This sounded far too dramatic to be true. “What do you mean?”

“Samson will only feed off me. The longer he’s away from me the longer he won’t feed. A blood-bonded vampire can’t metabolize foreign blood. He can only live off his mate’s blood. As long as I’m alive he’ll need my blood. Only when I die, will his body accept blood from somebody else.”

Delilah’s words were spoken with calmness despite the fundamental implications they carried.

“But that can’t be.”

“That’s how it is. Without our blood, our men will die.”

Nina swallowed hard, but the lump in her throat didn’t disappear. “You mean Amaury would starve without me?”

Delilah nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“Why then? Why make me his mate if that makes him dependent on me?”

“There’s only one reason why a vampire chooses a mate: he loves her and can’t live without her.”

Nina choked back a tear. How she longed to hear those words from him, even though they couldn’t be true. “But Amaury can’t love anybody. He told me so himself. He’s cursed never to love again.”

Delilah shrugged her shoulders. “Something must have happened. I can only tell you what I know from my own experience. No vampire takes a blood-bonding lightly. It is forever. And it is for love.”

Nina put her head in her hands. “Delilah, there’s something I have to tell you about me and Amaury.”

Delilah’s soft palm stroked over her hair. “You love him, don’t you?”

“Promise me not to tell Samson—I need to be the one to tell Amaury.” She paused. “If I ever get the chance.”

***

Nina jerked out of her sleep when she heard a sound at the door. She looked at Delilah who lay next to her on the stone floor, asleep. Nina remained still, pretending to be sleeping while she watched the door open. There was a sliver of light penetrating the dim dungeon, silhouetting a tall figure at the door.

She would recognize the man anywhere.

“Eddie,” she whispered and jumped up.

He looked behind him, then slipped into the room and closed the door. “Nina.”

A second later she wrapped her arms around her brother. “Why didn’t you tell me?” She swallowed back a tear. “How could you let me think you were dead? I buried you, I cried for you.”

Eddie’s familiar hand brushed over her curls like he’d done ever since he’d become physically bigger than her. “I couldn’t, sweetie. I wasn’t myself. The first few weeks were agony.”

She pulled away to look up at his face. “Did he force you?”

“Force me? Who?”

“Luther. He forced you.”

He held her a foot away from him. “Of course not. He would never force anybody.”

It didn’t make sense to Nina. Eddie would have never made her suffer like this without even trying to let her know he was alive. “I don’t believe you. You could have told me you were alive.”

Eddie shook his head. “I couldn’t. The days after the transformation were painful. I had to come to grips with the thirst. I had to learn how to control my urges and my strength without harming anyone. For the first couple of weeks I could barely think straight. I didn’t dare come near you. I was too afraid of hurting you.”

Nina recognized the sincerity in his voice.

“Why did you do it? I thought things started to work out for us. Why would you throw this away?”

“Throw what away? Just barely scraping by? Never quite making it? Always looking over your shoulder?” She could sense his anger and frustration.

“It wasn’t like that.”

But she knew her own protest was weak at best. They had struggled.

“It was always like that. Don’t lie to me, Nina. No matter how you tried to shield me from things, it was always like that. You can’t tell me you were happy the way we had to live.”

“But we had each other.” Her protest drowned in his angry huff.

“Yeah, we had each other. Because you always sacrificed yourself for me. Do you think I wanted that?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know what you had to do. I woke up that night. I heard what he did to you. You should have killed him. But you didn’t. Instead you stuck it out for me. You lived with this asshole day in and day out. Did you think I was blind? That I didn’t see how hard that was for you? And I couldn’t protect you. But now I’m a vampire, and as a vampire I’m finally strong enough to protect you from assholes like him.”