Page 102 of Dark Reign of Forever

Until now.

Beneath the covers, her free hand crept toward her middle. Bumps and lumps under the hospital gown. Bandages.

Dominique lowered his forehead to hers, enveloping her in the smells of leather, rain, and night.During the fight, you were stabbed several times. You lost a great deal of blood.

She let that sink in, remembered the moments she’d been hit, the moments she, in her frenzy, had registered them as punches, not stabs. More. There was more. More loomed just beyond the grasp of her understanding.That’s not all I lost. Is it?

Non. Not all.

Her fingers went limp in his hand. Heat stung her eyes.I lost the child.

Dominique cradled her face the way he cradled her quaking mind. She made not a sound as her tears flowed and she held on to him, but her heart wailed into the emptiness that radiated out from her belly. So much more than a new life had been destroyed there. Hope had been murdered in its cradle. Hope for even a sliver of light in Dominique’s eternal darkness.

You are my light, Cassie, he thought at her fervently.I need no more. I never did.

But you wanted this. You wanted this so badly, and I wanted to give it to you so much more than I even realized.

But I cannot have it, chérie. Fathering mortal children is not to be for me. Not anymore. Just like the light of day can never be mine again, and every other human thing is lost to me.

The fatalistic tone rallied her. “No,” she whispered. “No.”Not true. We did this once. We can do it again.

No. We will not. We cannot, he said with unnerving quiet.

When this is over, you’ll take another shot. We’ll…

We cannot.At her mounting confusion, he added,Your body was damaged in ways my blood can never repair.

Only then did it occur to her to consider the details of her injury and the implications. She had been stabbed in the abdomen hard enough to lose a pregnancy. Her uterus would have been punctured. Likely hemorrhaged. Probably removed.

No, notprobably.

Definitelyremoved. To save her life. She saw the truth of that now in Dominique’s mind. Jackson had told him. The doctors had told Jackson.

Strange, the dazed calm that settled over her. It had about it the flavor of the irrefutable and inescapable. She had never wanted children, but there had always been the option to change her mind. Shehadchanged her mind for Dominique, but now, at the ripe old age of twenty-five, that choice was gone for good. For her, anyway. For Dominique—

He stirred in her mind, expanding her awareness far beyond mortal limits. Sometimes, like now, when they were this close, she thought she could touch the edge of eternity.

My eternity includes nothing but the night, and no one but you. I am done with the day. I have all I will ever need. Everything is…as it must be.

Serge had uttered these words countless times over the years, and Dominique had always scorned them. No more. Everything is as it must be. It always had been. And the single-most important of these things was that she and Dominique were together.

She brought her hand to his neck, her thumb brushing the hard muscle and thick veins there, throbbing with supernatural power. Power he never wanted, along with responsibilities he wanted even less. Power without direction—until now.

Done with the day, she repeated, feeling the enormity of that statement.

He sat back and gazed at her with a seductive tilt of his lip. The tiny dragons in his sword hilts gleamed in the low light to either side of him.I am the Lord of Night, am I not?

Cassidy swallowed the lump in her throat. The Dominique she had once known—the youngling vampire tormented by doubt and longing and regret—was gone. Before her sat a being, a man, who had at last embraced his destiny: a blood-drinker of beguiling beauty and staggering power.

“That you are, my love,” she whispered. “That you are.”

The woman in the recliner stirred, and Cassidy held her breath, afraid she had awakened her. He glanced over his shoulder at his mother, who blinked at them.

“Dominique,” she cried, tossing the blanket aside and struggling out of the awkward chair. This morning’s bright, stylish outfit had been replaced by a simple pair of black slacks, non-descript cardigan, and an efficient pair of shoes.

Dominique rose but didn’t move toward her, letting her decide how much she wanted to be in contact with him, or even if at all. She lifted her hands as if to embrace her son, but then clasped them tight together as though in prayer.

He spared her further awkwardness with a smile. “I hear you are quite the combatant,Maman. You walked away without a scratch.”