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“You told him to stop. And no one intervened.”

I recalled the way I’d looked at Slyne, desperate. The way she’d looked back, confident that things were exactly as they should be. “He was their leader.”

“And they’re dead for following him blindly,” Raphael replied.

They were. Bloody, bloody deaths. I’d seen him kill before. Nelson, the guards, Tom. But those had been quick, clean kills. What happened in the Monastery was a slaughter.

Would I be a traitor if I didn’t mourn their deaths?

“Is that why you took us an hour from Apante?”

“I thought it wise for us to not be around in case questions were asked,” Raphael agreed. “Not that anything they would do could truly threaten me, but in your condition…”

Weak.

“How did you hear me? I thought you were leaving for the marshes.”

“I decided to remain in the city for a little longer. Vampire’s prerogative.” There was a casualness to the words that rang false to my ear, but I was too weary to interrogate it. Raphael closed the lid of the salve and began to wrap my back once more.

“Why?”

Why did you save me? Why bother? Why are you angry on my behalf? I’m a human. I mean nothing to you.

I don’t mean anything to anyone. Not anymore.

“I suppose because I wanted to,” he said with utter nonchalance, the bed shifting as he rose and walked to the door.

A whim. That’s all my life was for him.

Any further questions were cut off as my stomach let out a loud groan. Raphael’s head tilted at the sound. I flushed. Of course I was hungry. I’d slept for three days. Familiar pangs pierced me. How quickly I’d forgotten the sensation after traveling with the vampire for a time.

“I’ll address that,” he said, leaving the room before I could respond.

In the distance, I heard a series of clangs, curses, and eventually footsteps when he returned maybe half an hour later, carrying a plate.

A vampire is actually serving me a meal. Maybe I really was dead.

He placed the plate in front of me.

I looked at it.

Then I looked up at him, in horror.

“All that effort to save me and you’re going to poison me?”

“Only cowards resort to poison,” Raphael groused.

“Then what do you call this?”

The plate held a horrific mix of foods—berries, meats, beans, and at least two bones—bound together by something that might have started as eggs but was now closer to charcoal.

“I call itfood. Now eat, Samara. Your body’s healing relies on you using that mouth to masticate, not argue.”

I gave the mound of “food” an experimental shove with a fork. “Don’t vampires start out as humans, or is that just a myth?”

Raphael sank into the chair next to me. For the first time, his gaze seemed deliberately pointed away from me. His cheeks were just a touch brighter than I was accustomed to seeing on the pale vampire. “You go six hundred years without cooking and show me how good you are.”

Six hundred years. But still… he’d done it. For me.