“No, it wasn’t a lie.” He covered his face with his hands, a deceptive piece of body language that made him appear less dangerous. I knew better.

Or I thought I did. He didn’t lash out again, and I could only attribute his sudden defeat to sleep deprivation. “You’re tired. You should climb in the back and sleep.”

“No, I want to say this to you.” He rubbed his forehead with the thumb and first two fingers of one hand. “I was a monster when you knew me. I can’t change that. But I’m not that man anymore. I don’t know how else to explain it to you, except to say that she—Mouse—she did something to me that no one else ever did, and it made me different. Ah, I sound like a complete asshole.”

And he did, a little. I’d never bought into the idea that a person could be changed by something as miraculous as a bond with another person, though Cyrus had come damn close to changing me for the worse when we were blood tied. There was a genuineness in his words, though, as though he actually believed he had changed. If he believes it, that’s enough to make it so, right?

I swallowed, my tongue suddenly dry and thick in my mouth. “What did she do to you?” I hope it’s nothing disgusting. I couldn’t shake the suspicion that this outpouring of deep emotion might be a setup, another way for him to trap me into a gruesome shock. He’d always been so good at that.

“She said she loved me.” He laughed a little, but there was only sorrow in the sound.

He’d asked me once if I loved him. Well, actually, he’d demanded I say the words. But I’d refused. Guilt speared through me now. Was that really all it would have taken? If I had just kept lying to him, made him believe I’d loved him, could we have been happy together?

I pushed the thought from my mind. Of course I’d been attracted to him. He’d been an attractive man. It hadn’t helped that we’d been linked through a powerful emotional, telepathic connection. But if I’d bent to his will that night, it wouldn’t have changed him for the better. It would have condemned me to life as a monster.

You weren’t good enough to change him. The realization brought tears dangerously close to the surface, and I cleared my throat, blinking rapidly, to chase them away.