Bound by Danger (The Alliance #6) - Brenda K. Davies Page 0,33
subject and distracting her from the morose future she faced.
“Why are you asking?”
Because I want to know more about you. Lucien held the words back, mostly because the inclination to spill them startled him more than a unicorn farting rainbows would have.
It was yet another strange thing she made him experience. He rarely cared about anyone else or their history. No, not rarely, he never cared. He didn’t even know the history of his brothers in the Alliance, and that was the way he liked it.
Their pasts were their pasts, and his past was his. They didn’t need to know intimate details about each other. They already knew the most important detail—no matter what happened, they had each other’s backs, and nothing would change that.
However, he wanted to know more about her. He already knew she loved animals, a huge bonus in his book. He didn’t have a soft spot for many things in his life, but animals were one of them.
He’d never admit it, but he was the one who had brought a couple of stray puppies into the compound and left them out for the hunter children to find. It was a win-win in his book. The strays found loving new homes, and the children laughed as they hugged their new pets close.
His brothers would be shocked to discover it was him, and he would make sure they never knew.
“I’m not tired anymore, and we have some time to kill, so I figured I would ask,” he said.
“Where are you from?”
“I was born in France.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Three hundred and twenty years.”
Callie whistled. “Wow.”
Lucien chuckled. “I’m a youngster compared to some.”
“Wow,” she breathed, unable to fully grasp the concept. He was a youngster who was alive when they founded the U.S. That was insane to her. “So, vampires are immortal?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re French.”
“Yes. I am Lucien Fontaine.”
“You don’t have an accent.”
“My parents left France shortly after my birth. They traveled around Europe for a while before settling in Germany. I stayed there until their deaths, and then I came to the New World, where I met Ronan. I’ve been here for almost three hundred years.”
Callie’s eyebrows rose as he casually said the term “New World” like she said coffee break. Who still considered the United States the New World? A three hundred and twenty-year-old vampire, she reminded herself.
She suppressed a hysterical trill of laughter as she realized she was sitting beside an ancient who’d seen so much of this world.
“Who’s Ronan?” she asked.
“He and Nathan are the leaders of the Alliance. Ronan is the one who found me and turned my anger at the world into something useful.”
Ronan had directed his hatred of everyone and everything toward the Savages, but Lucien decided to omit that. She was nervous enough around him without him telling her how badly he craved killing and maiming everything that crossed his path.
The only reason he’d managed to refrain from becoming a Savage before Ronan encountered him was that he’d vowed never to become like Yannis. He’d been walking a thin, fraying line by the time Ronan entered his life.
“I’ve worked with Ronan for two hundred years. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him.”
“What about Nathan? How long have you worked with him?”
He briefly told her about the hunters and vampires joining together. He kept the details scarce to protect the others, but he told her enough for her to understand more about the way his world worked and himself.
“Why were you so angry at the world when Ronan found you?” she asked when he finished.
“Why not? By then, I’d lost my family, and I was starting to lose myself. I had no one.”
Without thinking, she rested her hand over his on top of her knee. She knew what it was like to be alone in the world except for her friends. “I lost my family too. My mom died when I was six, and my dad passed away four years ago.”
“Losing your mom at six had to be difficult.”
“Not really. She was never a constant in my life, so I didn’t really know or rely on her.”
Still, even after all these years, there were times when she pondered what might have been. But that was useless, and she tried not to get lost in the sea of melancholy such ponderings could drown her in.
“When she got pregnant with me, both my parents were pretty hardcore partiers. However, they cleaned up their acts when she got the news. My dad managed to