Blood Games (Chicagoland Vampires 10)

He stepped away, and I nearly gasped at the absence, the sudden chill against my skin, the loss of his comforting scent and the caress of his magic.

“I won,” he said, and it took me a moment to catch up with him. “I beat Nicole.” Lakshmi must have finished tallying the official scores.

“Good,” I said. “That’s good.

He nodded. “Tomorrow, the physical test.”

I thought of the pain he’d obviously been through. I asked the difficult question. “Do you want to continue?”

He didn’t answer for a very long time. “Yes.”

I chose my words carefully. “She’ll be angry that she lost to you. Afraid that she’ll keep losing. She may escalate because of it. She may try harder to hit you.” I paused. “And she may target your past again.”

“She very probably will. But that doesn’t change my mind.” He smiled, just a little. “I’ve tried to teach you to fight beyond fear, Merit. I can’t very well play the coward.”

“Okay, then.”

He looked back at me. “Okay?”

“Okay. I agreed to support you in this a long time ago. I’m not going to change my mind because it’s hard.” And I won’t change my mind about you either, I thought. But I still want to punch you a little.

“This hasn’t exactly been easy for us,” he said.

“No, it hasn’t. It’s been downright miserable, and it’s been hard on the House. But it’s what I agreed to.”

Many emotions crossed his face—awe, surprise, love. And maybe a bit of regret that I wasn’t giving him an excuse to quit, to walk away when it would be so much easier to do so. But he hadn’t trained me that way; quite the contrary. He pulled on the T-shirt, the damp ends of his hair just touching the collar. Then he leaned back against the bureau and slid down to the floor, knees raised.

I sat down on the facing wall, gave him silence.

“This is usually the part where you ask me to talk,” he said.

“I’ve already asked. You declined.”

He made a rough sound of agreement, pushed his hands through his hair.

And there on the floor, in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, Ethan Sullivan began to talk.

“As you know, I was a soldier. As a human, I mean. We were in Nördlingen, in southern Germany. We were outnumbered and, frankly, outcommanded. But one did what one had to do.”

My chest tightened. I’d seen him die as a vampire and didn’t much want to imagine him dying as a human in the middle of a battlefield, dark and alone.

Ethan rubbed his shoulder, the place where an arrow had felled him, taken his life. “Night came, and so did Balthasar.”

“He made you, and you traveled with him.”

He nodded. “For a decade. We traveled. Pillaged, and worse.”

“And Nicole was with you.”

A pause, then another nod. “She’d been born in Martinique, traveled to Europe with the humans who believed they owned her. Balthasar made her a vampire.”

“Effectively freeing her.”

“Yes. She took to it immediately—biologically, strategically. He was crazed—unstable, difficult to predict. But she learned to work through that. He considered me a soldier; he considered her a prize. Their relationship was considerably different, although even she wouldn’t argue he had little regard for life, human or otherwise. His immortality had, ironically, made him callous toward it. If anyone could have immortality by exchanging a bit of blood, then life was cheap.

“Life was cheap . . . as was love. Balthasar trained us to be monsters. To take what we wanted, discard the rest. To take who we wanted.”

Fear curled low in my belly at the disquiet in his eyes. Then his gaze slipped away again and back into the past.

“There were women, Merit.” He raked fingers through his hair. “For years on end. For decades on end, there were women. I hadn’t yet learned to take blood without taking pleasure. It was part of who I was, who I’d learned to be. Been trained to be.”

He looked at me again. “Who I’d been trained by Balthasar to be.”

My voice sounded so quiet. “That’s what you didn’t want to tell me. Because you’d had affairs?”

He nodded. “There was no faithfulness. There was no fidelity. There was only . . . decadence.” He paused. “Nicole was one of those lovers. Only for a brief time. But as, it seems, I’m being honest . . .”

He didn’t finish the thought, but gave me, I knew, a moment to reflect, to gather my own.

None of it should have been a surprise. Not given how I’d come to know Ethan. Before we’d fallen in love, only days after we’d actually met, Ethan had asked me to be his Consort—the paid and titled vampire whose job was to see to his carnal satisfaction.

That was shortly before I’d seen him in flagrante delicto with Amber, the Consort I’d have replaced. That, strangely, had been the first time I’d seen him naked, the first time I’d seen him in the throes of lust. And Amber hadn’t been the only of his lovers I’d faced down. Ethan was much desired.

But still . . . this was different in a way I couldn’t yet name.

Amber hadn’t meant anything to him. Hadn’t affected him, and he hadn’t hidden that relationship. He’d retired the position after learning of her treachery against the House, but he hadn’t hidden it.

If he’d been afraid to tell me this—how much worse was it, at least in his own mind?

“That look in your eyes paralyzes me, Merit.”

I shook my head. “I . . . just . . . I don’t know what to say.”

“I’ve lost you once tonight,” he said, fear writing lines in his face, spilling magic into the room. “I saw you leave me, watched it happen. And I cannot see that happen again.” His voice softened. “But if you’d leave me, then let it be for truth—because of who I am when you see the whole of me—and not because I was afraid to let you see it.”

He swallowed hard. “There was a night in London. It was near the end, although not near enough in hindsight. We’d played at being ton, with titles bought and paid for.” He paused. “There was a girl who fancied me. She was a wisp of a thing. Cream and roses complexion. Feminine in the most delicate sense.”

Ethan smiled wistfully, his affection for the girl obvious in his expression, his tone. But there was sadness, too.

“I might have loved her. In time, in a fashion. In the way I’d been capable of then.” Storm clouds crossed his face, darkened his eyes. “Balthasar watched us one night, saw me dance with her. Caught what was, to him, a hint of affection for someone other than himself. He was a narcissist; that was not allowed.