Page 52 of A Memory Not Mine (Sanguis Amantium #1)

Chapter fifty

Mira

A nd then, in just moments, as the darkness thickened around us, a shadowy figure appeared on the terrace—not there one moment, and there the next—standing motionless, watching through the kitchen window where Baird held me in his arms.

I froze.

That silhouette—I knew it. The same dark man who had followed me.

The one who stalked the edges of my sleep, haunting every nightmare.

My skin crawled with the familiar dread, my heartbeat hammering in my ears like a war drum.

Bunny crouched next to us, her low growl reinforcing my fear.

I pressed myself deeper into the safety of Baird’s embrace, willing myself to disappear into his solidity.

But Bastien was still there. Unmoving. Unblinking. Staring.

He seemed smaller now, somehow less imposing with Baird’s arms around me. And yet I knew—it was a lie. He was no less dangerous. His stillness was not passivity but provocation.

“Stay inside,” Baird said, his voice low but unshakable. “Keep Bunny with you. This is my battle, Mira—not yours.”

And before I could stop him—before I could even beg him not to go—he stepped away from me, grabbed the sword he’d sharpened the night before, and walked out the door.

Bunny pressed closer to my side with Baird’s absence, her growls rising in intensity, and I was oddly flattered that she seemed ready to defend me too.

Terror bloomed in my chest. What if Bastien killed him? What if I was left alone? I would be at Bastien’s mercy, no match for his twisted gifts of enthrallment—the ones Baird had warned me about, the ones I didn’t understand.

And then, it happened.

A voice, sudden and unmistakable, coiled inside my head—not mine. Not Baird’s.

Bastien.

The same voice from my nightmares. Smooth. Icy. Familiar.

Come to me.

At that same moment, Bunny fell silent, then sat back on her haunches, dazed—like she didn’t quite know where she was. I stared at her, unsettled, and wondered if he could speak inside her head too. The thought sent a chill through me.

Her confusion became mine in an instant, as my feet began to move of their own accord—carrying me to the door, then across the threshold, and out into the night.

Inside, I was trembling. Terrified. But outside, I was calm.

Composed. Controlled.

Anyone watching would think I was walking out of my own free will.

They wouldn’t see the war inside me.

They wouldn’t hear me screaming no.

“Thank you for joining us,” Bastien said, his voice disturbingly calm. “I was just telling Baird I need you to be present for this. There is so much you need to learn—both of you, really… ”

I looked toward Baird, just twenty feet or so away from me.

He stood rooted, unmoved, his gaze locked on Bastien with the cold clarity of a man who had already decided how this would end.

The power I’d seen in him the night before—that wild, thrumming energy just beneath his skin—was back.

But now it was different. Stronger. Hardened. No longer restrained by guilt or doubt.

The will of steel I’d glimpsed in moments past was fully forged now, sharpened alongside the blade he had readied. He wasn’t merely reacting—he was resolute. Every line of his body, every breath he took, told me he’d stepped into something irreversible. Not just a fight. A reckoning.

He no longer feared Bastien.

But I still did.

To my left stood the figure from my nightmares.

His beauty was sharp—dangerously so. Features that hovered somewhere between male and female, symmetrical yet strange, as if nature had over-perfected him.

There was a grace to him that didn’t belong to humanity at all.

It was fluid, primal. The kind of elegance born not of refinement, but of instinct—an animal’s grace, poised and predatory.

When he’d followed me, he’d been wearing sunglasses, hiding those uncanny eyes. I hadn’t realized how much they unsettled me until now, seeing them fully.

Liquid silver.

His eyes were beautiful, hypnotic. They flickered like candle flames, shimmering faintly, then growing brighter, then dimming softly again.

The fear inside me grew each time Bastien’s eyes began to glow, as if he were drawing power from somewhere—or someone.

There was something storm-like about him, but not the kind that brings life with rain.

Bastien was the cold, brutal kind—the kind that destroys .

His power was deadly, relentless, and icy to its core. So unlike the white-hot surge I felt from Baird when his eyes changed—his power burned with purpose, with heat. With heart .

Despite the power that had pulled me outside, I found my voice. “Why are you doing this? Is this some kind of sick joke?” I demanded, despite my fear, unwilling to be a damsel in distress.

Bastien laughed—a sound that began sharp and bitter, almost cruel, but as it faded, it thinned into something hollow.

“It’s not a joke,” he said quietly. “I’m here to try to make amends.

” His eyes moved from mine to Baird’s, and a strange stillness settled over Bastien.

“Because what I did to Agnes…and to you…still haunts me. And I want it to stop. I want it all to stop.”

If Baird was caught off guard by Bastien’s speech, he didn’t show it.

“I’m tired, Baird. Tired of this life I’ve led. Ashamed of it, from the moment I was sired by a vampire named Magda— no, truth be told, even before that —right up until the day I was saved—if you can call it that—by a woman named Clémence, forty years ago.”

It was then that I noticed the vibrant darkness that had cloaked him like a second skin was thinning. He looked…tired. Not frail, not weak, but weathered. As if centuries had finally begun to weigh on him.

Bastien was looking for something in Baird’s eyes, something small that said perhaps he understood, but if he did, Baird gave nothing away.

So Bastien continued. “My greatest regret—and there are many—is what happened that night. I never meant to hurt Agnes. I wanted to help her. I saw more than her beauty. I saw a kindred spirit. Someone wounded. Fractured. And I let my ego convince me I could fix her—that I alone had a power no one else did. Not you. Not the doctors. Not even her family. ”

Bastien’s expression shifted, softened—no longer the predator, but a man desperate to be understood. Desperate for another man to see why . To know who he had once tried to be.

“I thought I could take the pain from her mind. So I used what I had—my power. I enthralled her, clouded her thoughts. Not to harm her, but to soften the jagged edges inside her. To give her something that felt like joy, even if it wasn’t real. Even if it only lasted a moment.”

I watched Baird, trying to see how he’d receive this.

At first, he was unreadable—still as a statue, composed, that same unflinching resolve etched into every line of his face.

But I knew him too well now to be fooled.

Beneath the surface, I saw it—the flicker in his eyes, subtle but unmistakable. Pain.

Not new pain.Old.Deep.Reawakened.

The pain of watching the woman he loved unravel, powerless to stop it.

Of standing by as she crumbled, needing him—and him not being there.

Whether by fear, by shame, or the twisted logic of self-preservation, he’d stayed away.

And that absence, that failure, had carved a wound in him he still carried.

Raw. Bleeding. Close to the surface, even now.

He wore armor forged of duty and purpose, but guilt lived inside it undiminished. And yet he didn’t look away. He stood in it, bore it, let it burn. Because this time, he wouldn’t turn his back.

“She didn’t know what I was—not at first. Just like you didn’t.” Bastien’s voice was soft, almost reflective, but there was no warmth in it. Only weariness, and something darker beneath—contempt, perhaps.

Then a brittle, mirthless laugh slipped from his lips.

“ No one ever does ,” he said, almost to himself.

His eyes flicked toward me, and his tone shifted—cooler now, more deliberate.

“How well you know that now.” He gave a small nod in my direction, the gesture so slight it could’ve been mistaken for something casual.

But it wasn’t. It was dismissive. A mark of derision. Another stupid human , his gesture seemed to say.

“But then her sister-in-law, Mary— another Garvie with the Sight —saw through me. She warned Agnes—told her what I was. That’s when she ran.

That’s when she begged you to take her to the cottage.

” His voice dropped, thick with memory. “She thought she could escape me. But there was nowhere she could have gone that I couldn’t follow.

And I did. Because I still believed—I needed to believe—that if she just let me in, she’d see it. That I could be the answer.”

Bastien looked down at the stone under his feet, as if debating something with himself. "You should know something else, Baird—Agnes was never untrue to you. I don’t know whether that makes this easier to hear or harder. But it’s the truth.”

Baird’s face twisted with rage, and he began to pace back and forth. “I don’t want to hear your words! Whatever this is—whatever you are trying to do—it’s meaningless to me now.”

Bastien ignored Baird’s protests as if he were a petulant child. “I was unwilling to let her go,” Bastien said quietly. “I wanted Agnes to come to me willingly —something I think you understand. You feel that way about Mira.”

His silver eyes flared, catching the light, glowing just a little brighter—fueled, it seemed, by the truth he dared to speak aloud. “I’ve seen the way you look at her,” he said, turning to me then. “And the way she looks at you .”