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“Eight years is the blink of an eye by our standards.”

“I guess so.” She sits silently for a while, staring at her hands. One of her fingers is twisted at strange angle. Repeatedly broken, I’d assume. “If I can’t go back to my human life, can I … can I become one of you? I could help you. I could be useful. I have skills.”

I’m sure she does, and she’s definitely got balls. She could be useful, with her background. She’ll be able to research the hell out of things, and she’s just proved she’s damn good at listening. Experience in journalism could help with situations like the one in Goliath, or the many other times we need to come up with a plausible explanation for the weird shit that seems to happen with alarming fucking regularity. Still, it’s a big decision.

“Please?” she asks, reaching out to grab my hands. “Turn me. I never want to be weak again.”

“You’re not weak,” I tell her, moving my hands away from hers. “You’re fucking strong. I’ll need to think about it. It won’t be me who does it.”

“Why not?” she asks, her probing eyes meeting mine.

“Because it’s intimate. It involves mutual feeding, over three consecutive nights. I don’t feed from anyone but Rosa.”

She smiles, a real smile, showing off a broken tooth. “I knew it. I could tell from the way she talked about you. You’ll miss her when she’s gone.”

When she’s gone? What the fuck is she talking about?

Chapter 12

Rosa

Ialmost make it. I have a bag packed, a flight booked, and I’m on my way down the stairs.

Almost, but not quite, and there’s a world of difference between the two. I’m in the reception room when he arrives. Barges his way in, surrounded by a cloud of rage and sadness. He presses a hidden button behind a couch that’s never used, and just like that I’m trapped. Shit. I should have known this wouldn’t be easy.

The whole ground floor of the Brooklyn place is fake. It looks like a living room, with a TV and couches, but it’s basically a kill box. An extra layer of security to make the safe house even safer. There are weapons hidden everywhere, UV floodlights, and steel gates. Steel gates that have now clunked down into place, leaving me standing there with him. And his anger, which is almost like a separate entity, is so intense. It fills the space around us, and even as a Seer, I feel his power. It’s sometimes easy to see Luca as my boyfriend, my lover. But he is also ancient and strong and right now, pretty damn pissed.

“How did you know?” I ask him, dropping my bag to the ground.

“Yvonne. She was listening while she was in the tub. Her hearing is off-the-charts good. What the fuck, Rosa?”

His voice is a growl, his eyes ringed with red, his whole body pumped up and ready to fight. Wanting to fight. I lay one hand flat on his chest, fingers splaying, palm warm against the stone muscle of his pecs. He was expecting conflict, expecting a showdown, and the tenderness of the touch slows his roll.

“I’m sorry,” I say simply. “But I have to go. I can’t live here with you. I can’t live with the risk that one day I’ll lose control, and I’ll end you. You’d feel the same if you were putting me at risk.”

“I am a monster, Rosa. I put you at risk every time I fuck you. Every time I feed from you. I am always aware of how easy it would be for me to lose control. But I live with that fear, because you are worth it. We are worth it.”

Huh. I’ve never thought about it that way, but sometimes when I’m with him, my amulet flares into life, telling me I’m in danger. It usually only lasts a split second, but maybe that coincides with those moments where his control is slipping.

“Okay. That’s true. But Luca, you’ve had centuries to learn to manage yourself. I’ve had days since this really started, and I’m nowhere near control. Control and me live in different worlds, and I love you too much to put you at risk. Can’t you understand that?”

I see the turmoil in the tense lines of his body, the flare of his nostrils, the twitch of his jaw. Luca was raised in a world of pain and misery. He was transformed by Giulia, Vincenzo’s sister, who used him in every possible way. He never knew love, or kindness, or care. The one woman he ever had feelings for before me was murdered and raped in front of his eyes. Life has not taught him to expect happiness or to believe in fairy tales. It has taught him to be strong, to be cruel, to be ruthless.

I changed some of that, I know. I opened up a side of him that he’d kept so deeply buried it almost didn’t exist. I understand how hard it was for him to change, to adapt. To throw off the experiences of centuries and choose a different path. It was hard, but he did it anyway—because of our love.

And now, I’m standing here and telling him I’m leaving. I am breaking his heart and mine too. I could be aggressive. I could be snarky. I could physically fight him, though I have no idea which of us would come out on top. In fact, let’s face it, we’d probably end up fucking.

Instead, I make my own difficult choice to be vulnerable. My own childhood was no picnic, and Luca has broken down my barriers, scaled my walls, made me raw and new and soft in ways I never knew I could be. This is hurting me too, but it needs to happen.

“Don’t make this even worse, Luca. I love you, you know that. Like I’ve never loved anyone, ever. This isn’t me not wanting you or not needing you. I will always want you and always need you. This is me … keeping you safe.”

His eyes flash. I’ve said the wrong thing. Dented his macho pride, which is a magnificent example of the species. “I don’t need you to keep me safe, Rosa. I’ve been looking after myself for a long time now.”

“I know that,” I tell him, stepping closer, placing my other hand against his cheek. He leans in a little, a reaction he can’t stop no matter how mad he is. Stubble against my skin, a brief touch of his luscious lips on my palm. “I’m not expressing myself well here, Luca. Maybe what I mean is that I’m leaving to keep me safe? This new version of me. I meant what I said earlier. If anything bad happened, if I really hurt you, then I wouldn’t recover from that. You have to let me go.”

“No,” he says simply, shaking his head. “I don’t. And I won’t. We have survived much, cara mia, and we have survived it together. You will not be going anywhere without me.”

His face is set, rigid. His tone tells me he’s not in the mood for arguing, but I know I have to. “I’m leaving, Luca. I promise I’ll be back once I have some answers or once I’ve learned how to control this thing. But I am leaving.”