Page 49 of A Memory Not Mine (Sanguis Amantium #1)

Chapter forty-seven

Mira

I woke alone in bed. Sleep had come in fragments—brief stretches of darkness interrupted by long, restless wakefulness.

The bed felt too wide, the air too quiet, the space beside me hollow.

His scent still clung to the sheets, a cruel reminder of his absence.

Without Baird beside me, I never sank into that deep, anchoring sleep I’d come to crave.

I got dressed for class and headed down to the kitchen. A fresh pot of coffee was on—but Baird was nowhere in sight. I sat at the counter, hands wrapped around a warm mug, waiting for him to walk in. Hoping he wouldn’t shut me out. Praying he didn’t still hate me.

But sitting there wasn’t enough. I couldn’t let the silence between us stretch into something worse. I needed to find him—needed to face what had happened—before class, before the day swept me away and left this unresolved.

“Baird,” I called out as I moved through the first floor, peering into each room.No sign of him.

I started up the stairs—but then I heard the front door open and shut. I froze mid-step and peered over the railing. His tall frame filled the front hall, and he came into view as I stood on the second step of the winding staircase .

His face was grim. His eyes unreadable.

I wasn’t sure how to start this conversation now that I’d been presented with the opportunity. Everything I’d planned to say went right out the window. But I swallowed my pride.

“I’m sorry.” My words were quiet, but it was the truth. “I didn’t know I’d hurt you by doing what I did—what I asked of you. I just wanted to know all of you, for you to stop hiding that part from me.”

“Ye were never supposed to see that, Mira. And I hate that ye did.” Baird said, matter-of-factly, clinical. No acknowledgment of the connection we’d felt, the power that existed between us.

“I just don’t understand.” I was unable to leave it alone—still poking the bear. “You told me to be who I am,” I said, breath catching, eyes locked on his. “To stop denying it. So why can’t you take your own advice?”

Baird looked away, jaw tightening. “This thing I am—the inhuman part…that’s the thing that will keep you from being mine. Truly mine.”

I didn’t understand what he meant, what he was trying to say.

“Do ye not understand, Mira?” he said, frustration making his voice raw. “I love ye. That’s the truth of it—from the first moment I laid eyes on ye. And last night only proved I can never truly have ye.”

“No,” I whispered, shaking my head, a quiet protest slipping out before I could stop it.

Love me? That couldn’t be right. It wasn’t possible. Whatever he thought he felt—whatever this thing was—it had to be tangled up in his grief for Agnes. In the past. In the echo of someone else. He couldn’t separate me from her. He thought he loved me, but it wasn’t real. Not really.

His eyes flicked back to mine, a question rising in them. He didn’t look away .

“This isn’t what will keep me from being yours, Baird. Not this part of you.” I needed him to hear it—that what he’d endured, what had been forced on him, didn’t make me turn away. If anything, it pulled me closer.

And as he held my gaze, something in him shifted—subtle, almost imperceptible. But I couldn’t tell what it meant…or why it made my chest tighten the way it did.

“It’s something else that comes between us,” I said, finally giving voice to the thoughts that had haunted me for days. “Something I can’t compete with.”

He was still, too still. “Agnes.”

He said her name flatly, almost without feeling—but something flickered in his eyes. A strange light. Something I couldn’t name.

Her name hung in the air like a ghost, as real and cold as the memory itself.

“You loved her,” I said. “And you always will. But I can’t live in the shadow of the woman you couldn’t save.”

A long silence followed. The kind that either shatters or cements something between two people.

Then, softly, Baird said, “I don’t think ye are her, Mira. And what I feel for ye is real.”

He stood two steps below me, and the man who had looked so grim just moments ago now seemed…peaceful. Almost happy. He reached out his hand. I took it and stepped down to his level, and he pulled me into his arms.

My heart was still splintered, tugged in a hundred different directions—but for this moment, the ache softened. In the quiet shelter of his embrace, everything else fell away.

I wanted to believe him .

God, I wanted to.

But some part of me, buried deep and raw, still wouldn’t let go of doubt.

“I don’t know how I’ll do it yet, Mira Garvie, but I swear I’ll prove it to ye,” he whispered softly against my hair.

Something had shifted between us—something that felt important, though I couldn’t quite name it.

I pulled back slightly and looked up at his face, searching for answers I didn’t have the language for.

But whatever had changed wasn’t written in his expression—it was in the air between us, in the way his anger, his self-hatred, all that buried bitterness seemed to lift, swept away by something unseen and inexplicable.

It hadn’t been the words that changed things. It was something else entirely— deeper, beyond my understanding. And whatever it was, the weight of what I’d done last night slipped from my shoulders, and I could finally breathe again.