Tall and athletic, Jenna wore her brown hair cropped close to her scalp. She was pretty, yet formidable in some indefinable way, and when she leaned across the sideboard to pour a cup of tea, Melena noticed an intricate pattern of skin markings at her nape. Skin markings that looked remarkably, impossibly, similar to...

“Are those tribal tattoos, or—”

“Not tattoos.” Jenna’s hazel eyes were smiling, but there was a note of seriousness in her voice. She turned to provide a better look. The array fanned out to cover the back of Jenna’s neck, disappearing beneath the collar of her shirt. The arcs and swirls tracked upward too, well into her hairline and up the back of her skull. From the looks of it, they continued down Jenna’s spine and onto her shoulders as well.

“They’re dermaglyphs.” Melena frowned, astonished and confused. Females born Breed had been unheard of for millennia. They might never have come into existence if not for the genetic experimentations conducted in Dragos’s labs in the decades before he was killed by the Order. Even then, there were only a handful of women known to bear the glyphs and blood appetites of the Breed.

Melena found herself staring harder now, watching Jenna pile her plate with a healthy assortment of sweets and sandwiches. “You can eat all of that?”

Jenna grinned. “I’ll probably come back for seconds.”

“I’m sorry,” Melena blurted, immediately feeling stupid and rude for letting her curiosity overrule her manners. “I just thought...”

“You thought I was Breed?” Jenna popped a tiny pastry in her mouth and gave a shake of her head. “Not quite. But I haven’t been fully human for a long time either. I guess as long as Brock loves me, it doesn’t matter where I end up. Together we can handle anything—and we have.”

Her two friends nodded in agreement, and Melena smiled even though the sentiment was bittersweet for her. She’d believed she and Lazaro were heading toward something special like that too. Her father’s death was still a raw ache in her heart, and would be for a very long time. The attack she’d narrowly survived still held her in a cold grasp. But Lazaro had helped her through.

He’d been her rock, her comfort, whether he wanted to accept that role or not. And ever since they’d left Rome, she felt that support slipping away. No, she felt pretty damned certain that he wasn’t slipping—he was running away. Cutting her off with his forbidding silence and maddening stoicism.

When she finally heard his deep voice approaching with Lucan and the others, Melena’s heart started pounding in a heavy, expectant tempo. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or terrified when he strode to the threshold of the drawing room and those penetrating dark blue eyes found her, locking on with the intensity that would probably always kindle an instant heat in her blood.

“Melena. May I have a word with you.” Not a question, not an invitation. A sober demand.

She rose and walked to meet him as the rest of the group fell into easy conversation behind them. Lazaro led her down the hall to another formal parlor. He carefully closed the door, keeping his back to her for longer than she would have liked.

Melena didn’t have to see his impassive face to know he was about to crush her heart when he finally turned around to look at her. His aura was a dark cloud, the shuttered gunmetal gray from before.

Before the first time he’d touched her, kissed her.

Before he’d shown her such incredible passion and tenderness when he made love to her. And when he bit her vein and took her blood into his body, into his soul.

All of those moments seemed to evaporate as she looked at him now. They became nothing under the regretful look in his ageless eyes.

But the moments they had weren’t nothing. He’d felt everything she had. He wanted her. He cared for her. He cared maybe even as much as she did for him. She could see that diamond-bright truth breaking through the muddy resistance of his aura.

Everything they’d shared in Rome had meant something powerful and extraordinary to him too. But it wasn’t enough.

“Why?” she murmured, her throat dry as ash.

He didn’t pretend not to understand. “I told you from the beginning, Melena. I wasn’t looking for this. I don’t have a place for this in my life.”

“For this,” she said. “You mean, for me. For us.”

He gave a somber nod. “For everything you deserve. For everything I can’t give you.”

“I don’t recall asking you for anything, Lazaro. I didn’t even ask for your heart.”

“No, but you have it,” he admitted quietly. “I think you owned a piece of my heart from the night I first dragged you out of that frozen pond in Boston.”

“Then why?” Damn him, but those gentle words hurt all the more when she knew she was about to lose him. “Why are you pulling away from me now? Why are you acting as if I don’t mean anything to you?”

He held her gaze, his own haunted and filled with remorse. “Because it isn’t fair to you, letting you think I could ever be any kind of mate worthy of you.”

She couldn’t help herself. She scoffed brittly. “A shame you didn’t arrive at that realization before you drank my blood.”

“I told you I wasn’t looking for a bond, Melena.” His tone was tender but firm. As resolute as his aura. “I knew I couldn’t give you that promise.”

“No. Because you prefer simple arrangements. No entanglements or complications. No one to tempt you into throwing away twenty years of resolve on a couple of days of passion. Isn’t that what you said?”