Page 28 of Crimson Bond

“Consider yourself lucky on that count. So then, when you’re out with the Bloodbound you never...”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Well, when Kannon and his team rescued me at that border checkpoint, some of the guys, um... finished off the police officer and the border agent. I guess they decided not to let all that blood go to waste. I just wondered if sometimes on the job you drank from humans.”

“No,” he said in a definitive way. “I’ve had relatively little interaction with humans since becoming Bloodbound. My work has consisted mostly of tracking and bringing in rogues. Since Imogen made me captain of her queensguard, I rarely get out to do even that. I’ve been supervising my men, training new queensguard recruits, stuff like that.”

Shifting in his seat, he added, “And my experiences when I first turned left me with, shall we say, a bad taste in my mouth about drinking from humans.”

“You never did tell me what you remembered about those days once your mind cleared from the animal blood.”

Reece shifted again, his mouth forming a hard, unwilling line. “I don’t really like to talk about it.”

The night I’d left him behind at the Bastion, Reece had said some things to me I’d never forgotten. One was that hedeservedto spend eternity enslaved to Imogen because of something he’d done. I disagreed then, and I felt even more strongly about it now.

Maybe if he’d justtellme what he’d done, I could convince him he was wrong, that what he deserved, like all of us, was forgiveness and a fresh start.

“I told you about biting Josiah,” I prompted.

Reece rolled his lower lip in then out, exhaling loudly. “Yes. I did drink human blood right after turning. I attacked my family.”

“Oh. Did you k—did they die?”

“No. I stopped before draining them completely, but I... hurt them. And I didn’t stop there. I went on a sort of rampage. I bit alotof people.”

My next question was hushed. “Did they turn?”

He was quiet for so long I thought he wasn’t going to answer. But then he did. “Yes.Allof them.”

For a few moments there was only the sound of the tires on the road and the soft patter of rain on the windshield. Reece had inherited Imogen’s “gift.” He could turn a human with a single bite, and he’d turned his whole family.

I touched his arm. “I’m so sorry.”

He nodded but didn’t look at me, just kept going in a monotone voice. “I can never go home again—or anywhere near there. My family hates me. I basically terrorized my hometown, leaving brand new vampires in my wake. I’m the worst kind of rogue. I should have been destroyed.”

My fingers on his arm tightened, and I leaned down, craning my neck to the side to look at his face, to try to gethimto look atme.

“No—you shouldn’t have. It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know what you were doing. The only reason I didn’t do the same thing is that Kannon found me early on and brought me in. Is that why you started drinking animal blood? The guilt?”

He nodded. “I was really shaken by what I’d done. I was determined to resist drinking from humans, but the thirst was so powerful. I hoped the animal blood would satisfy me. Unfortunately, it turned me into a freaking psycho.”

“Look, Reece... I don’t mean to be insensitive, but in the grand scheme of things what you did was not that bad.”

“Not that bad? I just told you Iturnedmy parents and my brothers and God only knows how many other people.”

“Yes. I get it, and thatisbad—if they had no interest in becoming vampires. You changed their lives forever, but you didn’ttaketheir lives. It’s not bad enough for you to think you don’t deserve freedom and the right to still live your own life.”

“If you’re going to try to convince me again to defect from the Bloodbound—”

“I’m just saying I don’t understand why you didn’t think you could tell me about this before. What you did is no worse than what I did to Josiah and his family.”

Reece’s scowl melted into a blank expression, and he stared straight ahead out the windshield where the rain had begun to fall harder.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore. The subject is closed, okay?”

Heaving a heavy sigh, I said, “Okay.”

Suddenly noticing it was cold in the car, I cranked the heat up to knock off the chill.

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