His confession surprised her. "What made him do that?"
His grip on her tightened. "The downfall of all men, I'm afraid... Love. My mother was a captured Christian slave who had been given to him by his father after one of their raids. She beguiled him, and in the end she tamed him and turned a once-proud warrior into a docile farmer who refused to lift his sword lest he offend his newfound God."
She could hear the raw emotions in his voice. The contempt he felt for anyone who would choose peace over war. "You disagreed with his choice?"
"Aye, what good is a man who cannot protect himself and those he loves?" His eyes turned dark, deadly. The rage inside them made her shiver. "When the Jutes came to our village to loot and take slaves, I am told he held his hands out and let them run him through. Everyone who survived mocked him for his cowardice. He who had once made his enemies quake in terror at the mention of his name died at the slaughter like a defenseless calf. I have never understood how he could just stand there and take a killing blow without trying to defend himself."
She reached up to smooth his brow with her fingers as his pain reached out to her. But it wasn't hatred or condescension she heard in his voice. It was guilt. "I'm so sorry."
"As was I," he whispered, his eyes turning even stormier. "It wasn't bad enough that I left him there to die, but I took my brother as well. There was no one there to protect him in our absence."
"Where were you?"
He dropped his gaze to the floor, but still she could see his self-recrimination. He wanted to go back and change that moment, just as she wished she could take back the night the Spathi Daimons had killed her mother and sisters.
"I had left the summer before in search of war and riches." He released her and looked about his modest home. "After word of his death reached me, riches no longer seemed important to me. Disagreements aside, I should have been there with him."
She touched his bare arm. "You must have loved your father greatly."
He let out a tired breath. "At times. At others I hated him. Hated him for not being the man he should have been. His father was a respected jarl and yet we lived like starving beggars. Mocked and spat upon by our own kin. My mother took pride in the insults, saying it was God's will that we suffer. It was somehow making us better people, but I never believed her. My father's blind devotion to her beliefs only angered me more. We fought, he and I, constantly. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps and to take their abuse and say nothing."
The torment in his eyes touched her even more than the gentleness of his hand on hers. "He wanted me to be something I wasn't. But I couldn't turn the other cheek. 'Twas never in my nature to not answer insult with insult. Blow with blow."
He turned and looked at her with a scowl. "Why am I telling you this?"
Cassandra thought about it for a second. "The dream, I'm sure. It's probably on your mind." Though why it would be in her dream, she couldn't imagine.
In fact, this dream was getting odder by the minute and she couldn't figure out why her subconscious would come here.
Why was she conjuring up this fantasy about her mysterious Dark-Hunter... ?
He nodded. "Aye, no doubt. I fear I am doing to Christopher what was once done to me. I should let him live his life as his own and not interfere with his choices so often."
"Why can't you?"
"Honestly?"
She smiled. "I certainly prefer honesty to lies."
He gave a light laugh, then his face turned brooding again. "I don't want to lose him too." His voice was so deep and aching that it made her heart clench. "And yet I know I have no choice except to lose him."
"Why?"
"Everyone dies, my lady. At least in the mortal realm. Yet I go on as everyone around me perishes over and over again." He lifted his gaze to hers. The agony on his face reached deep inside her. "Have you any idea what it is like to hold a loved one in your arms while they die?"
Cassandra's chest drew tight as she thought of her mother's and sisters' deaths. She had wanted to go to them after the explosion, but her bodyguard had pulled her away while she howled in grief for their loss.
"It's too late to help them, Cassie. We have to run."
Her soul had screamed that day.
Sometimes it screamed even now at the injustice of her life.
"Yes, I do," she whispered. "I, too, have seen everyone I love die. My father is all I have left."
His gaze sharpened. "Then imagine doing it thousands of times, century after century. Imagine watching them be born, live, and then die while you carry on and start over with each new generation. Every time I see a member of my family die, it is like watching my brother Erik die all over again. And Chris..." He winced as if the very mention of Chris's name caused him pain. "He is my brother made over in face and form." One corner of his mouth lifted in wry amusement. "And mouth as well as temperament. Of all the family I have lost, his death will be the hardest to bear, I think."
She saw the vulnerability in his eyes and it affected her deeply that this fierce man would have so human a fault. "He's still young. His whole life is ahead of him."