Kirill could only watch with impotent fury as Ra walked out of the room, knowing once again it’d been his words that sent the god away.
Chapter Seventeen
“You’ve got to snap out of it.” Arvyn desperately wanted to shake his mate until his teeth rattled, but Kirill was built like a mountain. “What were you thinking? You don’t go smashing things like a two-year-old throwing a tantrum.”
“What would you suggest I do then?” Kirill shrugged off his hand and Arvyn let him go, watching as Kirill went over and started picking up the bits of the cup he smashed. “You saw what I saw on those screens. How would you feel if that happened in your pack?”
Arvyn threw up his hands. “It wouldn’t happen in a pack because in a pack, shifters either work together or get the fuck out. We don’t have secrets from our pack members, one faction working against the common good. That would undermine the whole point of what a pack is about. But as to what I saw, I’m not angry. What’s the point of being angry? I hurt deep inside. My soul aches for those poor people, but I’m not throwing things around because of it.”
“I should’ve done something.” Kirill got up, glancing down at the smashed china in his hands. Then, looking around, he clearly couldn’t find a trash can and ended up putting the remains of the mug carefully in the corner of the wood box. “I’m angry, furious that all this went on under my nose and I didn’t have a hint that anything was wrong in the coven. People got hurt on my watch, some might have died, and it’s my responsibility.”
“Oh, my gods. Really? Well, fine. You sound pretty convinced to me. I suggest you turn yourself into the council then.” Arvyn sat on the couch, folding one of his legs underneath him and spreading his arm across the back of the couch. “If you’re that determined to be a martyr, then take full blame, tell the council you did it…”
“I didn’t do it.” Kirill’s fists were clenched as he came towards him, but Arvyn knew his vampire would never hurt him. “I would never do anything like that to another living being. I didn’t have anything to do with it, nothing at all. Everything we saw on those screens was all Yakov’s doing, him and that bastard Sven.”
Arvyn waited, letting his mate’s words hang in the air. It probably took a full minute, the tension between them stretching taut like a rubber band. But finally, Kirill’s hands relaxed, his shoulders slumped, and he rubbed his hand over his chin. “Oh, shit.”
“Oh, shit, is right.” Arvyn patted the space on the couch beside him. “More importantly, Ra was right. Come and sit down for a moment and explain to me why anger appears to be your go-to emotion for handling anything unpleasant, because I have to say, that could get tedious after a while.”
“It’s not as a rule – anger as a coping mechanism, I mean.” Wiping his hands on his pants, Kirill came around the coffee table and plunked down in the seat Arvyn indicated. “And I’m not making excuses either. It’s just… I just…”
Arvyn could feel the rigid tension in Kirill’s shoulder as he rested his hand there. “Are abused victims a trigger for you?” he asked quietly. “You said yourself, you’re very old, and historically shifters and vampires alike haven’t been overly fair in their treatment of humans.”
“There were shifters in that barn too, you know.”
That wasn’t something Arvyn was likely to forget in a hurry and the only reason Arvyn could stay so calm about it, was that he knew those poor shifters would get the very best of care now they’d been rescued. Of course, they were unlikely to ever go near another vampire again, but it wasn’t as though vampires were prolific and with time, counseling, and hopefully reuniting with some of their own kind, the affected shifters would get over their trauma.
Which wasn’t a discussion Arvyn wanted to have with Kirill, given he was a vampire, and their other mate Ra was sitting by himself in another room – or at least Arvyn hoped he was. Instead, he just nodded and hoped Kirill would explain.
“A vampire’s casual disregard for human life, and other paranormal beings, was one of the reasons why I started my own coven from a young age – well, young in vampire terms.” Kirill leaned against the