Page 81 of Bewitched By a Vampire

She twisted her hands in front of her hips and then jerked her head up and looked him in the eye. “I wasn’t completely honest about my plan regarding Bastian. It wasn’t my idea. The elders put a spell in my blood so that when Bastian bit me, he would have been the one poisoned, and if I had seen in his memories that he was innocent, the elders were going to give him the antidote.”

“And if he had been guilty, he would have died as punishment for his crime.” Night folded his arms over his chest, sleep forgotten as his instinct to protect his family rose to the fore and had him glaring at Lilian. “And rather than my brother being poisoned, you poisoned me instead.”

All his anger leached from him to leave him cold and shaken as something else dawned on him. He had been in so much danger and he hadn’t even realised it. Worse, Lilian had been and still was in phenomenal danger. Memories bombarded him, a rush of every moment that had led up to him being in this bed.

Antoine had tried to attack her.

His cousin wanted her dead and had tried to kill her, and Night had stopped him.

Good gods, she was lucky his other cousin, Snow, wasn’t at the theatre. Snow would have gone straight through him to get to her, would have ended her there in the foyer, cutting her down without mercy.

“I don’t want you leaving this room,” he snapped. “Not without me.”

The way she looked at him cut him like a blade, the dark edge to her eyes so far from what he had wanted to see in them. He knew he was being overbearing, that once again he was ordering her around and shutting her in a room, and that it was becoming a very bad habit for him. She didn’t need to point that all out to him with that look in her eyes.

“I just want to protect you.” Night held his hand out to her. “I can’t do that if you’re out there. If you stay here, I’ll be able to sense anyone who comes into the room and can wake to make sure they don’t hurt you.”

Her look morphed into one of concern and she cast a nervous glance at the door. “You think I’m still in danger?”

He nodded.

Lilian’s fine eyebrows furrowed slightly and she looked torn as her eyes darted between him and the door.

Finally, they settled on him. “I’ll stay if you answer a question for me.”

Night nodded again.

“Did you really kill an entire coven?”

He almost flinched as she asked that. Not quite the question he had expected. He busied himself with looking at the sheets, avoiding her gaze as it drilled into him. If he didn’t answer her, she would leave. If he did answer her, well, she would probably also leave.

“Back at my coven, when I first came to your cell, you looked as if I had betrayed you.” Lilian’s eyes darted between his as he lifted his head to look at her and she slowly approached him. “You hadn’t felt betrayed because I wasn’t a captive like you. You had felt betrayed because I was a witch, and I wasn’t sure why until I looked at your scar. Tell me how you got it. Does it have something to do with what you did to that coven? Was it revenge?”

He hated talking about it, but the soft look she gave his throat as she sat on the bed beside him, so close to him, made him want to talk to someone about it for the first time in what felt like a very long time.

And when she leaned towards him and gently stroked her fingers along the line of the scar, her gaze tender and brow furrowed, he couldn’t stop himself.

He wanted her to know the truth.

To know him.

He settled his gaze on the ceiling between the four thick steel posts of the bed and then his eyes strayed to the plate that secured one of them to the ceiling. Snow’s bed. He was in Snow’s room. The sturdy bolts that held the posts in place were a dead giveaway. Snow was prone to rages when his bloodlust took him and needed to be chained.

Night wished he had still been chained when they had pushed Lilian into his cell and used a spell to force him to bite her. He glanced at her throat and away again before she noticed, shame eating away at him.

“I’ve served in the Preux Chevaliers for six hundred years.” Those words were easy for him to say, a gateway to the more difficult ones. If he was doing this, he needed to build up to it slowly, and it wouldn’t hurt to give her some backstory so she could see why he had done the things he had. “Grave was against it, of course. I was… too soft.”

“Too soft?” She looked as if she might laugh when he glanced at her again, but her expression remained serious when their eyes locked. “It changed you.”

He nodded. “Little by little. I was insistent. All Van der Garde sons had served and Grave showed no inclination to leave the corps, so I submitted myself for consideration. It was my duty to serve. I had to uphold my family’s name and maintain our reputation.”

“You make being a Van der Garde sound like a chore.”

He almost smiled. “I suppose it is in a way. Things are expected of me. There is a name to live up to and constant pressure to do it. Serving was difficult at first. Grave was right and I wasn’t cut out for it. I bounced around from one legion to the next, passed between them as someone tried to find a use for a Van der Garde with a little too much heart. I began to feel like… perhaps… I was too much like our sister.”

“Sister?”

“Her name was Luna.” He stared at the far wall, a faint image of her forming in his mind.

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