Page 40 of High Stakes and Soulmates
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I’m really sorry.”
Cyrus looks surprised. Maybe I should grovel more? Because I will. I’ll do whatever it takes to get him to forgive me.
“What the fuck are you sorry about?” he asks, voice full of disbelief. “Why do you let me stomp all over you and you just forgive me constantly? I’m a shitty-ass person. I feel like I’m going through life in this fucking tunnel of depression, and like… I’m trying to protect myself from caring about you and keeping you from liking me by being shitty to you, and you just forgive me constantly.”
“You’re not shitty to me.”
“I’m definitely not the person I want to be. But I feel like my whole world is constantly spinning out of control. I got so fixated on figuring out who killed my family that I let it consume me. And like… I see others moving on, other… family members just… moving forward, and I’m still stuck back there. I’m stuck and sometimes I think it’s because I barely remember my parents. I was… the vampire threw me so hard that the damage to my head fucked with me. I only remember pieces of the life I lived. It’ll just be random things like my mother taking me out into a field of flowers. My brother and I making these stupid little dolls… and these games we played. But it’s like this monster wasn’t happy merely taking my family, he wanted to take all of me. I miss those moments with my family. I miss our dinners. The games we played. The holidays. I miss my family, and he took them all from me.”
“They thought you were never going to wake up,” I say. “I don’t think anyone thought you were going to live and yet… you pulled through.”
“I did, but my life was in fucking shambles. Everyone I loved was just… gone. That man took it, but why? Why my family?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I wish I knew. Trust me, I tried to figure out who did it. I searched for a long while, but there was absolutely nothing that stood out about why your family was targeted. Do you know?”
“There were… rumors that the killer was after my brother Joaquin.”
“Why? He seemed like a normal kid. He was working on his doctorate and visiting home, right? Why him?”
“I don’t know… I’ve spent four years not knowing.”
“If this has been eating at you so much, why didn’t you ever ask us for help? I never brought it up because I didn’t want to dig up bad memories for you. But if you’ve been dragging this after you everywhere you went, why not tell us?”
“Because I didn’t trust either of you. I didn’t trust any vampires or weres or anything. And then Julian came into my life and you guys started drawing me into it. And still… I was obsessed with this idea that I couldn’t trust anyone. I wanted to make myself the bad guy so I couldn’t ever make the mistake of opening up to someone I could lose.”
“I know how that feels,” I say. “I know what it’s like to have your whole world torn apart. I know you said I shouldn’t apologize, but I still feel sorry for what I said. I was taking my own frustrations and my own thoughts about myself out on you. For that, I really am sorry.”
“Please don’t. You’re right. I was looking for an excuse to keep you at a distance. Of course I didn’t know what kind of person you were when I met you, but I do now. And I know that you would never kill my family for some fucked-up reason. In the back of my mind, I knew that. Why the hell else would I even let you into my life? But still, I said some hurtful things. And I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’m sorry that I never told you that I knew about your family. That wasn’t very fair of me either. I just… I didn’t know how to bring it up. Or if you never wanted me to ever bring it up. And since we’re just laying it all out there, the reason I knew about you… is because I’d checked in on your family here and there throughout the years. Not to the extent that I really knew any of you or conversed with you, but just like a ‘How are they doing?’ kind of thing. I was… very close to a man in your family about two hundred years ago.”
Cyrus gives me a confused look. “What do you mean?”
Fuck. I really didn’t even want to tell him. I feel like he’s going to assume my interest in him ties back to Arturo. And it’ll just be another reason to think I’m shitty. But I know it’s better to get it out there now while we’re being honest. Now, when he might still be able to forgive me for not being honest from the beginning.
“You just going to stand in silence and awkwardly stare at me?” Cyrus asks.
I shrug. “That’s the plan. Is it working?”
“Did you like have some vendetta against my great-grandfather or something?”
“Ha ha… no. I did not. I simply fell in love with your great-great…uh… a few more greats-uncle. Ha ha…”
“Excuse me, what?” Cyrus asks as his eyebrows shoot up like he’s doing his best to comprehend this. “You’ve just been keeping this little tidbit to yourself?”
“I didn’t want you thinking the reason I liked you was because of him. You areliterallynothing like him. He was all bubbly and like, ‘Ezio, you are so sweet and funny and handsome. And oh my gosh, you are justdelightful.’ And you’re all, ‘If you live… I will speak to you.’”
Cyrus cracks a smile. “I’m notthatevil. I very much care if you live. I’m just… in shock that you’re simply moving down the family line.”
I try not to laugh. “I’m not moving down the family line! If I was, do you think I’d have waited hundreds of years to snag someone else from the line? Instead, I picked the most stubborn one to like. I really do like you, Cyrus. And I understand you don’t overly like me, which is fine. But just… don’t think I’m over here killing people, either. I… had to do shit in my past that I’m not proud of. I was told again and again that they were bad people, that we were saving others from a horrible fate, but it was really hard for me to kill them no matter who they were.”
“I didn’t know you were much of a fighter,” Cyrus says.
“The type of killing I did was more along the lines of assassinations than fighting like Casimir does.”
Cyrus’s eyebrow quirks. “I… see that even less.”
I can’t help but give him a short laugh. “Right?”
