Page 60 of Hot Vampire Next Door: Season Four

Arion can’t lie. He’s not like me. And there’s no way to misinterpret that. Two words that can only mean one thing.

“You killed my mother?”

He plucks several more berries and piles them up in the cup of his hand. He’s changed clothing since last night and is now wearing leather armor on his shoulders and across his chest. A sword at his hip. The outfit of a warrior.

There’s a dull ache in my left arm that begins to throb, so I hold it against my torso.

“Why would you do that?” I ask him. “Because she was from the Winter Court?”

A berry disappears in his mouth, then another. He shakes his head. “She was Summer Court.”

“What?” I slip off the boulder. “But…I’m from the Winter Court. That’s what everyone said.”

“Your father was from the Winter Court. Your mother betrayed her people and joined your father in the revolt.”

I might still be hungover because it takes me several long seconds to digest his words and for them to make sense.

I’m not entirely Winter Court? I’m half Summer? I know any fae can leave their court of birth and join another, so there’s no such thing as purity in most of their blood lines. Except, usually, in the royal lines. I always assumed both my mother and father were from the Winter Court.

I look at Arion with new understanding. “If my mother was from the Summer Court, you must have known her?”

He tosses a berry into the air and catches it in his mouth. His teeth are stained bright red and a shiver rolls over my shoulders.

“She was my mother as well.”

The numbness that settles over me rolls in slowly, then all at once, until it seems like I’ve left my body entirely because I can’t feel a thing.

She was his mother?

Which would mean…

“You’re my family. You’re my…brother?”

He nods.

Heat flames across my face when I realize… “Oh god,” I squeak out. “The orgy. I was…you…” I look down at the new clothing that someone must have put me in.

“Have some decency,” he scolds. “I had another fae fetch you.”

I collapse back against the gate wall. “Thank fucking god.”

He clucks his tongue. “You always speak with such foul syllables?”

“Yes, when my modesty is on the line!”

“Modesty.” He bites into another berry. “As if you know what that is.”

“Hey, listen here—"

“Shut up,” he says.

The shock of his words makes the argument dry up. I clamp my mouth closed.

It might be time to panic.

“I don’t want to be part of this fight,” I tell him.

“Then you shouldn’t have worn the dress. You made a move on the chessboard, and you didn’t even know the pieces.”

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