Page 80 of The Vampire's Redemption

If her anguish from his near death was unbearable, then what he felt from her death must have been unfathomable.

He’d never mentioned it, and she hadn’t pushed, her survival instincts shying away from the pain of the past.

The betrayal on her brother’s face. Her conversion to vampire. The agony of death. The finality of it. She’d put it all behind her. Start anew as a vampire. She hadn’t wanted to deal with her pain.

So, she had never dealt with his either.

She had not been faced with his death before. Oh, she’d cursed him plenty of times and plotted his demise too, but like all fantasies, the reality turned out to be so different.

“Felix—”

“No.” He backed away. Put the couch between them.

She moved and blocked his retreat. “We need to talk about this.”

“Move,” he growled, his muscular body tight with restrained violence. The Gabby six centuries ago would’ve obeyed, but she’d long outgrown that phase.

“No.” She stuck out her chin. He’d pushed her aside long enough. “We can face it together.”

“Face it?” A bitter laugh burst out of him, the sound carving apart her insides. “I’ve lived through it thousands of times. Isn’t that enough?”

Her heart cracked, pieces of it falling like broken glass. She wanted to hug him, to take away his pain. He kept the wall up between them, but she didn’t need the mating bond to detect his anguish. It was in the stiff lines of his body, in the way his lips were pressed in a thin line, in the glow of his emerald gaze despite his best efforts to hide it.

And something else. The black ball of emotions he protected. Never allowing her near it. The shadows she’d sensed from earlier. Her brows drew together.

“No, it’s not about facing it,” she muttered, studying his feral and defiant countenance. What remained of her heart shattered into a million pieces.

“Felix, it wasn’t your fault.” He was rigid as stone when she wrapped her arms around him. “My death, it wasn’t your fault. You have to forgive yourself.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Felixcouldn’tstaystill,even though a part of him wanted nothing more than to stay in Gabby’s arms and lose himself in her tenderness.

He broke away and stalked to the other side of the room. His shoulder throbbed with a vengeance. It had healed, but it would take longer for the residual pain to dissipate. The molten hot agony had been nothing compared to Gabby’s death.

An icy blade of fear thrust into his heart. Every time he closed his eyes, he was taken back to that day. Her rasping breath. Her blood pooling around him. The slowing beat of her heart. The awful finality when it stopped.

All because of him. Because he’d failed to protect her. Because he’d been a selfish bastard and couldn’t let her go.

Because he’d bonded her to him.

She could’ve lived a sheltered life, safe from everything. All he had to do was wipe her memory. Instead, he’d fallen into temptation and lured her away from her brother.

A part of him had even gloated at being mated to a woman from a vampire Hunter family as old as hers.

Then it had all come crashing down around him.

Her brother may have struck the final blow, but he had served her up to Armando on a silver platter. He’d singlehandedly destroyed the best thing that’d ever happened to him.

Felix kept all those thoughts locked behind so many walls that he sometimes even forgot about them.

Until now.

Until the fight brought back the possibility of losing her again.

The self-hatred resurfaced with a vengeance.

Felix eyed the front door. He wanted this discussion as much as he wished to be staked to the ground.