Page 41 of Bewitched By a Vampire

But he couldn’t.

If he did, he wouldn’t want to let it go—to lethergo—and maybe that was what he needed to do. Maybe she was better off away from him—away from all of them. If he left her here to help the others evacuate, she might run off once she was done, and it might be a blessing.

She didn’t deserve to be put in a cage by his brother.

She didn’t deserve to be placed in a cage constructed of his love either.

The need to protect her, to shield her from the world, ran too deep in him and he feared he would end up stifling her and making her hate him. The only way to stop himself from feeling a constant need to keep her safe would be to make her stronger.

The only way to make her stronger would be to turn her.

He swallowed hard.

He couldn’t do that. She was light and life. Not darkness and death as he was. She didn’t belong in his shadowy, dangerous world.

He backed away from her and closed his eyes against the hurt that flared in hers.

Night pivoted and paused as his mind filled with the way Grave and Snow had both looked at him, and thought about how drawn he was to Lilian and how it was getting harder by the second to control himself around her.

If he didn’t go now, there was a danger he might do something he would regret. He needed space to think, to clear his head and study his feelings, and discover whether it was infatuation he felt or something far deeper.

Grave was right about something too.

Bastian would be furious with him when he discovered what he had been doing, and it really wasn’t Night’s place to be stealing a female who belonged to his brother. His family was everything. His loyalty was to them, not a female he had only just met, and he had to remember that.

“Evacuate the mansion,” he said, his tone cold even to his ears, and walked away from her.

He had slain kings. He had massacred armies. He had courted death. He had survived its chilling embrace.

But this was the hardest thing he had ever done.

As the distance between them grew, the warmth he felt whenever he was close to Lilian faded away, leaving him hollow and cold to the bone.

But it had to be done.

The flicker of life that she had ignited inside him guttered out as he reached the drive, darkness sweeping in to sharpen his mind and empty him of feelings. His focus shifted to the demon and Bastian, to Grave and Snow, and the things that needed to be done.

If Lilian was gone by the time he returned from London, so be it.

His family needed him now.

He narrowed crimson eyes on his car and bared his fangs.

No one threatened a Van der Garde and lived to tell the tale.

Chapter 11

Lilian grunted as she set the case down on top of another in the foyer and straightened, pressing her hand into her lower back as it ached. So far, she had helped more than a dozen of Bastian’s staff evacuate, phoning for cars and arranging places for them to stay if they didn’t have a home or anyone they could stay with.

Which was most of them.

She hadn’t really considered that many of Bastian’s staff had been serving him for decades and hadn’t aged much in that time. It wasn’t as if those who still had family out there who thought they were alive could see them, not without causing serious shock, anyway.

Arranging hotels dotted around the country had seemed like a more sensible idea and she had made sure to gather a list of their phone numbers in case Bastian didn’t have them. When the coast was clear and the threat was eliminated, he would be able to summon them all back to the mansion with little effort.

Ellen muttered things under her breath as she came down the stairs and Lilian turned to look at her, her eyes widening as she spotted the grey-haired woman wrestling with two red cases.

Lilian hurried up the stairs to her. “I told you to wait for me.”

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