We joked about death because we had to. But it wasn’t a joke. It was real, and it was coming for us. And the thought of death getting anywhere near Raihn made me feel sick.

For so long, he and I had danced around each other’s pasts. It didn’t behoove either of us to learn too much about the other. The less we knew, the easier it would be to carve each other out of our lives with a single well-placed strike of our blades, like a cancer excised.

But in this moment, I came to the horrifying realization that I would never be able to carve Raihn from my heart. He had embedded too deep. Roots through stone.

And as I had watched him sleep, I couldn’t help but see Ilana’s face float through my mind. There were so many things I hadn’t asked her, too. And when she died, I had to bury myself in broken, incomplete shards of her life, because it was all I had.

I wanted more of him than that. More of his body. More of his soul, too.

I said softly, “You told me before that you had a lot of people relying on you.”

Raihn’s smile faded. “I do.”

“Who?”

“I’d rather have more sex than this conversation. Glad your pillow talk is about as pleasant as your bedside manner, princess.”

I smiled weakly, a little embarrassed. But his fingers caressed my cheek in a way that said, perhaps, he understood. And maybe he felt some of what I did, this masochistic urge to hack out little pieces of our heart for each other, because he said, “Do you want the short answer? Or the long one?”

“The long one.”

What I didn’t add: I want to listen to you talk for as long as possible.

Raihn looked away, silent for a long moment, as if he had to prepare himself.

“The man who Turned me,” he said, “was a very powerful person. When I was human, I was a guard, and I took a job securing a trading ship from Pachnai to Tharima. Our boat was too small to be making a journey that long. We got caught in a storm and it flung us right to the shores of the House of Night. Snared on Nyaxia’s Hook.”

I knew the term—it referred to a little rocky hook of land that jutted out from the southern shores of the House of Night. The currents were very strong, and though I’d never seen it, I’d heard stories that the horizon there was littered with the remnants of shattered ships.

“I had no idea where I was when it happened. We were off course. It was dark. Most of the others died. I was close to it, too. Literally dragged myself to shore.”

His eyes fell straight ahead, not to the wall, but to the past.

“Luck,” he said. “Luck saved me. Or damned me. I was mostly dead by the time I found him. I’d seen a lot of death, even then, but when it’s breathing down your throat, it’s different. When he asked me if I wanted to live… what kind of a question was that? I was thirty-two years old. Of course I fucking wanted to live. I had a—I had a life.”

The dismay in that sentence. I felt it in my heart, too. I had a life.

“A family?” I whispered.

“A wife. A child coming. A lot of future to live for. I was willing to do anything for it.”

He said this with such rueful resentment, as if he hated his former self for thinking it.

I wondered if he thought of that version of his life as often as I thought of a different version of mine.

“So I accepted. I thought he was saving me. I traded away my broken humanity in favor of immortality. Or so I thought. But then…” His throat bobbed. “He didn’t let me leave.”

“Didn’t let you—?”

“At first, it was because I was sick. Turning is… I hope to any god that you never know, Oraya. I really do. I fought hard to live, but clawing my new self out of the old took weeks. Months. But after that, I realized—”

He bit down hard on his words, swallowed. I slid my palm to the bare skin of his chest in silent reassurance, and his hand fell over mine, pressing hard enough that I could feel his heartbeat—quick with the memory of the past, despite the careful restraint of his voice.

“I wasn’t the only person he Turned. Not the only vampire he took. He chose…” His head tilted slightly to the opposite wall, as if he didn’t want me to see his face. “He had his tastes, alright? He was very, very old. And once someone has been alive for the better part of a millennium, it gets hard to find excitement in the world. Fulfilling their various hungers gets difficult. Entertaining those they seek to influence, keeping their attention, gets difficult. People become… nothing more than sources of amusement. And when they’re that powerful, when they have that much control over every living being, you don’t have any choice but to let them do what they want to you.”

Horror curdled in my stomach.

Oh, Mother.

When I had first met Raihn, he had seemed like an immovable pillar of strength—first physical strength, and then emotional strength. The idea that anyone had ever used him that way… the idea that anyone had made him feel the level of shame that I heard now in his voice, all these years later…

And yet, so much now made sense. That Raihn knew so implicitly all the things I didn’t say. Knew what it felt like to be so powerless, to be used in ways beyond your control. Knew how to recognize the scars of a past, whether on a throat or on a heart.

It seemed patronizing to tell him I was sorry. What good did my pity do him?

Instead I said, “I am fucking furious for you.”

No, I wouldn’t give him my pity. But I’d give him my rage.

The hint of a smile creased the corners of his eyes. “There she is.”

“I hope he’s dead. Tell me he’s dead.”

If not, I’d hunt him down and kill him myself.

“Oh, he’s dead.” A wince flinched across his features. “I’m… ashamed of what I let myself become, back then, once the fight was stomped out of me. There was no shortage of ways to numb myself. He won, so I took them. I hated vampires. And for seventy years, I hated myself, because I had become one of them.”

Fuck. I couldn’t. I hated them, too.

“But… I wasn’t alone, either. There were others in the same position as me. Some Turned, some Born. Some of them were shells of who they used to be, like me. Some I formed an… uneasy kind of kinship with. And some…”

I wasn’t sure how I knew. Maybe it was something about the faraway mist over his eyes, and the fact that I’d only seen that expression once before.

“Nessanyn,” I murmured.

“Nessanyn. His wife. Every bit as much of a prisoner of him as I was.”

A lump rose in my throat. “And you fell in love with her?”

I admit there was a little twinge of jealousy at the thought—why?—but that aside, I hoped he had. Because I knew, firsthand, that having someone to love could help someone survive impossible situations.

He didn’t answer for a long time, like he really had to consider this. “I did,” he answered, finally. “And loving her saved me, because by that time, I didn’t think there was a single gods-forsaken thing in the entire shitty world that mattered, until suddenly, Nessanyn mattered. And the difference between nothing mattering and one thing mattering is a big one.”

I was grateful to her for that. That she had helped him survive.

“But she and I were very different people. If we’d met in another life…” He shrugged. “I don’t know if we would have paid any attention to each other. The only thing we had in common was him. But he was our entire lives, so that was enough. Together we were able to craft something that was just ours. She was the first kind vampire I’d ever met. Just a good, decent person. And through her, I met others. It just… changed everything.” He looked away, as if embarrassed. “It sounds silly. It sounds like nothing. But…”

“It’s not nothing. It’s not silly.”

I spoke more sharply than I had intended.

I was so fucking angry on his behalf. Angry that this had happened to him. Angry that anyone had dared tell him that any of it, any shred, was silly or shameful or undeserving of anything other than righteous fury.