He took a deep breath. “I want to believe you.”

“I’m not the one to believe or disbelieve. It is a law of the universe. Debate such at your leisure—or you could just accept the blessing for what it is.”

“What if she was right, though?”

“Who? What if who was right?”

Xcor looked away, focusing on their bare feet. “My nursemaid always told me I was cursed. I was evil. When she would—” He stopped there, not wanting to go into the beatings. “She told me I was rotten. That my face was only what showed of the rot inside of me. That the real festering was within.”

Layla shook her head. “She was talking about herself, then. She was revealing the truth of herself. To say those things to an innocent young? To warp his mind and terrorize him like that? If there is another definition of evil and rottenness, I don’t know what it is.”

“You see too much of the good in me.”

“That’s what you’ve shown me, though. You’ve always been good to me.”

Her hand took his from where he had clamped it on his knee, and as she squeezed his palm with her own, he struggled to process her loyalty and kindness. Indeed, she would never understand the extent of his atrocities, and perhaps that was just as well. It would save her from feeling bad at her misjudgment of him.

“I need to tell you something.”

As he heard the tension in her voice, he glanced over. “What.”

Now, he thought, now she would tell him to go.

“I owe you an apology.” Releasing the hold she had taken on him, she locked her own hands and seemed to have difficulty finding words. “I did something that maybe I shouldn’t have done—and that I definitely should have told you about before now. And my conscience is killing me.”

“Whate’er is it?”

When her distress appeared to intensify, it was both easy and a relief to switch gears and focus on whate’er bothered her.

“Layla, there is naught that you could do to upset me.”

She rushed through her words, speaking the syllables quickly, but clearly. “Up in the Sanctuary, where the Chosen dwell, there is a great library of lives. And in those stacks, in those volumes, the details of all the males and females of the species are kept, the passages written by the sacred scribes after they witnessed in the seeing bowls all the events, good and bad, that have e’er transpired down upon the earth. It is an entire chronicle of the race, the battles and the celebrations, the feasts and the famines, the sadness and the joy … the deaths and the births.”

As she paused, he was aware that his heart started beating faster. “Go on.”

Layla took a deep breath. “I was seeking to know more. About you.”

“You looked at my record.”

“I did.”

Xcor cast aside the blanket she had draped upon him and stood, pacing forward and back. “Why did you bother to ask me about my past, then? Why force me to say—”

“Not everything is in it.”

“You just said it was.”

“Not feelings. Not your thoughts. And I didn’t know about …” She cleared her throat. “I knew you had gone into the war camp, but what precisely transpired there had not been recorded.”

He stopped and turned toward her. She was blissfully naked, her spectacular body bare to his eye in the warm bedroom, only her long, lovely blond hair covering her. She was nervous, but not cowering, and once again, he wondered why in the hell someone like her would have anything to do with a male like him.

What was wrong with her, he wondered.

“So what did you read about me?” he demanded.

“I know who your father—”

“Stop.” As he put his palm forward, sweat broke out on his upper lip and across his brow. “You must stop there.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said as she reached for the discarded blanket and pulled it around herself. “I should have told you. I’ve just—”

“I’m not angry.”

“You aren’t?”

He shook his head and meant it. “No.”

After a moment, he went over to the pants he’d had to borrow and pulled them on. Then he did the same with the T-shirt he’d been wearing when he’d been shot. Moving the hem around, he inspected the hole in the fabric where the bullet had grazed him and then he checked his skin. Healed up.

The result of Layla’s Chosen blood.

“I know what you’re going to ask,” he said remotely.

“Well, do you want to know?”

His bare feet started walking again, taking him from one end of the room to the other and back once more. “You know, I had this fantasy … when I was a young lad. Well, I had several of them. I used to conjure them up when the nursemaid kept me chained outside the cottage during the night—”

“Chained?” Layla said weakly.

“—to pass the time. One of my favorites was imagining who my father was. I pictured that he was a great warrior on a fierce steed, and that one evening, he came out of the woods and took me away on the back of his saddle. In my idle dreaming, he was strong and proud of me, and we were of like kind, seeking nothing but honor and goodness for the species. Great fighters, side by side.”

He could feel her eyes boring into him, and he didn’t like it. He felt vulnerable enough. But as with removing a bullet lodged in skin, one had to finish the job.

“It kept me going. To the point that, even after I turned myself in at various orphanages, I never could stay in them because I always worried he might come to that cottage and find that I wasn’t there. Later, when my path crossed with the Bloodletter’s and he told me that lie to get me to join him? That he was my sire? I was so desperate that I recast myself to fit that evil male and made one of the biggest mistakes of my life.” He shook his head. “And when I discovered the falsity? I felt betrayed, but it was also a return to where I had been as a child. I’ve lived with the rejection of my parents all my life. They have had a century or two to rethink what they did and try to find me, but they have chosen not to. To discover now what either of their names are, or what happened to them, or where they live? It will change nothing, for them or me.”

Layla’s beautiful eyes were shining with tears, and he could tell she was trying to be strong for him.

He wished he had not once again put her in that position.

“I’m not mad at you,” he said as he went over and kneeled before her. “Never.”

He put his hands on her thighs and forced a smile. He wanted to reassure her, ease her conscience and her mind, but his own emotions were in a great upheaval. Indeed, talking with her had opened up a Pandora’s box of the past, and all manner of images were flashing through his brain, memories from childhood, and then the war camp, and still afterward with his fighters, crowding like invaders at a gate, threatening to overtake everything about him.

This was why the past must stay buried, he decided, and why truths long left unrevealed must remain as such. To bring them forth solved nothing and only created a dust storm that would take much time to settle.

The good news? He’d told his males he would meet them at four a.m., and that gave him an excuse to firmly end this conversation. So what if it was only just after two. He was going to need some time alone to compose himself.

“I must go.”

“To find your fighters.”

“Yes.”

She seemed to take a bracing breath. “Will you put your bulletproof vest back on? In case of more slayers?”

As Xcor stood back up, he made a dismissive motion with his hand so as to reassure her. “Yes, but do not worry. They’re almost non-existent the now. I can’t remember the last time I saw one.”

First Meal with Blay’s parents was, at least on the surface, a picture-perfect breakfast scene: You had a couple in love, two beautiful kids, and a pair of grandparents in a kitchen that was out of an old-fashioned ladies’ magazine.

The reality, however, was not even close to perfection.

As Qhuinn sat back in his chair, he took his coffee mug with him and set it on his stomach. Not a good idea, given what was doing in his guts. To make the elder Lyric happy, and pay respect to all her hard work, he’d sucked down four eggs, six pieces of French toast, three cups of coffee, and an orange juice. Oh, and three frozen After Eights.