Page 2 of Protecting His Vampire Mate

Still, I wasn’t entirely sure I believed any of it. It seemed like incredible luck to just have him drop into my life without warning. The universe definitely wasn’t fair, but it wasn’t that unfair, was it? I didn’t deserve that kind of luck. And I didn’t want it, either.

But somehow, his reassuring smile did actually calm some of the tension I felt. I felt it unravel against my will. I wanted to be tense. I didn’t want to be comforted.

“The decision of this council is unanimous and final,” Wynn confirmed, her words echoing through the crowd just like Tatiana’s had.

Fucking witches.

“This will be over soon, I promise,” Tobias reassured me.

“I hope so,” I muttered, wanting with every fiber of my being to be away from here. Away from all of these people, who should have hated me, but who instead seemed ready to forgive me and paint me as just another one of Giles’s victims.

“Further,” Tatiana announced, her voice seeming to wrap around me and draw my gaze to hers once more. “We cannot undo the harm Giles has caused you—the harm that this coven caused you—but we can, and we will, help to heal the damage.”

I stared at her, my eyes widening as the implication of her words sunk in.

“What are you saying?” I asked, my voice going thin and reedy with my sudden fear.

“We will use our magic to remove the memories of the actions you were forced to commit under the power of Giles Ames,” Tatiana told me, her smile soft and encouraging, like she was offering me a gift. “You will return to your old life, free from the burden of what was done to you. It is the least we can do to make this right.”

Horror flooded through me at her words.

“No,” I choked out, pulling my hand from Tobias’s. I took a step back from the witches’ council. I had been wrong before. I didn’t want to be punished after all. Not if this was what they had decided upon. This was so much worse than anything else they could have come up with. My voice came out as a terrified squeak and I added, “No, you can’t do that!”

“You don’t deserve to be tormented by crimes that were never your fault,” Wynn replied. Her eyebrows furrowed in bafflement as she took in whatever expression was now frozen on my face. “They were not your actions, but his. You should not be forced to suffer for them.”

But if they made me forget… if they erased the agony of those memories…

Well, what if that’s all that was left of me in the end? What if my body remembered the harm I had caused, even if I consciously couldn’t remember it? What if my darkest instincts as a vampire had been fed by what Giles had forced me to do, and I now craved violence, deep down? What if the memory of what I had done was all that was stopping me from committing fresh evil? If I could no longer use those memories as a shield to protect everyone around me, what might I do to the people I cared about?

And… if I didn’t remember killing those people… if I didn’t feel the shame and guilt and horror of their deaths every single day, then who would? My victims deserved that much, at least, didn’t they?

“Bryan,” Tobias whispered, sounding so forlorn that it caused my heart to ache. But he didn’t say anything else. He didn’t try to push me into it. If he had, I might have hated him. But I already knew, even at that moment, I wouldn’t ever be able to bring myself to hate Tobias Hawthorne.

“No,” I said, meeting his eyes. The flicker of pain I caught there made guilt flash through me, but I couldn’t do anything about that, could I? Swallowing hard, I turned away from him and met the Witch Queen’s gaze instead. She, at least, I could reason with without it tearing my heart to ribbons. “You’ve pardoned me, correct? You’ve vowed to do me no harm?”

“Well, yes,” Tatiana started, sounding abruptly alarmed. She held both hands up. A placating gesture. “But Bryan, truly—”

“Then you will let me go,” I told her flatly. “And I will keep the memories of what I’ve done. By your own word, you can’t do anything else.”

“Goddess!” Wynn exclaimed, her hand rising to her heart. Her eyes widened in surprise as they met mine. “Why on earth would you want that?”

I wasn’t about to explain myself to any of them. I didn’t even look at her. Instead, I kept my gaze fixed on the Witch Queen.

“Yes or no?”

“Well, yes,” Tatiana replied, sounding uneasy. “Of course, but—”

“I’m leaving, then,” I replied. I didn’t even pause to see how my words landed. I didn’t stop to see the stricken look I knew would be on Tobias’s face. I didn’t want to see any of it or know any of it. I just wanted to escape.

I strode forward. The coven parted before me, still giving me a wide berth, breaking the circle to allow me to leave. The witches and warlocks all looked nervous, like I might bite.

The thought turned my stomach.

I stormed into the stronghold, entering from the back. I had been here for the past two weeks, under the watchful eyes of the witches who specialized in healing and restorative magics. Not that it mattered. I was back to full health, with no trace of compulsion left on me.

I made my way down the long halls of the place—which had once been a school—and beelined to the bedroom the coven had set aside for me, which I had mostly confined myself to for the last week and change. It was a long and narrow space, hardly more than a closet. But that was fine. I didn’t have much. A few changes of clothes. A book on necromancy I had “borrowed” from the archives when no one was looking and then promptly hidden behind the dresser. A few half-finished, half-hearted drawings I had made in the sketchbook Tobias bought for me. Whoever I had been when I had liked to draw, I wasn’t really him anymore.

I packed it all into the backpack Ethan had given to me when I had moved from the vampire king’s dungeon into the stronghold. I left the stack of novels he had also given to me, all of which were unread. Someone would give them back, surely. They were all either romance or horror anyhow. I didn’t particularly believe in happy endings, and I certainly didn’t need any more horror in my life.

---