“I lost my only family member, too. So I know exactly how you feel.”
That shut his female up.
Not that she was his.
“What happened?” Mae asked in a softer tone.
“It was back in the Old Country.” Sahvage rubbed his face. “She was my charge, my first cousin. I was responsible for her. I was her only family, her protector . . .”
When he didn’t go on, Mae sat forward. “And you . . . lost her.”
“I failed her completely. She was taken from me by an aristocrat. And then she was . . . brutalized.” Sahvage pegged Mae with a hard eye. “So yes, I know what that is like, too—and it was all my fault as well.”
Mae’s eyes glowed with tears, her face flushing with compassion. “That’s why you don’t like to look at yourself.”
“No,” he said grimly. “That’s why I hate to look at myself.”
Shit, this was getting way too real, he thought.
“How can you say you don’t understand where I’m coming from, then?” she prompted.
“I never told you that. I said what you’re trying to do is wrong. With the Book. Forever on earth is not meant for mortals, Mae, and not for the ones we love, either. Let him go. Give him a proper Fade Ceremony . . . and let him go.”
Mae was quiet for a time. “I’m sorry . . . I just don’t think I can live with myself. I need to see this through. If I find the Book, I’m going to proceed.”
“Is there anything I can say to make you change your mind?”
“No.”
His eyes left hers and went to the empty bags of ice she’d crumpled up and put next to her hip. One of the bags had unfurled and was displaying a cartoon penguin with a red scarf. The fucker looked quite cheerful. Inappropriately so, given the circumstances.
“I’m sorry I lied to you,” she said remotely. “About Rhoger.”
“That hardly matters now.”
“It’s a difficult thing to talk about.”
Sahvage stared across at her, wishing she were human and he could manipulate her mind. “Of course it is. Because you know this is wrong, and if you say it out loud to someone or have someone see this, you run the risk of realizing how bad an idea this is for yourself.”
Mae blinked. A couple of times. Then she leaned forward, her eyes narrowing.
“Are you even kidding me.” She shook her head. “You’re a stranger. I’ve known you for forty-eight hours—and I met you when you were bleeding out at an underground, bare-knuckle fight with a human—”
Sahvage put up his forefinger. “I wouldn’t have been bleeding if you hadn’t distracted me—”
“Will you quit it!” Mae threw up her hands. “Goddamn it. My point is, you’re not exactly someone who’s properly in my life. And this”—she jabbed a finger at her brother—“is killing me, okay? It’s killing me. So, no, I wasn’t in a big hurry to share it with you.”
Her voice cracked and her eyes watered with tears again. But it was clear she wanted no kind of sympathy, at least not from him: She angrily slashed her palms across her cheeks and then wiped them on her jeans.
“I can’t just sit here and do nothing,” she said roughly. “So the only thing you and I have to talk about is what you’re going to do now. Are you in or are you out. And before you find some way of pissing me off again with one of your sweetheart comments, yes, we are here at this crossroads. Again.”
Sahvage closed his eyes. After a period of tense silence, he intended to give her an answer. But instead, the present drifted away, and was replaced by the past that he had resolutely ignored for so long . . .
• • •
In the great hall of Zxysis the Elder’s castle, Sahvage felt as though a veil had fallen from his eyes, his sight now clear, though he had been unaware that it had been obstructed, the world around him no longer beset by fogged haze, though he had assumed all was as he believed it to be.
And what he saw revealed before him was terrifying.
“Who art thou?” he whispered again as he stared down at Rahvyn, his cousin, his charge, his only family.
Behind him, the headless bodies of the stand of guards jerked in their pools of blood as the last of their animation deferred unto death’s cold call of im-motion. And afore him, Rahvyn was unbowed, even in the face of the beating she had been given, of the violation that had occurred unto her virtue.
But she had good reason to fear nothing, did she not.
Lifting her arms, she looked at first one, and then the other, of the steel cuffs that had bitten into her fragile wrists. They dropped off as if commanded to do so, clanging to the stone floor.