I frowned. “Does it always hurt so bad?”

My body tensed involuntarily at the reminder of how awful it had been. How my bones had seemed to be breaking, rearranging, lengthening. How claws had burst from my fingers and fangs from my mouth. The process was bloody and awful, and the fact that it would continue to be made me dread this even more.

“You get used to it,” said Sorin.

“This all seems more like a punishment,” I said.

“You can choose to see it as a punishment, or you can choose to see it as a tool,” he said. “A weapon.”

I might have scoffed had he called it a gift. There was a part of me that was still angry with Adrian for how excited he had acted in the aftermath of my change when I had been so devastated, so frightened.

“I have yet to see the potential in this power,” I said.

“You have yet to actually live in the skin,” said Sorin. “All you have done is pout as if that can change what you have become.”

“Excuse me?”

“I will not use caution with my words,” said Sorin. “You will never reach your full potential if you continue to deny who you are.”

His words made me feel defensive, and a rush of anger reddened my face. “I know who I am, Sorin. Need I remind you?”

“I am very much aware, Your Majesty,” he said, his voice growing cold. “But in this room, you are my student. Do you know how hard it is to watch you mourn this change? To be given the luxury of time to accept it?”

“You act as if I should have expected to become a monster,” I said, frustrated. “I never asked for this.”

“I did not want to be this either,” he said, pointing at himself. His voice rose as he spoke. “I did not ask to crave blood or live for an eternity or fight battles for causes I lost sight of long ago, but sometimes we do not get a choice!”

I stared at him in silence. I had always suspected this was how Sorin felt about being a vampire, but he had never confirmed his feelings until now.

“Sorin—”

“Fuck!” he said, letting his head fall into his hands.

I did not speak, did not really know what to say or to ask. When he looked at me again, his eyes were red and watery and he swallowed hard.

“Did you want to do this?” he asked. “To come back to this world?”

“I…don’t know that I had a choice,” I said, but I had never thought long about it.

Sorin laughed humorlessly. “I didn’t either.”

“What happened?” I asked, posing the question quietly, afraid that it might scare him away.

He did not answer immediately, running a hand over his short hair. “It wasn’t even what happened,” he said at last. “It was how.”