmurs, “Yes.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not drinking all of these,” says Anya. “I just want to taste them. I’m sure Auclair won’t mind.” Her footsteps stop abruptly, and she softens her voice as she asks, “What’s it like?”
Reid doesn’t answer right away, and I feel frozen where I stand, unable to blink, tobreathe.
“The world around you is the same,” he says, “but suddenly every experience you have is different. It’s more. I imagine it’s the closest I’ll ever get to feeling the sun. Even the worst days are better as long as she’s by your side. It’s a kind of peace I’ve never known elsewhere.”
“What happened? Why didn’t it work out if you were so in love?”
He’s followed Anya far enough down the row that I can’t see either of them anymore. Can’t see his face as he says, “I messed it up. I did things that I shouldn’t have because I was so afraid to lose her. I lied. I kept things from her. I was so desperate to keep her that I stopped being the man she fell for in the first place. And people like us, we don’t always get to choose the paths our lives take, do we?”
I press my fingers into my sternum, unsure if the heaviness that’s settled behind my ribs belongs to me or him.
“And now you’re down here basically asking me to marry you,” mutters Anya, the earlier amusement in her voice gone now. “Did you at least tell her? Did you tell her how you felt about her when you had the chance?”
“I—um.” I take a step away from the wall, then another. My lungsache.There’s not enough air in this room. “I’m going to check the hall upstairs. Are you okay down here with them?”
Feddei searches my face for a moment, and I see it in his eyes the moment the realization hits. It doesn’t take vampire senses to hear their conversation, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why I’d want to leave the room now. But in the end, he only nods.
I hurry from the room, but not before hearing Reid’s quiet “I tried” behind me.
CHAPTERNINETEEN
The hall is eerilyquiet when I make it to the top of the stairs, each breath I pull in shorter than the last. I do a quick sweep of my surroundings, straining my senses for a trace of a threat, but finding none, I turn for the side door that leads to the grounds. I just need a minute. Some fresh air. I can’tbreathein here.
Because he’s going to marry her. Until now, I guess I never truly believed it would happen. But now it’s the right thing to do. And Reid always does the right thing. And hearing him talk about me like that—uslike that—in the same goddamn sentence as him asking her to marry him—
I’m going to be standing off to the side with Feddei watching over Reid and Anya for the rest of my life.
I pull in a lungful of air as I step outside, my vision swimming from lack of oxygen. I keep close to the side of the building so I can see the stairwell to the cellar through the window.
“Sending your lover off to be with another woman. Tragic.”
I curse as V’s reflection appears beside me in the window.
“I’m really not in the mood,” I mutter.
“Oh really? So there’s nothing you want to ask me? Nothing I might be able to help with? Nothing you think I might know that you don’t? My mistake.”
I grit my teeth as a group of birds takes off into flight from the trees behind us, the flap of their wings filling the silence. My eyes burn as I stare unblinkingly at the stairs to the cellar through the window.
