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He had seen the sun. But the price was beyond steep.
For starters, there was the excruciating pain. Even without the suppressant in his blood, his injuries would have challenged his capacity to heal. But under its lingering influence, they overwhelmed him, leaving him blind in one eye, his legs uncooperative, and his hands and feet mostly useless. Worst of all, every time he moved or spoke, delicate new skin cracked open. The wounds bled, tried to mend, only to open again, bleeding more.
Serge and Samantha fed him all the blood they could spare, which was just enough to get him mobile again. He didn’t regain use of his eye until Serge organized more feeds for him by summoning the security detail from the front gate. After that, it took two solid nights of hunting until his skin stopped feeling like parchment paper and his extremities were fully restored. Three more after that before he recovered most of his strength.
Guilt, too, was another price of this madness. Serge was racked by it as he watched over Dominique throughout his recovery. The old pirate was convinced he had misinterpreted his visions when Jackson first brought the suppressant. “It was fire I saw, but bodies in rut, too,” he insisted, wide-eyed, whenever Dominique moved gingerly, which was often.
“And you were right,” Dominique assured him every time. He didn’t have the heart to tell his friend that more dire warnings would have made no difference; he had wanted this too much to heed them.
Cassidy agonized as well. “I should have known what would happen. Your alter ego always wakes up when we make love. I was an idiot to take a risk like that.”
“No, you did right,” he told her. “I had to remember, or none of this would have mattered.”
And he remembered. A few glorious seconds of sunlight. That was all he would ever take from this mad experiment. He had neither the luxury nor the stomach to try again. The possibility that he might lose his immortal life—along with the lives of every other blood-drinker in existence—had never even crossed his mind. He was horrified at how close he had come to exactly that, thanks to his obsession with daylight.
But all of this paled compared to another possibility he hadn’t considered, one that didn’t materialize until a week later. When he awoke that night, anxiety plowed into him hard enough to make him gasp. It took him a moment to recognize the source. His telepathic link with Cassidy was currently ebbing, making the exchange of distinct thoughts impossible without physical touch. Emotions, however, still came through. The stronger the feeling, the louder the echo. This one reverberated in his bones.
He reached out, trying to soothe her.
Then he caught a hazy impression through her eyes and felt his world tilt off its axis. Non. Non…
He sat up, grabbed his tablet and called up the security camera in the patio at the other side of the house. It couldn’t be, it just couldn’t, and yet…it was. Right there, sitting across from Cassidy…
“Maman…”
Tall and stately in taupe linen slacks, cream silk shirt, and a stylish maroon cardigan, Francesca Marchant was everything Dominique remembered of his mother. She had cut her hair, though. Instead of carefully upswept brunette locks, she now sported a short precision cut and a wave of silver that flowed from her distinctive widow’s peak. She looked older, her face more drawn, but also fiercer than he had ever seen her: a woman on a mission.
The man sitting beside her, with the cat curled in his lap, was another shock. Dominique hadn’t seen his cousin, Étienne Pélissier, in more than a decade. Yet, there he was, not the sophisticated patron of Parisian cafés Dominique remembered, but dressed in shorts and an untucked white button-down shirt, the nut-brown embodiment of a beach bum.
Francesca and Étienne. In his house. Dominique trembled.
Out on the patio, the halting conversation stopped. Francesca’s expression softened into concern as she spoke to Cassidy, who had put down her glass and gripped the armrests of her chair. She nodded in response to Francesca, but he could tell she was grimacing. The onslaught of his rising panic and despair threatened to overpower her, even across their weakened link. Closing his eyes, he tried to quiet his reaction. Finally, he sensed her getting up and moving toward him.
By the time she got to the kitchen, Dominique had the vault door unlocked and swinging open. She rushed into his arms. The moment they touched, her memories came into focus…
It was like a bomb going off in his skull, the culmination of his every fear.
Four years ago, in the horrific aftermath of becoming a blood-drinker, he had done the unspeakable, killing not only his father but also his younger sister. He had left his mother and surviving sister to pick up the pieces of their lives by staging his own death. Then, a week ago, Francesca had received a call from Dominique, saying he needed her help. He gave her the address of this house, which she could barely write down before he hung up, leaving her badly shaken. Étienne later prompted her to call back the strange American number. The woman who answered said the man who borrowed her phone earlier seemed perfectly fine. The description she gave matched Dominique’s. Which was when Francesca recruited Étienne to help her find her son.
And now, here they were.
“Mon Dieu.”
“The five minutes I left you alone at the restaurant,” Cassidy whispered. “That’s the only thing I can think of. You got your hands on a phone.”
Merde.Given the near-cataclysmic way that day ended, the idea of him reaching out to anyone had never been considered.
“I couldn’t send them away. Samantha and I were ambushed. They saw we knew something when they mentioned your name,” she hurried on. “I’m so sorry, Dominique, but I had to tell them something. I had to do…something.”
What she had done was invite them in, serve refreshments, and tell them as little as possible. For two hours, she played the considerate hostess, watched every word that left her mouth, and counted every second to sundown. When her guests insisted on knowing why she couldn’t produce Dominique on the spot, she told them he was out, teaching a class, and would be back soon.
“Teaching?” Étienne wondered, his thick brows rising.
“Aikido,” Samantha jumped in. Her cheeks flushed as she met Étienne’s eyes. “He’s really very good.”
“The martial arts have long been a passion of his,” Francesca agreed, relaxing a bit into her chair and looking around at the lavish home and expansive gardens. “He seems to live comfortably here, coming and going as he wants, while we thought he was dead.” She shook her head a little, as though still unsure she believed he wasn’t. “Mon Dieu, why did he not contact us sooner? And why does he say he needs help?”
“He…he felt you’d be…safer that way,” Cassidy stammered. “From the cartel.” Francesca blanched. Officially, the killers of her husband and daughter were the men Dominique had fought off when he found them raping his little sister, Anastasie. Not only had he caused them serious injuries with his martial arts abilities, he had killed one of them. As they were high-ranking affiliates of a notorious Colombian drug cartel, Dominique’s supposed kidnapping—and the murder of his father and Anastasie—were all attributed to them. There had been no proof, though, so no charges were filed. They left St. Barth free men. “He had to make everyone believe he was dead, so there would be no point for them to come after you,” Cassidy added quietly. “As for why now…he’ll have to be the one to explain that.”
