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Dominique’s stomach turned over in slow-motion. He found a chair that allowed the scabbards to hang to either side of him.

Jackson sat, facing him. Behind him, Vancouver glittered with a sinister new energy. Lightning flickered beyond the high-rises.

“Three men came this morning, posing as hotel maintenance workers. They were obviously looking for you. When they couldn’t find you, they tried to take Cassidy and your mother instead. The men were compelled and not all that clever, just brutes, but they had tools. One of them used a screwdriver as a weapon when Cassidy tackled him.”

Tackled him? Dominique almost didn’t hear the rest of Jackson’s words, too caught up in the disjointed memories shooting out of him like strobe lights. Francesca screaming, hysterical. Pain throbbing in Jackson’s head. Anger that the blood Dominique had given him had spent itself, giving him no advantage. Rage that he had been caught off-guard. Fear that he would fail to keep them safe.

And Cassidy…Cassidy clinging to the back of a dead-eyed man, shrieking with fear-fueled anger.

“What?” Dominique said.

“I said she was so hopped up on adrenaline, she didn’t even know she got stabbed.”

An image of Cassidy on the ground, fighting for air, terror in her eyes, going flour-pale while protruding from her abdomen…

All of Dominique’s blood seemed to leave his extremities at once. Jackson remained silent, rubbing his fingertips together, waiting.

“What else?”

“She’ll be fine, but she—” he swallowed. Dominique heard the words in Jackson’s thoughts as he fought to voice them. He wanted to clamp his hand across his friend’s mouth so they would never emerge. “She lost the baby.”

The gruff whisper crackled in Dominique’s bones.

“She hemorrhaged. They tried everything to save her womb, but in the end, it was all they could do to save her.”

Dominique closed his eyes.

“She doesn’t know yet. She’s still too drugged to know what’s going on. I’m sorry, Dominique. I really am.”

If he weren’t sitting already, he was sure he’d crumple to the ground. Instead, he dropped his head into his hands and let the grief surge through him in devastating waves. “Elle est en vie,” he whispered over and over. She is alive. She is alive.

But the child was dead. The child that was to be his future, the proof of his humanity, reborn. The child that would…couldnever be.

Tears dripped from his eyes. The child was as impossible and short-lived as his own abortive attempts to reclaim his humanity. That, too, was forever dead, for he would never again take the suppressant. And Cassidy would never again conceive. Not by him or anyone.

Elle est en vie.

Cassidy lived. She was all he had left. She was all he ever truly had in this cursed life, always walking by his side without hesitation and always hounded by danger. Danger for which he was responsible. Just as he was responsible for the deaths of members of his mortal family and endangering those who survived.

All those deaths, all those threats, every one of them because of his one unrelenting need to be human again.

Ça suffit, he thought. Enough. He was done with dreaming and hoping and ambivalence. Done endangering the lives of those he loved. Most of all, he was done being something he could never be again.

When Dominique lifted his head, his eyes were still wet, but his grief had hardened into something cold and new and dark.

Jackson didn’t move, but the sight of Dominique’s face made his cherry red aura flinch. He knew that what he was in the room with now was infinitely more dangerous than what it had been two minutes ago. “Nick?” he said carefully. “You okay?”

Dominique said nothing. Instead, he sat and listened to the wet heartbeats and murmuring voices in the building all around, a river of humanity flowing past and over and under him, but no longer touching him. Two were closer than the others. Jackson’s and…

He turned his head to the closed bedroom door as he reached into Jackson’s mind for the information he sought.

“That’s not Garrett,” Jackson said and jumped up when Dominique got to his feet. “But it’snotthe guy who stabbed her, either.”

43

Truth and Treachery

Dominiquewasinthebedroom and followed the intruder’s heartbeat into the adjacent bathroom before the warning had fully left Jackson’s lips. In the Jacuzzi tub, trussed up and gagged with duct tape, was a large human male dressed in stained blue coveralls. His longish, dull blond hair tangled around his head, and a dried crust of blood covered part of his face. His eyes were open but flat, showing no interest in his situation.