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“You can be human with me. That’s what I’m here for,” I asserted.
“It feels dangerous, Tatum,” she whispered.
There was a shift in the air. Suddenly, we were talking about something else, something far more serious.
Clara squeezed her eyes shut tightly and licked her lips. “It’s dangerous to want too much. I’m being greedy, and you know what happens to greedy people.” Her eyes snapped open and bored into me. “You know what happens, right?” she insisted.
My heart seized. She was confiding in me about her monsters. Was this gorgeous, formidable woman pursued by monsters and ghosts the way I was?
“What happens?” I asked back, my voice soft, yielding.
“They’re cut down,” she murmured back, so low I barely made out what she said. It was as if she was afraid to speak out loud for fear she’d call up the monsters that would tear her away from me.
“If you get too greedy, if you ask too much of life, everything will get ripped away. I learned that from my parents. You can’t have everything you want; it’s risky to even wish for it.”
Her eyes turned as bleak and cold as a birch forest covered in brittle snow.
She spoke as if she was an oracle, “You can’t have love and power.”
I gripped her chin and turned her to face me. Her gorgeous blue eyes fled from mine.
“Eyes on me, woman,” I demanded.
I gave her a forbidding look, pouring out the ironclad determination that had made me who I was, that had saved me from the sins of my father and wrestled me and my family out of the cesspool of his legacy. I poured everything into that look so she could see that I was prepared to burn down the world for her.
“Listen to me, Clara, and listen well. I will make it happen. I keep telling you, that’s why I’m here. To do for you what you can’t do for yourself. You’re smart to know your limitations. A sef shouldn’t be so arrogant to think they can do everything, but you’re not alone anymore. You have me, just as I have you. We complement each other, and together—not individually, but together—I swear to you, we will have it all.”
“But my father…my clan.…”
She trailed off, pushing against my hold.
I slid my hand to her throat, lifting her chin so she had no freedom of movement. I felt the fluttering of her pulse like butterfly wings beneath my thumb and fingertips.
She swallowed hard.
“Stay still,” I commanded. I delved deep into her gaze and confronted her reticence, her lack of belief in my vow.
“What is it?” I demanded.
“We don’t speak about it,” she began. “It happened, but we don’t speak about it in my family. My brother was born from it, and yet, we’ve never spoken about it once.”
Secrets.
Her family had secrets. If only she knew that was my element; I lived in the shadowy world ruled by secrets.
“I know all about dirty secrets,” I assured her. “I know how they fester and eat at your soul like a growing cancer. You can tell me, baby. I will keep your secret as if it were my own.”
She gave a cute little snort. “What could you know about secrets?”
“More than you could possibly know,” I blurted out. A part of me ached to confide in her, to confess and be cleansed, but it was never to be. I wouldn’t foist my secret on her. Seeking to cover my impulsive admission, I quickly followed by saying, “I’m consilier to the Lupu clan.”
Air got caught in my throat, strangling me, but I forced the lump down. It was the closest I’d gotten to admitting my own secret. Inside me, the little demon cringed, cowered, and scurried away, covering his head as if it’d somehow make him invisible, as if it’d somehow extinguish the secret, poof, like the delicate flame of a candle in a windshaft.
“Oh, good point,” she said with a knowing nod as if that explained everything. Far from it, sweetness.
“But that’s neither here nor there. We’re talking about you. Come on, tell me,” I pressed.
“It’s not like I’m the only one who knows the secret,” she hedged. “For all I know, it might be an open secret among a few select clan members. Grigore might even be privy to it. But it’s shameful, and if my father ever found out I’d told anyone, especially a stranger, he’d kill me.”
