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Francesca’s face distorted into something beyond misery. Something that made his heart hitch. This wasn’t just a grief-stricken mother lashing out. No, this was an impenetrable wall rising against him. A wall she had built since the moment she learned the truth about him. Though he had watched her construct it, he had refused to see it. Not until now, when the last brick slid into place. He was her son, and she would forever love the memory of him…but she could never love what he had become.
As of this moment, there was nothing more that would ever bind them.
Sadness filled Cassidy as she witnessed this revelation in his thoughts. Her unacknowledged embrace of Francesca loosened, preparing to be shrugged off the way Francesca was shrugging off her son.
It was contempt he saw in his mother’s face, hateful and raw. “You…youabomination.”
Dominique didn’t flinch. The words felt like the ghosts of a sad, half-forgotten reality.
Cassidy recoiled. “Francesca, you don’t know—”
“I know all I need to know,” she snapped. With small, angry movements, she swiped at her eyes. “I have seen all I need to see. And I have reasoned out everything you did not tell me.”
Garrett reached for her shoulder. “Francesca, don’t.”
She slapped his hand away and stood. “How was it exactly that my husband died, Dominique? Your father? The love of my life?”
He closed his eyes. Hung his head.
“And Anastasie? My sweet, innocent baby?”
Dominique said not a word. He let it happen and pass around him and over him and through him like so many more ghosts. They joined the other shades still haunting the murky corners of his being—the sun, a human life, a family of his own.
“They were both found decapitated and not a drop of blood in them. It was not just yourkindthat did this, was it?” Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “It was you.”
The ghosts shrieked in his skull, but no one spoke. Or moved.
Francesca threw a shuddering breath. “So you know this, Cassidy? Garrett?”
Silence.
“I see. You all know this, and still…you are with him. What kind of monsters are you?”
“Well, I almost killed him once,” Garrett offered.
“Almost? Only almost?”
“Dominique didn’t know what he was doing,” Cassidy tried. “He has been plagued with guilt ever since. I had to stop him from killing himself over it several times.”
This seemed to give her pause. Her tone softened, but not her venom. “I was happier believing my son was dead. I was happier not knowing all of this. He might as well kill me, too, and finish destroying our family.”
Dominique finally raised his head. “You are right,Maman.” She flinched a little, apparently not as eager to die as she claimed. “It is all my fault,” he clarified with a derisive smile. “I was a fool to rescue Ana from her attackers the way I did, drawing the attention of the immortal who stole my life from me and, for a while, even my sanity. Everything I have done since, and will ever do again, springs from that one moment in which I made—what?—the wrong decision?” he finished on a soft, mocking note.
She stared at him. Her lower lip trembled.
“I did not think so.” He stood and stepped closer. She shrank back. “Do not for a moment think that I have suffered no regrets over what I have done. The guilt you try to heap on me is inconsequential compared to the guilt I have already lived with and already resolved. I will take the blame, if you will, but I will not apologize for what I cannot control. I will not apologize for cruel and random fate.”
Her silent tears flowed freely now.
“Everything is as it must be,” he said as if intoning a prayer. “Including this moment in which we must part for good.” Sorrow welled up, but faded when he began to see Francesca Marchant, his mother, for what she truly was to him now—another ghost.
He forced a smile to soften the words. “I love you,Maman.But there is no place for me in your life anymore. And no place for you in mine. We remind each other too much of everything we have lost, do we not?”
She gave the smallest of nods.
“With your permission, I can make it so that I am dead to you again. You will remember nothing of what happened here.”
Francesca glanced at the bag. “She will still be gone.”
