His beautiful lips bent in a sad smile. “Don’t take it personally. There was a time I would have done anything to keep you. But I’m human now.”

“And the people around you aren’t,” I finished for him.

“I’m never going to get away from this life. The blood and sex and horror. I knew what was going to happen between us. It was just a matter of time. And I knew what it would mean when we did it. I was willingly giving in to that part of me I should be fighting against.” He paced the tiny area in front of the bed, no more than three steps, his forefingers pressed in a steeple at his lips. “I could have just killed you in the desert and disappeared.”

“There’s a cheery thought.” I eyed the nail file on the edge of my desk, thinking I could use it as a weapon if he tried to attack me. You could use yourself. You are a vampire.

He cleared his throat, actually looking remorseful. “I’m sorry, it’s not meant to be insulting, it just is what it is. I could have started over, completely new, and had all the things I wanted the first time I was a man.”

“What did you want?” I imagined the Soul Eater’s corruption had begun early. The thought Cyrus had, at one time, had wishes and needs of his own seemed impossible.

He knew exactly what I was thinking. “He didn’t become so hungry for power until he fell in with his own sire.”

“What did you want?” I repeated quietly.

There was a long pause. He was no longer with me, in my room. The faraway look in his eyes suggested he’d removed himself from me by seven centuries. “A peasant knows better than to want more than a reasonable life and an easy death. In my wildest fantasies, I had a home of my own and a real bed. As it was, my first wife had to spend her wedding night on the hard-packed dirt of my family’s cottage, with my brothers and father and their wives not a foot from us.”

He gave a grim chuckle. “That was how it always was then, there was no help for it. But I was a shiftless dreamer, like my father. That’s probably why we managed to tolerate each other for so many long years.”

“Did you have any children?” When I’d been his fledgling, he’d dispensed information on a need-to-know basis—namely, what he thought I needed to know. The subject of his family had never come up.