Page 53 of A Memory Not Mine (Sanguis Amantium #1)

My stomach twisted. The air seemed too thin.

That he would bring up Baird and me— us —in this moment, in the middle of his confession, felt like a blow.

Because the truth was, what I felt for Baird was complicated.

And now Bastien had dragged it into the open like it was just another chess move in his game .

“There’s a difference, you know,” Bastien said. “You didn’t understand Agnes—not truly. But Mira…you understand her better than she understands herself.”

What did he mean by that? How could he possibly have seen so clearly what I could barely admit to myself?

How Baird always seemed to know —the exact moment I wanted to shut down, to disappear into myself.

How he never pushed, just offered his presence like a lifeline.

How, with a look or a word or the gentlest touch, he coaxed me back into my own skin.

Back into the world. How he made me see feelings were something that tethered me to life instead of something I had to survive alone.

His words had been meant for Baird, but his eyes were still fixed on mine, sharp and searching, waiting—almost daring —me to react.

“He loves you, Mira. Baird loves you.” Bastien said this simply, as if it were some universally acknowledged fact.

His eyes glowed more faintly now than they had earlier, as if his power was diminishing, fading somehow.

“It’s plain to see—it doesn’t take Sight or any special gift to know it.

It’s written in the way he watches you, the way he breathes when you’re near.

He loves you more than life itself. And there should be no shame in that. No shame in what exists between you.”

“You can’t know that—you can’t know what he feels,” I said, my voice too sharp, too quick.

I was trying to convince him. Trying to convince myself.

Because if Bastien was right—if Baird was right—then the truth was too big, too wild to hold.

Letting myself believe it, even for a second, felt more impossible than anything else that had happened since that moment I’d touched Agnes’s portrait and my world cracked in two.

All the visions, the voices, the strange pull toward Baird—it could be explained away.

My clairvoyance. Rationalized. What I’d felt in my visions?

Those were Agnes’s emotions. But this? This idea that this something that existed between Baird and me could actually be love?

A love destined by something outside of our understanding?

That was terrifying.And far harder to believe.

I turned toward Baird—searching for something, confirmation or denial, I wasn’t sure. But what I saw instead was the crack in his resolve. The weight of unspoken questions darkened his eyes, and when he spoke to Bastien, his voice was raw.

“Why did ye turn me?” he asked hoarsely. “What was I to ye?” There was desperation in his voice, a jagged edge that sent a chill up my spine. It wasn’t just a question—it was a wound laid bare. And I wasn’t sure which answer would hurt him more: the truth…or the lie.

“Why did I do this to you? I was punishing someone. A man who looked like you—acted like you did then…maybe still do,” Bastien replied.

It was Bastien’s face now that looked haunted, his expression flickering with something almost human.

He was somewhere else—reliving a past that clung to him like ash, just as Baird had.

For a brief, jarring moment, they weren’t enemies standing on opposite ends of an ancient feud.

They were two men carrying the weight of two separate ghosts.

“I can’t blame you for trying to protect Agnes,” Bastien said quietly. “But when you came at me with that blade…something in me snapped. Snapped back almost 150 years before that night—to when I was just a boy.”

He paused, as if the memory itself was something he had to push through physically. And for a moment, the mask slipped. The predator faded, and in his place stood something raw and broken. A glimpse of the boy he had been—and the monster he was destined to become.

“There was a man then—my father.” Bastien looked down, his jaw tight, and nodded to himself, as if granting permission to revisit the place he’d buried for centuries.

“Same height. Same frame. Same coloring as you.” He swallowed hard.

“He beat my mother. And he beat me—for the smallest sins. For loving art. For quoting poetry. For not being like him. For not looking like him.”

The words hung heavy between them, a confession long unspoken. Not as an excuse, but to lay bare the lesion in his soul, still raw beneath the centuries.

Bastien’s eyes held Baird’s, wanting—no, needing —him to understand. “When you lunged at me that night, I didn’t see you. I saw him . I was sixteen again, in the barn, with his blade at my throat after I tried to shield my mother from another one of his drunken rages.”

This revelation slammed into me like a freight train, and I gasped when I heard it.

This wasn’t part of some grand plan. Baird hadn’t been a target—he’d been an unlucky bystander.

Caught in the blast radius of someone else’s tragedy, someone else’s obsession.

A casualty of a past that wasn’t his but had claimed him all the same.

Tears glistened in Bastien’s moonlight eyes as he continued.

“In that moment, in your cottage, there was no logic. No reason. No clarity. Only rage inside me. Someone coming between me and a woman I loved— thought I loved —I’d felt so little of it in my life.

I wasn’t striking at Baird Campbell—I was striking at him, my father.

I was making him pay. Holding him responsible for the monster I became after I ran away. ”

The eyes of the monster were gone—replaced by the eyes of a broken man. And in them, I saw something I hadn’t expected, nor would have believed.

An apology.

Not spoken. Not begged for. But there, all the same.

Worn and wordless, heavy with the weight of everything he couldn’t undo.

I looked to Baird and saw him take a step back, as if the weight of Bastien’s words had physically struck him.

He didn’t speak—just staggered slightly, caught between rage and something that looked like it might be pity.

It was the kind of truth that didn’t rewrite the past but instead cracked something open in the present.

“But it wasn’t him. It was you. A man with the same eyes. The same hands. The same damn blade. In the wrong place…at the wrong time. And I realized only after that I had become just like my father.”

I saw Baird’s shoulders slump, the weight of it all settling over him like heavy cargo on a beast made to bear more than its share. He looked like a man bowed not just by grief or anger, but by the sheer burden of understanding—of knowing too much, too late.

I could only imagine how many times he’d asked this question to the universe, over decades, centuries—desperate for an answer that never came. And now, at last, the only one who could answer was standing before him…and giving up his terrible secrets.

“I know you saw me drain Agnes. But I didn’t do it to punish you—not really. I did it to free her .”

I saw them then—tears, barely held back, glistening in the corners of Baird’s eyes. Not from fear. Not even from anger. But from memory.

The memory of this beast draining the life from his wife as he lay helpless near her, dying himself, powerless to stop it.

That helplessness had branded him. And now, faced with the monster who had done it, those long-buried tears rose—not just for what had been taken, but for the man he had been and the man he couldn’t be in that final moment.

“Can you imagine what her mind would’ve become if she’d woken to see what I’d done to you? To see the man she loved, broken and bloodied, because of me ? No…I still believe what I did was a kindness. Twisted, perhaps. But mercy in its own way. For her. And, in a small way, fo r you.”

Bastien stood taller now, somehow freed by speaking this truth. “I don’t expect you to understand that. I don’t expect forgiveness. My sins are far too great for that.”

“Why did the visions stop? Why, after forcing me to witness the long line of women ye targeted to feed from and kill—why did it stop?” Baird demanded. It was as if there was a need in Baird, a need for all the answers he’d been plagued with for 240 years, and he’d pushed it to the surface.

“Oh my, Baird, you’ve really made me out to be a monster, haven’t you?

I didn’t kill those women—fed from them, yes.

Made them my lovers, yes…until I grew bored and moved on.

Until I realized, one by one, that they were powerless to fill the void inside me.

But you asked why it stopped—it stopped because I met Clémence. ”

I saw the confusion in Baird’s eyes, but Bastien continued.

“It was Paris, 1981. We met in a painting class. I still painted then—it was the last joy I had left in this cursed life. I noticed her immediately; a natural platinum blond, curls so fine and wild they formed a halo around her head, a cherub straight out of a Renaissance fresco.”

Bastien’s mercury eyes lit up once again as he spoke, stronger this time, the way they glowed in my nightmares.

A strange and eerie beauty, lit seemingly by his memories of this woman.

“One day in class, she approached me—calm, direct. Told me she’d painted me from memory the night before.

No pretense. No flirtation.” He gave a faint, almost regretful shrug.

“She wanted me to come to her studio. To see the portrait. She wasn’t really my type.

But she was beautiful, in her own quiet way.

And I hadn’t fed in weeks.” His voice lowered, the next words stripped of sentiment.

“I thought—maybe she was a means to an end.” The shrug came again, softer this time.

Almost an apology. Not just for what he did, but for what he was .

“The portrait was unfinished. Like many of the pieces in her studio, it seemed abandoned mid-breath—paint only in the center two-thirds of the canvas, the edges left bare. But in the center…was me . My face, my shoulders, rendered in thick, expressive strokes—her Impressionist hand capturing what seemed, at first, like a true likeness.”

His story was pulling me under, drawing me in like a tide I hadn’t noticed until it was too late.

I could see this woman—Clémence—through his eyes, like a silent film flickering across the inside of my mind.

Every brushstroke, every glance, felt vivid and close.

I didn’t know if it was my imagination or some power of his, working subtly as I stood there in the cold night air. But either way, I was caught in it.

“But her painting—it wasn’t me. Not really.

He looked like me, yes—but there was something else.

A quiet dignity in the eyes. A beauty not of youth or perfection, but of soul .

A human soul. Courageous. Redeemable. And I knew, standing there, that I was none of those things.

” He drew a ragged breath, his composure unraveling as the weight of memory eclipsed him—dragging him backward into the place he had never truly escaped.

“I told her that. Said the man in the portrait wasn’t me. Maybe he was who I could have been, had my life taken a different path. She just smiled and said, ‘No. He is you. I see what you truly are. You are not the things you’ve done.’”

I felt a kinship with the woman in Bastien’s story.

Another woman, like me, burdened with a knowledge that defied logic or fact.

But unlike me—still tangled in doubt, still fighting what couldn’t be measured—I wondered if she had resisted it too.

Or had she always known to trust it? That strange, unexplainable knowledge the universe sometimes offers—not as proof, but as truth.