I darted up the stairs and spotted Roane’s closed bedroom doors. I threw them open, prepared to unburden my soul, but I braked abruptly. Nothing. Roane wasn’t there. The sheets were in the same place. The window was open and a cool breeze swept in.
“Oh my god! Vampires are so unreliable!” I cried to myself.
Then I heard a soft chuckle behind me and I whirled around—my jaw dropped. There he was, buttoning a black shirt that looked custom-fitted and straight from the dry cleaners. He wore a pair of light blue jeans underneath, which also looked custom fitted and dry-cleaned.
“You’ve got money. I can see that,” I stated as my greeting.
“That’s what you had to say and why you called with your commanding ‘now!’?” Roane drawled as he slipped past only to drop the shirt off his shoulders—oh whoa. I had assumed he’d been buttoning it up, but nope. He’d been unbuttoning it.
“Wha—why—what are you doing?” I quickly turned around. I wanted to look. I shouldn’t. It was bad to look, but I peeked anyway. Roane was all muscles. Perfect, chiseled, hard ridges, muscles up and down and all around. My fingers itched to touch them and my mouth went dry, but I twitched to keep myself back.
“I was out. I had to make sure you and Gregory weren’t followed.”
“That would’ve been bad, huh? If they had followed me…” I trailed off as Roane was in front of me in a flash… in all his shirtless glistening chest gloriousness…. Fans. Vampires should keep fans everywhere they were… for all those hot, passionate, and overheated humans like myself….
“They?” Roane caught my shoulders and jerked me back to him.
I’d been absentmindedly looking for a fan somewhere.
“They?” he barked again.
“They.” I needed to remind myself who ‘they’ were. Oh—“Yes. Your twin brother.” I growled that last bit and shoved Roane back. “You could’ve told me that you had a twin brother. They have Emily and Adam.”
“You met Lucan?” Roane grilled. “You talked to Lucan?”
I nodded. “I met him. I talked to him. I found out that Kates is in love with him, thanks for that heads up and yes—he sent a message for the Immortal. I’m supposed to deliver it because apparently he can smell you all over me. That’s gross. I really don’t like being sniffed.”
“I’ve almost forgotten what he smells like,” Roane confessed as he moved around me and back into the bedroom. He flicked his wrist out and shut the door on his way. As I turned to watch him, the door shut behind me with a click.
“That’s… how can you forget what your twin smells like? Wouldn’t he smell like you?” I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation.
Roane stopped, stared at me for a moment, and then crossed to his closet. He pulled out a grey shirt, but only held it as he hung his head. “Lucan and I were sired by different Families. That mean
s that we have the same face now. Nothing else remains the same with the two of us. I have different blood than he does.”
“Because you were sired by different Families?”
“Lucan was sired first.” Roane still hadn’t put the shirt on. He only held it and now his hand wrapped tightly around it. He looked at the floor and I heard the suffering in his voice. “He was the louder one of us. Everyone thought he was the leader. When he was sired… I felt it happen. I felt him and then suddenly—I thought he was dead. It was almost two weeks before he came to me. He said that he couldn’t control himself before that and he wanted to make sure he wouldn’t hurt me. I didn’t see much of Lucan after he became a vampire. I lived another year as a human until this man came to me.”
I felt the history swirl around us, like it was another entity in the room.
Roane continued, haunted, “He told me that Lucan had become a problem with the vampires. He was uncontrollable and defying a lot of their rules. He said that I was once his twin brother. They wondered if I could help them with their problem. That’s what they called him. My brother was ‘their problem.’”
I heard his hollow laugh and bit my lip from crying out.
“He turned you into a vampire because of your brother?”
“No. He took me to Lucan—as a human. Lucan was the one who decided I should be a vampire. He missed me. He wanted me beside him. He wanted things to be how they were. The man who had come to me realized what Lucan was about to do. He did it instead. To say Lucan was furious is an understatement. He ripped my Master’s head off.”
“So…” I asked, hesitant, “You didn’t have a Master?” I had no idea what that meant, but I guessed that it meant something.
He cleared his throat. “I joined Lucan for awhile. I became a part of his Family, even though I wasn’t from their bloodline. The rest of the group didn’t like that, but Lucan was their leader. They did what he said and I’d been his twin brother—it still meant something to Lucan and me. We were how we used to be, for a time.”
Inseparable. I heard it before he said it. I felt it from him. Roane wished things were how they used to be.
“As I learned things, I started to change. Lucan didn’t like it at first, but I don’t know—I think his Family were the ones who stepped in.”
“You said Lucan was the ‘louder’ one of you. They thought he was the leader.”