frown.
Niall blew out a breath. “Would it not be kinder tae let the girl just be what she is? She’s comfortable there. Another lass, being buggered by two total strangers would have terrified her. Instead, she’s hungry for touch, to serve. It’s all she knows.”
“While having our own female sex slave is lovely for us, I’ve more interest in what’s good for her.”
Niall bristled. “Or perhaps she’s a blank canvas, and ye want to see what kind of painting she could be. The fact that she’s not long for this life makes it more intriguing. She’s like a rainbow, or an eclipse. Too bloody ephemeral.”
Over near three centuries, he’d learned to either accept certain things about the vampire world, or go mad. But this . . . it made him exceptionally mad.
“Ephemeral? That well-educated mind you go to such effort to hide is showing.”
Niall made sure his next thought was a properly uneducated response. Evan’s lips thinned, telling Niall he was pushing it, but he returned his gaze to the canvas. Studied it. “Say you’ve always lived inside the walls of a prison, Niall, and you discover you only have one more day to live. Wouldn’t you want to step outside, see the sky, lie on the grass? Touch, taste, feel . . . everything.”
“She doesn’t know she’s in a prison.”
“Those tears earlier say her heart knows. We can be the key to open the door.”
“And if we do open it? What have we done to her, Evan? She’s not likely to survive this, and then she follows him into the afterlife, his slave for eternity.”
“I don’t believe that nonsense.”
“I didnae believe in vampires, either,” Niall fired back. “But how about this, then? Say by some miracle, they capture him alive and sever the link. She’ll be reassigned, because they only give InhServs to made vampires who are fancy overlords or ambitious bastards willing tae trample everything in their way.”
“I’m flattered you don’t put me in that category, even though I think you simply chose not to call me an aimless ne’er-do-well outright.”
“Since I’m using my big, impressive words, how do you feel about dilettante? It seems to fit.”
Okay, so maybe this conversation was starting to jab to life things best left undisturbed.
When Evan closed the distance between them, Niall held his ground, even as the vampire brought all that intensity up close and personal. There was a certain line he didn’t cross with Evan, not often. Unless pushed.
“If you have something poisonous in your gut, neshama, spit it out.” Evan’s gray eyes were locked on his like a hawk’s.
“You take a bird who’s always been in a cage and show her what it is to fly. Then ye put her back in the cage and say that’s the end o’ it. There’s nothing crueler than that. She’d be better off dead.”
“She likely is going to be dead, Niall. Very shortly.”
And that was the crux of it, wasn’t it? She didn’t deserve that fate. One would think he was past railing about what was fair in this world. Yet something old and deep stirred in his gut, something he didn’t want to rouse. The scope and depth of what a man could accept were amazing, but the ability was dependent on him burying certain things deep.
“Ah, hell with it. You’re the vampire. You’ll do what ye bloody want.” He turned away. It’s all a prison, anyway, isn’t it?
Evan was so close, he felt the brush of the vampire’s hand when he turned. Niall tensed for an attack, or even something different, but then the hand was gone.
A glance over his shoulder showed Evan in front of the painting again, staring at it. His back to Niall.
Bloody, fucking hell. He hadn’t meant . . . Niall clenched his fist on the ladder. When it creaked in protest, he reined back his strength. He didn’t want to spend tomorrow rebuilding it. “I hate what’s been done to her. I hate how she was hurt. I hate how she thinks it’s her fault.”
You hate bloody vampires.
“No. Not all of them.” He paused, knowing he’d been dismissed, but still waiting for . . . he wasn’t sure what. Evan said nothing. After a muttered oath, Niall forced himself into motion, heading for the kitchen level.
Fuck, that was a bloody cock-up. After three hundred years, he fucking knew better. Maybe he wasn’t so different from Alanna. Staying in the boundaries was safer, more comfortable. But whereas she’d been born in captivity, so to speak, he’d