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“I didn’t tell you, because I thought you wouldn’t be able to handle it. I thought you might do something bitter and stupid. You have hardly proved me wrong. You delivered yourself to Gideon, you made a mockery of all the sacrifices made to keep you safe prior, and once freed from captivity, you set about becoming the nastiest, basest, most criminal version of yourself possible. I did not tell you about Lora Candy because you were not ready to hear it.”
“That wasn’t your decision to make!”
“Of course it was. All decisions regarding you are mine to make because You. Are. Mine.” Maddox punctuated the sentence by grabbing Will’s throat and drawing him close with that irresistible vampiric strength that was his to command.
Will grabbed at Maddox’s wrist in a helpless attempt to free his neck. “Let me fucking go.”
“No,” Maddox said firmly. “I am not going to let you go. Not ever. I took you from prison, and I made you my pet and then my lover. I let you experience yourself as a powerful creature, because that is what you are. But you are something else as well, first and foremost. You are mine. I will live longer than you. The entire span of your life, every single one of your days, you will belong to me. What happened with Gideon will not change that. Nothing will change it.”
“I don’t belong to you.”
“Yes. You do.”
“I don’t want to belong to you.”
“That, my dear boy, is your problem.” Maddox kept his grip on Will’s throat. “It changes nothing. I tried respecting you as an independent person with the right to choose his destiny, and you acted out until I was forced to come for you. You would rather kill others than admit to yourself that you want to be here, with me, kneeling at my feet, submitting to me in the way you know calms that vicious beast who lives inside you.”
He pushed Will down onto his knees, giving him no choice in the position. Will pretended to loathe captivity, but the truth was, captivity was the only place he felt safe. The wild behavior, the murderous rages, they were all symptoms of the fear of freedom.
Will snarled and growled, but he did not make the mistake of taking his wolf form. Perhaps he was starting to remember his place after all.
“I have not said this to you before, because there is so little point in speaking to you, William. You do not respond well to reason, nor to statements of emotion. But given all you have done of late, I feel there is something I must say.”
Will visibly braced himself for what he understandably anticipated would be another lecture.
Instead, Maddox spoke more softly than he had before, and with more intensity and care. It was not a tone he had often used with anybody, and never when Will was in a state of disobedient rebellion.
“There is nothing you can do in this world that would make me stop loving you. Nothing.”
At those words, Will’s face crumpled. He slumped further down and began to sob. It was as though Maddox’s unexpectedly tender words of love in the face of the most obscene criminality had unlocked a door that had been kept shut for far too long.
Maddox joined him, crouching down and wrapping William in the warmest of his cold hugs. He held Will as he cried.
“You can’t love me. It hurts too much.”
“I know it hurts. Love hurts more than anything,” Maddox said. “Loving you has been one of the most painful experiences of my life. Separation from you was hell itself. Being close enough to see you, but not being able to hold you, seeing the pain in you, seeing you lose hope in me, in life itself. These things were terribly painful for me. I know that for you they were the cause of even more agony.”
“Why? Why did you let him hurt us?”
“Because I did not know what else to do. Because the mistakes I had already made seemed to lead me, and us, into that place. We were there because I put us there. You are right to be angry at me. And because I knew you were right to be angry, I let you be. I abandoned you to your anger. I will not do that again. You can be as ferocious and furious as you like, but you will do it here, with me.”
Will did not feel as angry now as he had before. Maddox’s words felt genuine, and they were what William had not known he needed to hear.
His greatest fear had always been that of abandonment, and when he’d heard that Maddox withheld the truth of his mother, it was easy to make his greatest fear come true. The months of captivity were not Maddox’s fault, and Will had always known that. They were his own fault.
This was all his fault.
He realized that suddenly and completely, finally allowing all the many points at which his future could have been different to coalesce into that single realization. Yes, bad things had happened to him, many bad things, but he had made them worse at every turn because he could not believe in anything good.
He sobbed not out of guilt, because he was barely able to feel such a thing as guilt, but out of grief. Grief for all he had never had, and grief for all he had rejected out of fear.
True to his word, Maddox held him through it all, even though Will was certain that he must appear completely pathetic to his vampire master who valued his strength and his monstrosity.
“Don’t look at me,” Will sobbed. “Don’t…”
Maddox picked William up in his arms and carried him to the upstairs bedroom. Will hated the way he curled up into Maddox’s cold, strong arms, sinking into his master’s dominance. Not a day had gone by since Gideon took him that he had not secretly craved to be back here in Maddox’s arms.
There were still parts of him that wanted to fight. He still had the instinct to resist and to attack, but he no longer had the energy to do any of that. He had purged so much of his rage in his murderous rampage, he was left with nothing but the misery.
