Page 58 of Fallen Heirs

If it was taken away now somehow, I worried it would unsettle him all over again when it had taken so long for him to accept himself as he was.

Was it messing with his head and he just wasn’t speaking to it?

His therapist was coming here now to see him for a session every single day, so maybe she’d helped him with that.

It just made me sick that Constantine kept trying to fuck with our minds, that it was one of his chief tactics.

It wasn’t his power and experience that were only the most dangerous things about him—it was also that. The psychological impact. It was why he’d been able to turn a whole set of new recruits in those vampires, and many more according to their claims.Fuck,even without the aid of black magic like he’d used with me, he still had the ability to control these beings and have them do whatever he wanted. He still had such power over so many.

I mean, if Xavier’s theory was correct, he’d even managed it with Orpheus.

The formidable and indomitable Dark Fae royal who’d been all about not allowing fear to guide our actions, who’d believed in doing whatever was necessary to extinguish a threat.

“I need you to help me train with my new ability—extinguishing dark magic. It stands to reason that, with me being able to erase a dark magical stream, I should be able to do it entirely, maybe completely wipe out a dark being’s magic—Constantine’s. If I could do that, then he’ll just be a vampire, a lot easier to take down and no longer such a major threat. Even with the black magic now gone, the level of magic he wields is staggering. You know that, you went up against him.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

That conversation had been playing on my mind a lot lately.

When I’d considered forgoing all the secrecy with mine and Xavier’s hunting.

But the more I’d thought about it, the more it had cemented the notion of keeping it quiet and off his radar.

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take in order to put him down.”

“I’m not.”

“What about your whole modus operandi of doing whatever it takes?”

“You eclipse that. Your safety and wellbeing does. Nothing compares to that. Nothing comes before that.”

It was my fault that he was this way now.

His worry for me wasn’t unfounded either.

In fact, it was all made worse by the fact that something badhadhappened to me. I’d been taken and abused by Constantine.

And Orpheus was obviously worried about something like that happening again.

So worried that he couldn’t see past it.

Beyond that, so worried that it had changed him.

Changed how he saw things, how he did things.

It made me sick that it had come to that, that he was being impacted by it so profoundly.

He’d been so weighed down by everyone else’s suffering that he hadn’t been able to address his own. He’d been hurting andstruggling in silence, just concerned with how the three of us were doing.

Was that why he’d actually gone to the DFR all of a sudden? Not just to spend some time with his father? Had it been to find a way to deal with what was haunting him? Maybe the fact that his mother was involved in all this too, something he hadn’t spoken about at all?

I wished he was here with us.

It hadn’t been long since we’d last seen him, last been in his presence, but I felt the loss of him as though it had been much longer.

His presence was such that it was so noticeable when he wasn’t around.

Even when he’d been visiting the compound while we’d been staying at my mom’s place, it had been jarring for the few hours he hadn’t been there with us.

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