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“You know I wanted none of this.”
He grunts and I accept the invitation to truly look at him. Yes, he’s ruggedly beautiful in a French aristocrat kind of way, and he’s powerfully lethal, but more than those things—he’s broken.
Somehow, I know the searing pain I felt in that dream when he thought I was dead wasn’t something he made up in a nightmare.
That’s how it felt to have his Unity Witch torn from him. He’s barely surviving it and now here I am—the daughter of the woman he blames for that pain—and he’s facing the idea of history repeating.
Is that what brought him to this state?
I press a gentle hand on his bare back and release healing warmth through his system. “You and I are going to work past the hatred we’ve both been holding for the past twenty-five years. I know you’re not the monster I was taught you were. It wasn’t fair what happened to you, but I didn’t do it. I won’t pretend to understand the hell my mother and grandmother put you through, but that wasn’t me. Let me help.”
In the blink of an eye, he’s off the floor and standing with his back against the wall. “I don’t need your help.” His gaze sweeps over me as I stand and he curses. “And why the fuck don’t you have any clothes on?”
“I’m not naked.” I have my bra and panties on. “Yes, now that we’re standing here, I wish I’d grabbed a robe or something before racing up here, but honestly, when I woke from your nightmare, the only thing I could think of was?—”
“—When you what?”
I swallow and meet his fury. “I’m not sure if it’s our bond or my growing powers, but for some reason, I was dragged into your dream just now. I saw the vampire woman in the red sheets, my mother, and then me.”
That last image, the one of me dead on the watery grass of the park, makes me want to take a turn kneeling in front of the toilet, but I force the bile back down my throat.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he snaps. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I leave the bathroom, click on the lights in his bedroom and grab the button-down dress shirt from the floor. Shrugging it on, I do up enough buttons that I don’t feel so vulnerable.
Next, I go over to the bar cart by the wall and pour us each a couple of inches of cognac. When I turn back, he’s staring at me from the doorway, looking like a spooked stallion about to bolt.
How have I not seen how desperately lost he is? Rune and Finn have been worried about him and I’ve done nothing but snipe about him not being worth their concern.
If any part of this is because of me, I have to help him. I hold out the snifter and swirl the amber liquid at the bottom. “Sebastian, please.”
He takes the drink and swigs it down before striding to the cart to give himself a top up.
Standing before me in just his boxers, I’m drawn in by the scars marring his body. How the hell did he get diced up that badly? Was it one event or a hundred battles? Was it before he became a vampire or after?
He catches me staring and his head quirks to the side as his lip lifts in a smirk. “Did you want something, or are you just going to ogle my body?”
My irritation at my runaway libido knocks me out of the planes of his abs and back into the moment. “Right. Sorry. I wanted to talk to you more about what that was.”
“What what was?” he asks, lifting his glass to hide his expression.
I take a sip of my drink and work to calm my nerves. He’s going to deny everything and play like it’s nothing. “Sebastian, I know the signature of my family’s magic and I know my mother’s voice. Given what I felt and saw in your memory, I want to know what is going on.”
A flash of anger burns in his gaze as he rushes forward. “The same fucking thing that’s been going on every night for twenty-five fucking years. Your mother cursed me and reaches from the grave to invade my mind and poison my thoughts.”
I blink, his sudden nearness bringing back the lethality in him. This is the Sebastian I’m used to. And, as silly as it may sound, I find him less alarming than the vulnerable version of him I’ve been with for the past ten minutes.
“How is that possible?”
He empties his drink a second time and then sends the glass sailing across the room to shatter against the stone fireplace thirty feet away. “I don’t fucking know how she did it, little witch. If I did, I would’ve broken her hold on me by now, wouldn’t I?”
I suppose that’s true. “And you go through torture like that every night?”
He dips his chin. “Every fucking one.”
No wonder he’s losing his grip. A whorl of nausea churns in my belly. “Why would she do something like that?”
Sebastian’s temper subsides, and he sinks into one of two chairs, gesturing for me to take the other. “I won’t pretend I was a good man to her, Josephine. I wasn’t. There was a war going on and people I cared about were being torn to shreds and the witches performed that damned ritual…When the bond took hold, I looked at our unity bond as a way to tip the scales with more power.”
