Page 54 of A Memory Not Mine (Sanguis Amantium #1)

Chapter fifty-one

Baird

If he’d just known. If someone had told him.

But no one had.Not until now.

More of Bastien’s story spilled from his lips, words unwilling to be contained a moment longer.

“I was furious. Violated. Exposed. And yet…no one had seen me like that since my mother, when I was a child. Clémence told me that no soul was beyond salvation. And in time, she became mine. She said she knew what I was the first day she saw me in class. But that didn’t matter to her. ”

Tears flowed from Bastien’s eyes, and Baird wondered for the first time if he and Bastien were more alike than they were different.

“From that day forward, I was hers—for forty years. Until she died last spring. Cancer. I wanted to turn her. Begged her. But she refused. Said one lifetime was enough for her. She was the love of my life…”

Bastien dropped to his knees on the stone terrace in front of Baird, his moonlit eyes dimming by the second, like the last embers of a fire losing their glow.

Anguish and exhaustion were etched into his enigmatic face, softening the sharpness that once made him seem untouchable.

He looked tired. Diminished. As if something essential was draining from him.

“I didn’t come back to ask your forgiveness, Baird. I don’t deserve that.” Bastien’s voice was raw now with desperation. “I came to ask you to end this. To use your anger, your pain, your revenge—whatever it takes—to rid the world of me—and to release me from the weight of losing her.”

“Wait!” Mira said, the words escaping her lips sharply. “I need to understand.”

“Stay back, Mira,” Baird warned, but she stepped forward, toward Bastien, surprise on her face at the fact that she again controlled her own movement. Perhaps Bastien had released his hold over her some time ago, but she hadn’t tested it until then.

“How—how were you able to see me and put my image in Baird’s head?” she asked, wide-eyed.

Baird could see this piece of the puzzle was something she desperately needed.

“My mother—she was a Seer, just like you. Like your father. And I was one as well. Another thing my father hated about me. Another piece of me he couldn’t understand, couldn’t control.”

Baird envisioned Bastien as a child then—the one Granny Margaret had told Mira about, the boy treated cruelly, shaped by pain until he twisted beneath it. It wasn’t sympathy he felt—at least not entirely—but recognition. He knew it deep in his bones: no one was born a monster. Not even Bastien.

“When I was turned…I retained that gift. That doesn’t happen often. The Sight doesn’t usually survive the change. But in me, it did. When your parents died, the pieces began to shift. Fall into place. The universe—whatever power governs it—began moving you, guiding you. Bringing you here. To him .”

Baird saw the confusion in Mira’s face slowly turning to anger.

“And I saw it. I saw you as my chance. As a thread I could pull, a tool in a plan. I won’t pretend I didn’t use you.

” Bastien’s voice was softer now. “But even if I hadn’t— even without me —your power would’ve brought you to Baird eventually.

That was written in the fabric of the world. That was always going to happen.”

Bastien stared at Mira, willing her to understand, but Baird knew her too well, he could feel her emotions—and she was fighting against this too.

“You were destined to find him. As only you could. You felt it in your very first vision after touching the portrait…the connection between the two of you. Not Agnes…it was always you.”

Baird saw Mira’s face harden into a mask of defiance, her irritation with two men speaking over her—telling her what she felt, what was real, what to believe—emanated from her, and he felt it viscerally. And then she turned on Bastien, her voice low but sharp as glass.

“How do you know what I feel? What he feels?” she demanded, pointing directly at Baird.

He flinched—just barely—not out of guilt, but from the sheer weight of being seen, named. And in that moment, he couldn’t tell whether she was defending him…or ac cusing him.

“You’re wrong,” she said, her voice steady, breathless with conviction. And unlike Baird’s or Bastien’s, her breath still fogged in the cold night air—warm, human. A reminder that she didn’t belong to their world.

“Tell her how wrong she is, Baird—or have you kept this from her too?” Bastien’s voice cut through the night, sharp with accusation, as if he thought Baird hadn’t told her about the Sanguis Amantium. He turned his gaze from Mira to Baird, eyes still glittering softly in the low light.

Mira looked between them, confusion flickering across her face. The silence was heavy, alive with things unsaid.

Baird’s jaw tightened, his hands clenched, and when he finally spoke, his voice was low, rough—almost broken. “Aye, I’ve told her. But there are things she doesn’t yet want to know.” Baird said at last, his voice gravel-low, worn from holding too much for too long. “Doesn’t yet want to believe.”

Baird turned toward Mira, not in frustration, but in a quiet plea. “I canna convince her. I’ve tried,” Baird said, his eyes never leaving Mira, waiting to see what she would do with the pieces now laid bare between them.

A small, knowing smile crossed Bastien’s lips as he looked up at Baird.

“She’ll come to it when she comes to it,” he said gently.

“ Oh ye of little faith. ” He shook his head, slow and solemn, the weight of hard-won wisdom in every movement.

“Don’t lose faith in her. I haven’t. I believe in her…

just as I believe in you—to do what must be done. ”

Then, without flourish or resistance, Bastien clasped his hands in front of him—not in defiance, not in prayer, but in quiet surrender. The silence that followed pressed down around them, thick and unrelenting. The kind of silence that comes before a reckoning .

Baird knew it was time. He expected Bastien to close his eyes, to brace for the end. But he didn’t. He looked up instead. And in his eyes, Baird saw shame, yes, and sorrow—raw and unguarded. But also something else. Hope.

Not hope for forgiveness. Not even for mercy.

Hope for release . For closure. For an end to the long penance of his existence.

Baird didn’t believe Bastien deserved release. Not after what he’d done.

And yet…

There was Mira.

She was here—alive, radiant, sharp with purpose. Bastien had brought her into his life. And Baird, for all his anger, knew that mattered. He would never forgive the past…but Mira could be his future. And for that, he owed something. Perhaps not to Bastien, but to fate.

He stepped back, circling the vampire slowly across the broad stone terrace, sword held low but ready in both hands. The blade was heavy, forged for battle—but Baird held it like it was an extension of himself.

Baird glanced to Mira, needing to see her face. Needing to know what this looked like through her eyes. He expected fear—of the violence, of him . But there was none.

She stood tall, unmoving, her arms at her sides, fists curled not in tension, but in resolve.

There was something almost otherworldly about her—like the universe had placed her here for this exact moment, a silent arbiter of justice and mercy, and after fighting so hard, she had accepted her role in this.

As though she was meant to bear witness.

To hold him accountable, or perhaps…to set him free.

She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to.

Her eyes found his—steady, unwavering—and in them, he read the unspoken truth: Do what you must .

It was then that Baird truly understood. This act would not undo the past. It would not erase the pain. But it might close a door that had remained open too long.

Baird said a prayer in Gaelic, his grandmother’s tongue, just before he pressed the tip of the blade to Bastien’s chest, directly over his heart.

With a cry of anguish, both hands on the blade, Baird used all his strength to force the blade home.

When the blade slid through Bastien’s body, he felt the brief resistance, then reverberation of the blade fully cleaving Bastien’s chest, and then sword hitting stone, shock waves radiating from the ground up Baird’s arms. He heard Mira gasp but didn’t turn to look at her. Instead, he kept his gaze on Bastien.

And in that moment, Bastien turned to black dust. A swirling cloud rose where his body had been, twisting in the rough shape of a man—then unraveling, thread by thread. There was no scream. No final plea. Just silence.

Then, a sudden gust of wind—unnatural, sharper than the already frigid night air—swept through the terrace. It gathered the ash in one violent breath and carried it off into the darkness, as if the earth itself had waited long enough to reclaim him.

Baird remained where he stood, both hands still gripping the hilt of the sword. He didn’t move. Couldn’t.

Then, slowly, the weight of it all—tonight, and 1785, and everything between—came crashing down.

His knees finally buckled, and he sank to the ground, his head bowed.

The blade, now motionless and bloodless, bore his sagging weight as he knelt in silence beneath the stars, breath ragged, shoulders heaving with the burden of everything he could never undo.