At this point, it felt like I was dancing on hot coals, trying to figure out how to get through to a man I’d never met, going solely by the instincts I had developed while dealing with my brother.

He returned to my side and bent down, his knees jutting out and almost knocking my shoulder. Amaya followed him, continuing to provide shade.

His sharp blue eyes fixed on mine, and I held his gaze, unflinching.

“A family reunion would have been welcome, actually,” he said, in a softer voice than I had expected from him. A voice that didn’t quite match up with the harshness of his gaze. A voice that even quivered, ever so slightly. Perhaps he was not as closed off from emotion as he made himself out to be.

“In fact,” he continued, clearing his throat, “it’s what I had been hoping for the day I discovered that I was not the first Novak to be turned into a bloodsucker.” His jaw twitched. “I suppose you can imagine my disappointment when I discovered that my father had been murdered by a member of my own extended family.”

“You never met your father,” I stated, knowing it for a fact. I was sure that Lucas himself had been oblivious to fathering Jeramiah, and I even found myself wondering whether this young man had been the only child born from one of Lucas’s many old flames. “And you were not present the day he died,” I continued. “Do you know why he was killed? Do you know even the slightest thing about the circumstances of his death? Or anything about who he was during his life?”

To my surprise, a small smile curved Jeramiah’s lips. Not one of amusement, but one of bitterness.

“I know more about my father than you ever bothered to find out,” he said, his voice dropping to a low hiss.

A pain stabbed my chest as Sofia and Aiden’s groans intensified. I didn’t know where all this talking would lead, or how much longer Jeramiah would stand being distracted from what he was planning to do with us, but right now, keeping him in conversation was the only thing that I could think to do.

“Why don’t you enlighten me then?” I said, a part of me genuinely curious as to what conception—or rather misconception—this vampire had formed about my brother.

“It’s a bit late for that now, don’t you think?” he replied. My gut twisted as he stood up. I had been hoping to keep him kneeling down on the ground, away from my wife and father-in-law.

“Jeramiah,” Sofia breathed out, even as her face continued to contort with pain. She would’ve been writhing around by now had she had control of her limbs. “Lucas Novak was a disturbed man.”

To put it politely… I thought.

“We never set out to make an enemy out of him. Since the day I arrived in The Shade, he had it in for me. He murdered an innocent girl who was staying in Derek’s quarters—she was only one of his helpless victims—and he would’ve done the same to me. We never wanted to isolate or cause harm to him. He did both of these things to himself. He was blinded by envy of Derek and—”

“Silence!” Jeramiah’s demeanor had turned to ice. Every part of his body was rigid, and his breathing had become uneven, his chest and shoulders heaving.

Sofia had overstepped the mark in what he was willing to hear about his father, it seemed. Whatever picture Jeramiah had painted for himself about my brother’s character, it was obviously filled with rainbows and unicorns. And he wasn’t willing to shatter his illusion.

As I gazed up into his face, now contorted with anger, it was clear that there were many layers to this man, one of which was instability. And for that, I couldn’t blame him. From what Ben had told me of his childhood, it had been traumatic, no doubt. He’d never met his father, not even once—Lucas had turned from human to vampire soon after Jeramiah’s conception, and then he’d been long gone. And then Jeramiah had lost his mother when he was very young, and I couldn’t imagine that his life with his grandparents had been a satisfying one, since he’d left them at such a young age to go traipsing halfway across the globe.

I guessed that my nephew had never truly felt firm ground beneath his feet. He’d never had a figurehead, or a role model.

Or perhaps he had… in his father.

Perhaps he had taken refuge in his father, and that was why he clung so tightly to his rosy vision of him, however misguided it was.

The irony was, if he weren’t so bent against us, I would have invited him into our family, perhaps even treated him as though he were my own son. Since I’d first found out about Jeramiah’s existence from Ben, I’d known that I never wanted to make an enemy out of him. I’d known that if I ever got the chance to meet him, I would try to hold no prejudices against him. Because I’d never been happy with the relationship—or rather lack of it—that I’d had with my brother. Jeramiah was my own flesh and blood, and he would have been welcomed onto our island. Perhaps he didn’t know it—and perhaps he didn’t care—but by accosting us like this, he was cutting his nose off to spite his face.

As I stared up into his angry eyes, the small amount of hope I’d held that I might still be able to turn him around and make him see sense evaporated. He didn’t want the truth. He wanted anything but the truth. And if he wasn’t willing to even hear us out, there was nothing we could do to try to cobble together a relationship.

Sofia and I could have gone on, kept talking, forced him to listen to what had actually happened, but it was clear that it would only aggravate him further, and I doubted we would be any better off for it.