Page 152 of Wicked Heirs

I stopped down the corridor and leaned against the wall, trying to get a handle on what I’d just witnessed.

The fucking, the talk about manipulating Alena right from the start, Ore struggling more than I’d even realized… all of it.

Holy. Fucking. Hell.

28

~Xavier~

“Sometimes there’s no right way, there’s justaway.”

Those words of Alena’s were haunting me.

Not just the words, but the way she’d been so certain and so cold about it.

They had come from the same woman who’d comforted me about my own fears and insecurities when it came to that sort of thing, those that weighed so heavily on me that sometimes I felt so consumed by it that I could barely keep moving, barely keep functioning.

There were times where I honestly didn’t want to.

And thenshe’dcome along.

The first person to truly manage to comfort me and see things another way, to see thedemonanother way.

“It’s not all darkness with the vampire side. There’s beauty to be found in the demon, that which you haven’t begun to explore yet.”

“You actually believe that?”

“I do. Everyone has darkness in them. But as I’ve learned the hard way, denying it all completely isn’t the way to go.”

I’d thought that belief had come from a place of hopefulness and light, but now, knowing this was her stance with Constantine Vale, it strongly suggested it hadn’t been rooted in that, but in resignation and even justification for turning dark.

She didn’t understand.

She couldn’t.

ButIdid.

All too well.

I knew what it was to give into the darkness, to let it consume me to the point where it obscured all else.

The way you could get so lost in it.

So lost to yourself.

I’d never told anyone this and only my father knew, but right after I’d turned, I’d killed someone. I hadn’t been able to control my bloodlust and I’d drained one of the security guards at the Sabre Mansion dry. Even after that, I’d had such trouble getting a hold on it, that there’d been several close calls afterward.

It was why I abhorred that demonic part of me.

That guilt and remorse… it haunted me even years after the fact.

Ineverwanted to experience that again—murdering an innocent in cold blood.

Blood.

Urgh.I despised that it was such a part of my life now. That so much began and ended with it.

In spite of that, I was the voice of reason in our foursome.

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