Seduce(30)

Antoine growled. It rumbled up his throat, a possessive hungry snarl. He wanted to deny what she had said, wanted to tell her that she was wrong and she didn’t know him, and that he could so easily break her. He had seen the danger of the strength that flowed in his veins. Had witnessed it unleashed on those he loved.

And on himself.

The scars on his body burned, throbbing deeply, and he stepped backwards on instinct. Sera faltered, the confidence draining from her eyes. She thought he was distancing himself from her, that he was going to deny what she had said. He knew that he should.

He rubbed the scars on his chest through his shirt.

He couldn’t bring himself to do it though.

Sera had offered him comfort and he was too weak to deny his need for it, and for her.

“What dark secrets do you have in your heart?” Sera slipped her hand over his and curled her fingers around so they pressed into his palm, stopping him from rubbing his chest. She drew their joined hands away and frowned. He did too. He had been smearing his own blood across his shirt and he had been so lost in his pain and the dark secrets she spoke of that he hadn’t noticed. Sera sighed and pressed a kiss to the cuts on his palm. “You don’t have to tell me. Not if you don’t want to.”

“I loved her for a century.”

Sera went rigid, her lips frozen against his palm. It probably wasn’t something a woman wanted to hear about but she had to suspect that another had hurt him, so it couldn’t be unexpected. She should have been prepared to hear it. Maybe she had been, but she hadn’t anticipated the length of the relationship he’d had with the woman who had broken his heart.

“She was an aristocrat,” he said and Sera released his hand and turned her back on him.

“Oh.” It was a small sound, one laced with defeat.

Antoine couldn’t quite believe what he was going to say.

“I do not care that you are an elite, Sera.”

Her shoulders tensed beneath her blue t-shirt. If she didn’t believe him, she didn’t say it. She turned towards him and blinked very slowly, her gaze assessing him. Searching for the truth.

“I mean it. Javier and Callum, even my brother, would probably pass out if they heard me say it... but I mean it. I thought it mattered. My family had always lectured me about the elite and our bloodline, and how we had to maintain the purity of it. I believed them once. But what good did it do us?”

His voice cracked on that last handful of words. What good had it done them indeed?

If they had bred with humans and muddied their blood, they probably wouldn’t have awoken the dark hunger that lay dormant in all members of their species. Years of selective breeding, of mating with only other aristocrat families, had kept their blood pure but the price for such purity had been a weakness none of them could have predicted.

His and Snow’s generation were the first to experience bloodlust.

His family had paid dearly for their pride.

Very dearly.

Antoine slumped onto the bed and collapsed backwards onto the mattress, splaying his arms out across the cool crimson covers. He stared at the black canopy.

The bed depressed to his left and Sera’s hand slipped under his. She was gentle as she inspected it and it touched him that she was still concerned about cuts that were nothing more than grazes compared with the open wounds on his heart.

“Anya was her name. We met and fell in love at a ball. One night of madness followed by a century of...”

“You don’t have to go into details.” Sera’s grip on his hand tightened. He flinched as his cuts reopened. Evidently, it wasn’t wise to anger her by speaking of other women. She had asked to know his secrets. She would have to live with the truth of them.

“I loved her for a century and then three more.”

“You love her even though she left you?” She dropped his hand.

He had deserved that. It had sounded as though he had just confessed his undying love for another woman.

“She left me without a word. I spent years, one hundred of them, looking for her at every ball and social gathering. I haunted the places we had stayed or visited frequently.”

“Why did you stop searching for her if you love her so much?”

Antoine sighed and placed his hand on his chest. “Something happened that demanded my attention and deserved it more than a woman who had walked out on me.”

“Your brother’s bloodlust.”

If only it were that simple.

“Snow had been suffering on and off with his bloodlust for many centuries. The symptoms had been minimal, inconsequential, so we thought it would remain that way. Doctors said that with regular, higher, intake of blood he would be fine.” Antoine closed his eyes and cursed the name of those doctors for what felt like the millionth time. “I was so caught up in Anya that I just presumed Snow was doing well. I stopped checking on him and let him get on with his life. He never told me that the symptoms were getting worse and the attacks more frequent. I probably wouldn’t have listened even if he had.”