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“It’s all right.”

“I don’t know that it will bring you any comfort, but you are not suffering alone. Andreas feels it, as well, you know. He feels the same regret that you carry inside.” Danika smiled gently. “His thoughts were just as plain to me in the other room as yours are now. He is torn and broken from rage, but he’s hurting in another way, too.”

Claire stared at her, unable to speak. Barely able to breathe.

“Life is precious,” Danika continued. “And it is so very short, even for those like us. Four hundred and two years with Conlan wasn’t nearly enough time. We don’t often get second chances, not in life or in love. If I had just one more minute with my Conlan, I wouldn’t waste a second of it on regret. Let Andreas know how you truly feel.”

“But he isn’t mine,” Claire murmured softly. “Not anymore.”

“Try to tell that to your heart.” Danika gave Claire’s hand a light squeeze. “Try to tell that to his.”

Reichen avoided going upstairs for hours after Danika had returned to collect her son. She and Connor had gone to find their own rest for the day, leaving Reichen to prowl the quiet farmhouse, killing time and trying not to think about the fact that Claire was in bed somewhere above him.

In bed all alone, her sweet body relaxed and languid. Her buttery light brown skin like velvet to the touch, every exquisite inch of her clean and soft and warm …

Good Christ.

Since the moment she asked about taking a bath, she’d doomed him to imagining her undressed and fragrant from a long, hot soak. He’d been tempted almost beyond reason to vault up the stairs behind her when she left with Danika, a feeling that had yet to pass. There was nothing he wanted more than to be with her right now, to comfort her and let her know that she was protected from Roth and his cronies. To assure her that no matter what evil was at work around them, he would keep her safe at any cost.

Things he’d failed to provide his kin or Helene.

Spending time around Danika and her young son had brought his attention back to that reality with scathing focus. He wasn’t here to smooth over Claire’s fears, any more than he was here to slake his own longings for her or to answer the primal call of the blood bond that would draw him to her always. A blood bond he’d imposed on her, he was quick to remind himself.

No. He was here now for one purpose: vengeance.

Everything else—his wants and desires, his future, his right to claim even the thinnest moment of selfish joy—had burned away in the fire that devoured his Darkhaven home.

Longer ago than that, he thought grimly, reflecting back on the night he’d last seen Claire. It had been a night of stupidity and violence that had left him beaten and bloodied, baking in an open field under a harsh morning sun. Until that moment, he’d known nothing of the power he’d been cursed with at birth—a power passed down to him by a Breedmate mother he’d never met, who hadn’t lived long enough to warn him of what his fury could do.

He’d learned that lesson in a brutally vivid moment that awful morning outside Hamburg, and the horror of what he’d done had never left him.

So many innocent lives had crumbled to ash around him. His own life was heading swiftly in that same direction, but he still had time to see justice met, at least for those lives that had been lost at Wilhelm Roth’s command. He had no doubt that his anger and hatred were only strengthening the fire living inside him. It would destroy him sooner than later, but he’d be damned if he went down without taking Roth with him.

He only prayed that his resolve was firm enough to keep Claire far away from him as he moved ever closer to that inevitable end.

It was the depth of that conviction that finally gave him the strength to climb the stairs and find the room that Danika had given them. He also didn’t know if the couple who shared the farmhouse was aware of him and Claire, and he wasn’t about to put Danika in the position of having to lie to cover for him should the other residents