“Everything about this has me upset, Sig. You surprise attacked me with my father, knowing he was the one you were sending me to deal with. Some warning would have been great, but it’s more than that. I don’t know what this makes you and me. ”
“What did you think we were before today?” He sounded so calm I wanted to strangle him through the phone. But none of this was news to him. He’d known everything.
“I don’t know. ” Friends and colleagues didn’t seem right. We weren’t lovers, though sometimes he treated me in a way that suggested he’d considered it. But now I wondered if his affection towards me had been for another reason entirely.
That I hadn’t known the difference between attraction and a familial bond skeeved me out.
“If you don’t know what we were, why does it matter so much to you what we now are?”
“Don’t play games with me. You’ve known about this the entire time we’ve known each other. ”
“Of course. ”
“Is that why you allowed me to hunt for the council? Why you didn’t just kill me on sight when I showed up at your door?”
“Yes. ” Blunt. I’d been expecting him to soften his honesty to make things easier on me, but that had been a foolish hope. I had threatened his servant mere minutes earlier, so perhaps he didn’t want to play nice either.
“Holden asked me once if I’d let you drink from me because he couldn’t understand why you were always able to find me. It’s because I carry your bloodline, isn’t it?”
“I think you answered your own question. ”
I gnawed on my lip in an apparent attempt to take my frustration out on myself. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters,” I snapped.
“Very well, if it’s so important to you, ask your questions. ”
“What am I to you?”
“In what sense?” I didn’t think he was being intentionally evasive, but the question rankled me all the same.
“In every sense. ”
“According to vampire genealogy, you are of my line but not directly mine. So while it is my blood that ignites the vampire spark within you, we are not…related. Not in the way humans consider it, anyway. ”
That made any past innuendo slightly less sketchy than it had felt a moment before. If I’d had to think of him as my great-grandfather, it made all those times he suggested getting me out of my clothes to be really creepy. Knowing his blood was in me, though, made it difficult for me to think of him as anything other than a parental figure now. As handsome as he was, I didn’t think I could ever get past that notion.
“So we’re connected but not related. ”
“Yes. ”
“If you don’t think of me as a relative, why the extra attention? Why were you so interested in me? You protect me from Juan Carlos and go out of your way to make things easy for me. You wouldn’t do that for just anyone. ”
“You’re correct. I have taken a special interest in you. Imagine my surprise when you came through my door at sixteen, full of spite and angst, and you demanded to be given a job. Picture it from my side, knowing the instant I saw you I’d had a hand in creating you. The spark igniting you had—in part—begun with me. I loved the fire I saw in you, and wanted very badly to know how my line had ended up in this spunky hybrid girl who was more attitude than she was monster. ”
His impression of me at sixteen still summarized me in the present, except now I had the power to back my attitude up with something.
“And what did you think when you got to know me?” I lay back on the bed, staring up at the gray ceiling. With the lavender accents in the room I was reminded of Desmond’s eyes, and my heart clenched with longing for him.
“I think you’re an amazing woman, Secret, and I’m proud to have you in my lineage. But you’re as much a pain in my ass today as you were the evening we first met. ”
For some reason that made me smile.
“I still don’t understand why you never told me. I shouldn’t have found out this way. It blindsided me, and I was unprepared. ”
“I didn’t realize it was that important. Until this week I never expected you and Sutherland would cross paths, so why complicate our relationship with unnecessary details?”