Page 48 of Tears of Revenge

“I can feel the questions you want to ask me.”

She stole a glance before returning to her task. “You don’t have to answer them.”

“You’re stating the obvious.”

That made her smile—she appreciated his honest nature. “Where did you grow up?”

“In what is now Eastern Europe.”

“And the clan you mentioned was your family?”

“Yes.”

“But not all blood?”

“Over the years, alliances were forged and blood families turned into clans.”

“And what made you come here?”

Lysander sighed, placing a pan on the stove and lighting the burner. “I decided I didn’t want to die by the hands of my own clan—or kill any of them myself. I refused to get involved in the politics of it all. I was neutral, which wasn’t appreciated. They turned on me when they discovered that I was taming my lycan.”

“What do you mean by tame him?”

“With creatures like me, we have our human side and our lycan. For most of my kind the lycan is stronger and takes control of our mind.”

“The wolf in a sheep’s skin?”

“Yes. Once that happens, we no longer look human. We don’t fully shift like a werewolf but our nails turn to claws and our teeth into canines. Our thoughts and actions are more feral and animalistic.”

“And you didn’t want that. So when you regained your human morals, your appearance changed too?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry they didn’t accept you as you are.”

Lysander drizzled oil into the pan, adding the onions once it was hot. As he talked, he put a pot of water on to boil. “During full moons, we can’t control our shift. I tried to find ways to control myself, but nothing worked. When they discovered what I’d been doing, they refused to leave me alone during a full moon—they forced me to shift with them.”

“They forced you to hurt people.”

“Yes. Which is why I asked Varos and Marcus to help me.”

“Even though they were your enemy.”

“My kind’s enemy, yes, but they’d never done anything to me.”

“So, you gave them freedom and they in turn helped you control yourself?”

“They wanted revenge. They wanted my clan to suffer for what they’d done to them. I hesitated but it only took a few full moons to turn my back on my family.”

She froze, and she tried to stop the picture forming in her mind—the one of them taking their revenge on the clan.

“By the time I agreed, my clan had become my captors. They’d forced me to kill humans, putting them in the same room as me during a shift because they knew I couldn’t control him. I couldn’t watch myself kill more innocent people, so I freed the vampires. I fed them, giving them their strength back before I turned my back on my clan.”

He took the peeled and cut potatoes and let them boil in the water before he added meat to the pan. She laid her hand on his arm, wanting to comfort him somehow.

“Of course, my betrayal was discovered, so we spent quite some time in hiding. When we heard of the new world that had been discovered, we hoped our enemies wouldn’t follow us here. We slowly adapted to the human world so we could hide in plain sight.”

She was rendered speechless. To give some sense of comfort, she stroked his arm with her thumb. She stayed by him as he cooked, unwilling to leave his side for a second. The mouth-watering smells were nothing but a tease. Then, Lysander surprised her by grabbing a bag of donor blood from the fridge and adding it to a steaming water bath.

---