Feeling good and lazy, I skipped a glass and slid my fangs through the thin plastic of the bag. I hadn’t fed enough on the trip, and I had a hard time sleeping in the back of the van, let alone in a strange bed in a bordello. All this left me with too much time to think, and of the two people on my mind most lately, the one I didn’t want to dwell on kept forcing his way into my thoughts.

Probably because Evan had almost put me into the same situation Cyrus had been forced into. I’d always imagined Cyrus had some sinister motive for making me a vampire, though he’d insisted it was an accident, and what I could remember of the evening—aside from crawling on my hands and knees through formaldehyde and harvested human livers—didn’t suggest otherwise. As much as I hated the thought he might have been a victim of circumstance like I was, it seemed as though it was true.

What if Evan had taken my blood? When I’d become Nathan’s first fledgling, he’d been incapacitated by fear of losing me. More precisely, the fear of the pain he would feel if he’d lost me. Cyrus had tried everything short of physical restraints to keep me by his side. I knew I was stronger than Cyrus. I must have been, to look him in the eye as I stabbed a knife through his heart. I’d assumed I was stronger than Nathan, but that assertion seemed unfair now. Nathan had lost his son and gained yet another emotional burden, right along with his blood tie to me. All of this, on top of the lifetime of guilt he’d endured for the murder of his wife. How could I measure my untested strength against a man who’d been put through an unending gauntlet of emotional pain?

At times I felt Nathan had overlooked a key component of our blood bond, though. While he ached with loneliness for his wife and son, he had me. We could laugh and joke and fuck, but God forbid he ever share any emotion with me.

I hadn’t considered the possibility Nathan might hear my thoughts until a shattering pain nearly tore the bones of my skull apart. There were no words across the blood tie, only crushing regret.

Now you want to be a part of my life. I knew Nathan was locked in some unimaginable, hellish prison now, but I couldn’t stand a second more of the physical and emotional pain I felt being tied to him. I blocked off the blood tie and wiped tears of shame from my eyes.