Lover Reborn (Black Dagger Brotherhood #10) - J. R. Ward Page 0,21

to be in their mid- to late twenties until just before they died. And that was not the only change in him. He was suffering from a persistent weight loss—no matter how much he ate at the table, he did not carry enough flesh on his bones, his face marked with hollowed cheekbones and a too-sharp jaw, his sunken eyes smudged with shadows above and below them.

His physical infirmity, whatever it was, hadn’t stopped him from fighting, however. He hadn’t changed before the meal, and his damp clothes were stained with red blood and black oil, visceral reminders of how all the males spent their nights.

He had washed his hands, however.

Where was his mate? she wondered. She had seen no evidence of a shellan—perhaps he had remained unattached all these years? Surely if he had a female, she would be here to support him.

Ducking her head further under her hood, she placed her fork and knife to the side of her plate. She had no more appetite for food.

Nor was she hungry for echoes from the past. The latter, however, was nothing she could politely refuse.…

Tohrment had been as young as she when they had spent all those months together in that fortified cabin in the Old Country, taking refuge against the cold of the winter, the wet of the spring, the heat of the summer, and the drafts of the autumn. They had had four seasons of watching her belly swell with life, a complete calendar cycle in which he and his mentor, Darius, had fed, sheltered, and cared for her.

It was not how her first pregnancy should have gone. It was not how a female of her background should have lived. It was not anything that the fate she had intended for herself would have e’er provided.

Arrogant of her to have assumed anything, however. And there had been, and still was, no going back. From the moment she had been captured and ripped away from her family, she had been forever altered sure as if acid had been splashed upon her face, or her body had been burned beyond recognition, or she had lost limbs or eyesight or hearing.

But that was not the worst of it. Bad enough that she had been tainted at all, but that it had been by a symphath? And that the stress had triggered her first needing?

She had spent those four long seasons under that thatched roof aware that there was a monster growing inside of her. Indeed, she would have lost her social station if it had been a vampire who had abducted her and cheated her family of the most valuable thing about her: her virginity. Previous to her abduction, as the daughter of the Council’s leahdyre, she had been a highly valuable commodity, the kind of thing that was sequestered and brought out for admiring at special occasions like a fine jewel.

In fact, her father had been making arrangements for her mating to someone who would have provided her with a lifestyle even higher than that to which she had been born.…

With terrible clarity, she recalled that she had been tending to her hair when the soft clicking sound from the French door had registered.

She had put the brush down on her makeup table.

And then the latch had been released by someone other than herself.…

In quiet moments since then, she sometimes imagined that she had gone down to her subterranean quarters with her family that night. She hadn’t been feeling well—the precursor, likely, to her needing period—and had stayed upstairs because there was more to distract her from her restlessness up above.

Yes … she pretended sometimes that she had followed them down into the basement and, once there, had finally told her father about the strange figure that often appeared outside of her bedroom on the terrace.

She would have saved herself.

Saved the warrior across from her this anger of his…

She had used Tohrment’s dagger. Right after the birth, she had snapped and taken the weapon from him. Unable to bear the reality of what she had brought into the world, incapable of drawing one more breath in the destiny she had been condemned to, she had turned the blade upon her own stomach.

The last thing she had heard before the light had claimed her was him screaming—

The screech of his chair getting shoved back made her jump, and everyone at the table went silent, all eating halting, all movement ceasing, all conversation cutting off as he prowled out of the