Page 65 of Claimed By Blood

I’ll have to deal with them later, but for now, I’ll leave them be. It can’t be a bad thing to have backup all the way out here if we’re planning to stay a while.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Eve teases, drawing my attention back to her. “I thought you’d be talking my ear off trying to convince me of all the reasons for us to get back together.”

It’s a quiet reference to the time when I first asked her if I could court her. Back then, I’d listed all of the reasons and had them written down, ready to whip out when she inevitably shot me down.

Only she never did, and when she found the list later on, she never let me live it down.

“Number one,” I begin, glancing upwards and suppressing a groan. “I’ve been fully reformed since we were last bonded. I no longer leave my dirty clothes everywhere, and I’ve even been schooled into putting the seat down by Finn.”

She snorts, and I keep going.

“Reason number two, I come with minions.”

“What good is a group of ghoul minions going to do me?” she asks.

“Oh, I was talking about the pack,” I retort. “Gid loves it when I call him my minion. Didn’t you know? But I suppose the ghouls are all right.” I pause, running my fingers over the stone, searching for a new handhold. “Three, I’m convinced being turned gave me another two inches.”

She’s silent for a while, scrabbling for her next hold, until she figures it out and looks down at me with wide eyes. “That isnota known side effect of vampirism.”

“Four,” I continue as if she hasn’t spoken. “I’ve got us a house. A few, actually, but there’s this one place, back in the Old Country…”

This time, she nearly falls from the cliff in surprise.

“That’s a little presumptuous—”

“I had it designed so it was perfect for you.” I obsessed over every tiny detail, dragging up every memory of our time together when she expressed a preference onanything. “It kept me sane.” And tortured me at the same time.

All I could think about was her, anyway. At least when I was working on the house, I could remember the good moments.

And not the way she looked when she was forced to break our bond and locked into that coffin.

“Five?” she whispers, and I give myself a shake, forcing myself to move upwards and cross the gap between us.

“Five,” I say, swallowing the hoarseness that threatens to choke me. “I’m still in love with you.”

The air around us goes still the moment I say it, and her silence bands around my chest until I have to keep talking or just stop breathing.

“I’ll always love you. No matter how long we’re apart, or whether we’re immortal or mortal. I’d love you if you were a ghoul. I just can’t stop. Believe me, I tried. After the thrall bond broke, I wanted to stop. I would’ve given anything to be able to stop—”

“Well, you must’ve succeeded,” she retorts. “Because you didn’t rush to my rescue for almost two hundred years.”

I nod, pressing my head against the stone. “I’ll grant you that one. I didn’t.”

“Why?” Her voice is strong, but the word holds a wealth of uncertainty. “You could’ve come for me earlier. Enacted your plan at any point. Why leave me there for so long if you claim you’ve always loved me?”

“At first… I was too broken,” I admit, hating myself. “It took a decade for Draven’s team to get me out of there, and I was just a shell. People hid me, made me eat, but I couldn’t do anything.”

“Obviously that passed.”

“Yes, in time, and thanks to the dedication of a few people who knew me from before and didn’t want me dead because I was an abomination…”

“What?”

“I was part of a resistance that hated vampires, Eve. When they found out Iwasone, there were a lot of people who wanted to put me down.”

Her outraged hiss is a good sign, right?

“There was a lot of debate about whether I should be allowed to live. Then Cain did me a favour and decided to wipe out a whole load of the resistance at once. After that, everything was about survival. I could barely breathe without vampires breaking down the door of my safe house…”

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