"Don't!" I marched down the hall, raging with the things I wanted to scream at him. The fact his little "pet" had tried to take away my reproductive freedom—albeit freedom I didn't really know I'd had—should have been at the top of the list. How could he have not suspected? She'd never hidden her ambitions, from him or anyone else. So how could he have not known? And what would have happened to the child we might have created?

Another, more haunting possibility—that we could have had a child together, that I could have been a mother—tore my heart. But what kind of child would it have been? An unholy monster, like its father? Would I have lost all my humanity in protecting and caring for it?

To his credit, Cyrus didn't try to give me space. He followed me to my room and sat on the end of the bed after I flung myself across it. Two tear tracks, tainted pink with blood, wet his face as he looked at me. "I didn't know. Carrie, I swear to you, I didn't know."

He pulled his legs into the small space at the end of the bed and closed the door, shutting us in the dark. He didn't turn on the light.

"How could you not know?" But that wasn't what I wanted to ask him, and he knew it.

"You mean, 'how could you take potions from her?'" His voice was thick with emotion. "'How could Dahlia have done something you weren't aware of, when you were the person closest to her? Didn't you care about her? Didn't you take an interest in her beyond what she could do for you?' I wish I could tell you that I was forced. I wasn't. I took what she gave me, like a common drug addict I can't lie and tell you that I knew all about it, or that I cared about her, or that I ever asked her a single question that wasn't a proposition. I don't even know her last name."

"How could you be that way?" I hated how my voice trembled when I cried. I sounded like a seventeen-year-old breaking up with her boyfriend. "How could you treat her like that?"

"I don't know. I'm ashamed of myself. Not because you want to hear it, but because I am. And you know I've changed. But I can't change the past, no matter how much I wish it."

We sat in silence for a long time. I measured the seconds by the beating of his heart, which sounded as loud as my own in the silence of the room.

"It would have been a lovely child," he said finally. "We're not unattractive people."

I smiled, in spite of the pain that twisted in my chest. "Nursing a vampire baby might have proved problematic."

He chuckled, then there was more silence.