by Donya Lynne
Micah had Sam. He’d found his salvation. From the looks of it, his father hadn’t, despite having a second son. Part of him had assumed his father had taken another mate, but maybe he’d assumed wrong. Had his father taken another mate only to lose her, too? If so, it was a miracle his father was still alive.
Maybe he could cut his father some slack, because Micah knew better than anyone how irrational and insane a male vampire could be after losing his mate.
“No, Dad. You’re not a coward.” His father lifted his gaze and met Micah’s. Somewhere behind those eyes was the powerful male he’d all but worshipped as a child. “Only the bravest and most courageous male forces himself to live after losing a mate.”
His father said nothing in reply, just nodded in consideration, and then looked away again. Micah could almost feel the shame billowing out of him.
For several long, tragically silent moments, nothing was said. Micah wasn’t exactly sure where to go from here, and his dad seemed in no rush to say more. But wasn’t that how Micah had been during his own suffering? Silent, brooding, secretive?
Rebellious?
Micah shifted uneasily and forced back his own remorse as he glanced down at his brother.
Ronan wouldn’t be here today if his father had died. It still felt odd to think he had a brother when he’d spent his entire life believing he was an only child. And if his father had let himself die, that’s exactly what Micah would have been. An only child.
As angry as he was at his dad for keeping his survival a secret, he was grateful to learn he had family. A dysfunctional family, but that was better than no family at all.
Ronan had the same black hair as he and his father. The same strong jaw and angular eyes. He even had the same full lips. The only feature of Ronan’s that hadn’t come from the Black bloodline was his eye color. Slate blue. Otherwise, the three of them could pass for brothers, not a father and two sons born from different mothers.
“Who is Ronan’s mother?” Micah kept his gaze on his brother, finally seeing him for the first time. Really seeing him.
When his father didn’t answer, Micah turned away from Ronan, frowning when he saw that his dad wore a vacant expression, his eyes watery and glazed over.
“Dad?”
He blinked and looked at Micah. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Ronan’s mother? Who was she?”
His father looked around as if he’d forgotten where he was. He blinked a few more times and scrubbed his palms up and down his face as he cleared his throat. “Ronan’s mother?” He dropped his hands to his sides and looked at Micah as if he hadn’t understood the question.
“Yes. Is she human? Vampire?”
“Oh, uh . . .” He cleared his throat again and paced to the opposite side of Ronan’s bed, where he placed his hands on the rail as if he needed the support. “She was a vampire. A full-blood.”
“Where is she?”
His father shrugged and glanced casually toward the door. “I assume she’s with her mate.”
Micah’s brain slammed on the brakes. “Whoa, wait. What?” He raised his hand, palm out.
His dad shoved himself away from Ronan’s bed. “She wasn’t my mate, isn’t my mate, and will never be my mate.”
“Are you saying you never had a calling with her?”
Creating a child without a calling was like trying to find your way through a maze wearing a blindfold and soundproof headphones. You might eventually find your way out, but it would be a whole lot easier to find your way if you could see and hear.
And didn’t the aristocrats who were in arranged matings experience their own share of miracles when it came to bearing young? It was rare without a calling, but once in a while, a young was conceived.
Looked like he and his father at least had that in common. They’d both found their way through the procreation labyrinth despite their handicaps.
“Are you sure you want to talk about this, Micah? I know what happened with Kat. I know—”
Micah cut him off. “Just answer my question. Did you have a calling with Ronan’s mother or not?” He didn’t want to talk about Kat or how he’d been unable to produce young with her. He was with Sam now, and she was carrying his children. That was where his heart was. As much as he’d loved Kat, she was in his past. He would always love her, and he would have loved having a child with her so a part of her could have lived on, but that’s not how things worked out. No sense dwelling.
His father frowned in the way Micah remembered him doing when he was frustrated. “No, I didn’t.”
What was with the short, clipped response? Micah couldn’t tell if his father was angry, resentful, uncomfortable, or just filled with regret over giving that part of himself to a female who wasn’t Micah’s mother. Or maybe his father had been whoring himself after Mom’s death? Sleeping indiscriminately with any female willing to spread her legs. Had Ronan’s mother been just one of many one-night fucks? If so, it was no wonder he was so angry.
“Who was she to you if she wasn’t your mate?” Micah couldn’t hold back the accusatory bite in his voice.
“Look, Micah, after your mother died, I was fucked up.” His father tossed a perturbed frown at him. “You of all people should know what that’s like. You lost Kat. You suffered. I know you did.” His gaze fell to the floor. “I suffered, too. Bad. So how about you ease up on the attitude.”
“Fine, whatever.” Micah paced to the side and grabbed a bottle of water from a shelf. He twisted off the cap just so he could expend a fraction of the nervous energy curdling under his skin.
He didn’t like the idea of his father with another female, especially if she meant nothing to him. That disgraced his mother’s memory more than if his father’s relationship with Ronan’s mom had been pure.
Or maybe hearing his father talk about his mother’s death and how it affected him was too strong of a reminder of how bad his own suffering had been after Kat’s death. A suffering that had lasted until he met Sam.
No male wanted to remember such depraved sorrow. The kind that splits your soul into two halves. One half that hurt beyond description because it remembered how good life used to be, and one half that felt like acid because all it wanted was to die, die, die . . . please let me die.
There was nothing good in the suffering. The only hope came from remembering how good life used to be, but sometimes that wasn’t enough to prevent a male from letting death take him. Consequently, it wasn’t unusual for a male in suffering to die.
His father retreated to the far wall then turned to face him. “I was in a bad place, Micah. I was ravaged by guilt. I didn’t understand why I lived when your mother died. I was ashamed because I didn’t die with her. I tried to make sense of her death and my survival, but I couldn’t.” He paced across the room, rubbing his hands together as if his own nervous energy was getting the better of him. “Then again, there’s no making sense of death . . . why it takes one person and leaves another to suffer the loss. All you can do is accept it and move on, but for us, accepting death isn’t so easy, is it?” He turned his navy blue eyes on Micah, and a sense of knowing shone from their depths. Wherever his father had been for the past nine hundred years, he’d seen a lot of darkness and lived through a lot of hell. Was probably still living through it.
Micah shook his head, knowing exactly where his dad was coming from. “No, it’s not.”
The ghost of suffering a male endured after losing a mate was like adhesive residue left behind on the bottom of a vase after the price tag was removed. It still coated a part of your soul, even though it no longer hurt and could no longer be seen. But just knowing it was there was enough to strike fear in a male’s heart, because no male who had experienced suffering wanted to go through that kind of pain again.
Which was why Micah would sacrifice his own life to save Sam’s if it ever came to that. He wouldn’t want to go on living if he lost her.
His father returned to the far wall and placed his hand on
the back of a cushioned chair. His head was bowed, and his short, thick hair was mussed as if he’d run his hands through it a few hundred times in the last six hours. His other hand clenched into a fist as if he were reining himself in so he didn’t explode.
For several seconds, he didn’t speak. Then he took a deep breath and blew it out. “I still haven’t accepted your mother’s death, Micah. I’m not sure I ever will. But I’ve come to terms with it.” He turned around. “Savannah helped me do at least that much.”
“Savannah?”
“Ronan’s mother.” A tremulous but gentle smile turned up the corners of his father’s mouth. “He got the grey in his eyes from her.”
“And he got the blue from you?”
His father nodded. “Yes, but he got so much more from me than just the blue in his eyes. My fire. My passion. My rebellious nature.” His gaze traveled proudly to Ronan’s still form. “My stubbornness.”
The qualities his father had just ticked off were all qualities Micah saw in himself, as well. He was beginning to understand why he and Ronan butted heads as easily as they did. They probably always would. They were similar creatures, and when like faced like, one was bound to rub the other the wrong way.
His father’s smile broadened as his shoulders squared. “Ronan is his father’s son, I’ll give him that. Even if my own fire and passion are gone.”
“It’s not gone, Dad.”
His father looked up at him as if surprised by Micah’s gentle tone. “It feels gone.”
Micah shook his head. “No. Only dimmed. It’s there, and someday, when the time is right, it will flame back to life, and you’ll be your old self again. You’ll be the hero I always saw in you as a kid. The hero I wanted to be when I grew up.”
A beat of silence passed between them as Micah’s words sank in.
“I’ve failed him.” His father glanced at Ronan. “I’ve failed you both.”
“You didn’t fail me, Dad,” Micah said. “I turned out all right.”
“You have, but what of Ronan.” His father’s sad eyes swept up Ronan’s motionless form. “I haven’t been the kind of parent Ronan needed. He needed the hero I was for you, but I couldn’t be that for him. I couldn’t even be my own hero, so how could I be his?” He sighed then turned his gaze to Micah’s. “And I allowed you to think I was dead. That’s not very heroic or courageous, is it?”
“Yeah, well . . .” Micah was still angry about that, but not as angry as he had been a few hours ago. “I’ll get over it. And, you’ll see, Ronan will eventually get over it, too.”
They stood in silence for a while, watching Ronan as he slept. Okay, so it was more like he was passed out cold from heavy meds.
“Why didn’t his mother raise him?” Micah asked.
His father shrugged as if in surrender. “Another male mated her after Ronan was born. I met her about fifty years ago, in the late 1960s. She was a full-blood vampire living in Louisiana at the time. There’s a pretty large vampire community in Louisiana, and for a while, those I was traveling with took up residency there.” He scrubbed his hand over his face. “I’ll be honest, Micah. I was extremely messed up until I met Savannah. The people who were taking care of me often had to take turns guarding me to ensure I didn’t try to kill myself or do something equally stupid. I was kept in an induced coma more often than not, but when I was awake, I was more like a ghost than a living being. When I was lucid, they had to force me to eat. Sometimes they even had to force me to feed. Most of the time, I held little regard for my own survival, and I struggled with taking blood from someone who wasn’t your mother. But they forced me. Their will to keep me alive was stronger than my own. I’m grateful for their protection and efforts now, but at the time, I was a fucked-up mess. That’s why I never came to find you. Most of the time, I could barely think about anything beyond surviving through the next minute.”
Bad memories of Micah’s own trip through the wastelands of suffering popped into his mind again, and he took an aggressive gulp of water to force down the lump in his throat.
“At any rate,” his father continued, “I met Savannah, and suddenly the world wasn’t such a dark place. She was the proverbial breath of fresh air so many people speak of, and I quickly became addicted to her smile and her laughter. We began spending time together, and we fell in love. I didn’t mate her, but I definitely loved her.
“A few years later, we were surprised to discover she was pregnant. I hadn’t experienced a calling, so this came as a shock to us both. A welcome one, but still a surprise. Then Ronan was born, and things were great for a while. I was actually happy again. I hadn’t been happy in such long time that it felt a little strange, but then I got used to it, and life began to feel normal. Then the worst thing that could’ve happened did.” He frowned then sadly bowed his head. “Another male mated her. Ronan was still just a little boy, and his mother was taken from him.”
The way his father scowled and bit out his words made the reason for Ronan’s paternal upbringing clearer.
Sometimes when a vampire mated a female who already had children with another male, he rejected the children and forbade his mate from bringing them into their union. This meant the father of the young usually had to become a single parent, or, if the father was already dead, the young was sent to an orphanage, while the mother was whisked away to begin a new life and family with her mate.
In Micah’s opinion, such situations were ten levels of cruel and fucked up. He would never force a mother to abandon her children on his account, and neither would his father, but it was obvious by the disgruntled expression on his father’s face that Savannah’s mate clearly hadn’t shared their opinion.
“He should have been raised by his mother,” his father said of Ronan. “She would have done a much better job than I, but that’s not the way it was meant to be. So I took Ronan and started a new life with him. By then, with Savannah’s help, I was no longer a threat to myself, and Ronan gave me purpose, but getting through the days was still hard. The first year was the hardest. The people looking after me stayed away, though. They were never far, and there were times I feared they would take Ronan away from me, because sometimes I struggled just to get out of bed, but they never took him. They kept their distance, letting me find my own way back, but by then, I’d already fucked up Ronan’s life so badly we hardly had any kind of relationship.
“I struggled to provide the emotional support he needed, because there was still a part of me that was suffering, too, no matter how small that part was. And maybe I bragged about you too much when he and I had disagreements.” His brow furrowed as he bowed his head almost shamefully. “Maybe I talked about you and glorified you too much . . . told him how much I missed you . . . how you were the perfect son any father would be proud to call his own.”
Micah swallowed past the lump that formed in his throat, understanding not just the source of Ronan’s resentment, but also how deeply his father’s love ran. “If you missed me so much, why didn’t you ever come and find me?”
“Like I said, I was lucky just to get through the days, Micah. Until I found Savannah, I hardly knew day from night. I honestly didn’t even consider it. That’s how ravenous my pain and suffering were. Anguish ate at me every day. The weeks blurred into months, and those blurred into years. To be honest, I was shocked to learn how much time had passed when Savannah brought me out of my living corpse.”
Irrational anger began to rise inside Micah’s heart again, fed more by the latent grief he’d suppressed for centuries than his outrage at being kept in the dark all this time. “But what about then, Dad? What about after you met Savannah? After you came back into yourself and were no longer caught inside suffering’s grasp? Why didn’t you come and find me and tell me you were alive then?”
His father’s face twisted into an expression of apologetic misery. “I couldn’t.”
Micah took a step back. His annoyance, fury, heartache, and sorrow bubbled up inside him like he was a b
oiling pot over a fire pit. “Couldn’t? You couldn’t? Do you know how much I suffered, Dad? Did you know what I was going through?”
The guilt that shone back at him when his father lifted his face was all the answer Micah needed.
“You knew. You knew how close to death I was and how important it could have been for me to know you were still alive. And yet you felt no compulsion whatsoever to contact me? To tell me you were alive and that I had a brother?”
“That’s not what I said.” His father stepped around the bed toward him, but Micah didn’t want anywhere near him right now and stormed to the other side of the room. His father blew out an exasperated exhale. “Don’t put words in my mouth, Micah. I never said I felt no compulsion to contact you. I wanted to contact you every single goddamn day.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
His jaw clenched. “Because I couldn’t,” he said again.
“What the fuck does that mean? You couldn’t? What? Was someone forcing you not to see me?”
His father’s scowl deepened, but so did the air of guilt hanging over him.
Micah reared back as it dawned on him that it hadn’t been his father’s choice. Someone else had kept him from reaching out.
“That’s it, isn’t it? You let someone force you not to come to me?”
Who would do such a thing?
His father held up his hands in a calm-down gesture. “Not exactly.”
“Then what? What aren’t you telling me?”
“I wasn’t forced to stay away, son, but I was told I shouldn’t see you. I was told it could put us all in danger.”
“Us? All? Who are you talking about?” He marched left then right, feeling caged in. He needed to escape before life as he knew it changed yet again, because he got the feeling his father was about to blow his mind for about the hundredth time tonight. That whatever his father was hiding would rock him to the core.
His dad tracked him, drawing closer, hands held up almost pleadingly. “Micah, this is a lot bigger than just you and me. There’s a lot you don’t know. Things about our family. Things I never got the chance to tell you. Things that could get a lot of people hurt or killed.”
