was to keep you safe." A sob worked its way up her throat. "Why?" she murmured. "Why are you showing me all of this tenderness now, Andre? Why not then?" He swore softly. "To keep you safe, I had to let you go." She shook her head, unwilling to accept that excuse, but he softly caught her chin. The pad of his thumb was a whisper of contact as he brushed it across her lips. "I left because of what I had become. You've seen it now--the fire that lives inside me. I was horrified when I thought of what it could do to those I loved. Like you, Claire. Christ... especially you."
She swallowed with a dry throat. "Why didn't you tell me all of this at the time? We could have worked through it--" "No," he said. "There was no working through it, not then. It exploded out of me without any warning. I lived most of my life never knowing what my fury could do. Once it got loose the first time, it owned me. I left Germany because it was the only thing I could do. It took the better part of a year for me to finally bring the fires to heel. By the time I returned, you were already with Roth." Claire listened, struggling to put all the pieces in place in her mind. "So, all your life, you never knew anything about your pyrokinetic ability?" "Not until the last night I saw you." "We argued," she said, remembering their parting words. They'd been out most of the evening in Hamburg, enjoying each other's company as they had for the handful of months they'd been together. But then she'd become jealous when another woman started flirting with him. Andreas had always been a magnet for female company, with his good looks and easy charisma, but he swore to her that he was interested only in her. Claire hadn't believed him. She told him she wanted proof--a commitment that his love was true.
When he hesitated, she had become upset and scared that he didn't really love her. She called him selfish, irresponsible. Unkind things. She'd been unreasonable and she knew it, even then. "I regretted my words the minute I said them," she told him now, an apology some decades too late. "I was young and stupid, and I was unfairly harsh with you, Andreas." He shrugged. "And I was a pigheaded fool who should have known better. Instead, I had been all too eager to prove you right. After I left you at Roth's Darkhaven, I went into the city looking for a fight. I found a few, actually, and after I had sufficiently bloodied my knuckles and used my face to crack a few others, I found myself in a rundown hotel in the company of two intoxicated women I brought with me from a bar along the way." Claire's disappointment to hear this now was couched by her concern for what had apparently happened to him next. "At some point, there was a knock on the door. Another woman. I let her in, and because I was ... distracted by my own idiocy, I didn't realize she had a knife in her hand until she'd sliced it across my throat." Claire winced, her heart twisting at the thought. "What did you do?" "I bled," he answered simply. "I bled so much, I thought I would die from it.
I nearly did, in fact. I was too weak to struggle when a group of Breed males came into the room and carried me to a truck in the alley outside. They chained me and dumped me in a remote farmer's field to bleed out and then fry to dust with the sunrise." "Oh, my God. Andre... I saw that field, didn't I? You showed it to me in your dream yesterday." His answering look was a grim confirmation. "Sometime between that awful hour and daybreak, I felt an unnatural heat beginning to burn inside me. It kept growing, until my entire body was bathed in blistering energy. And then it exploded out of me. I don't recall everything--that's one of the least unpleasant aftereffects, as I would learn. The fires burned from within me, but my skin didn't ignite. By the time dawn started to rise, the chains had melted away. I tried to scramble for some shade, but I was weak from blood loss. I didn't see the young girl until she was standing