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Claire listened, struggling to put all the pieces in place in her mind. “So, all your life, you never knew anything about your pyrokinetic ability?”

“Not until the last night I saw you.”

“We argued,” she said, remembering their parting words.

They’d been out most of the evening in Hamburg, enjoying each other’s company as they had for the handful of months they’d been together. But then she’d become jealous when another woman started flirting with him. Andreas had always been a magnet for female company, with his good looks and easy charisma, but he swore to her that he was interested only in her. Claire hadn’t believed him. She told him she wanted proof—a commitment that his love was true. When he hesitated, she had become upset and scared that he didn’t really love her. She called him selfish, irresponsible. Unkind things. She’d been unreasonable and she knew it, even then.

“I regretted my words the minute I said them,” she told him now, an apology some decades too late. “I was young and stupid, and I was unfairly harsh with you, Andreas.”

He shrugged. “And I was a pigheaded fool who should have known better. Instead, I had been all too eager to prove you right. After I left you at Roth’s Darkhaven, I went into the city looking for a fight. I found a few, actually, and after I had sufficiently bloodied my knuckles and used my face to crack a few others, I found myself in a rundown hotel in the company of two intoxicated women I brought with me from a bar along the way.”

Claire’s disappointment to hear this now was couched by her concern for what had apparently happened to him next.

“At some point, there was a knock on the door. Another woman. I let her in, and because I was … distracted by my own idiocy, I didn’t realize she had a knife in her hand until she’d sliced it across my throat.”

Claire winced, her heart twisting at the thought. “What did you do?”

“I bled,” he answered simply. “I bled so much, I thought I would die from it. I nearly did, in fact. I was too weak to struggle when a group of Breed males came into the room and carried me to a truck in the alley outside. They chained me and dumped me in a remote farmer’s field to bleed out and then fry to dust with the sunrise.”

“Oh, my God. Andre… I saw that field, didn’t I? You showed it to me in your dream yesterday.”

His answering look was a grim confirmation. “Sometime between that awful hour and daybreak, I felt an unnatural heat beginning to burn inside me. It kept growing, until my entire body was bathed in blistering energy. And then it exploded out of me. I don’t recall everything—that’s one of the least unpleasant aftereffects, as I would learn. The fires burned from within me, but my skin didn’t ignite. By the time dawn started to rise, the chains had melted away. I tried to scramble for some shade, but I was weak from blood loss. I didn’t see the young girl until she was standing right next to me.”

A knot of dread tightened behind Claire’s breastbone. “A girl?”

He nodded, only the slightest movement of his head. His mouth was drawn tight, his face rigid with regret. “She only could have been about ten or twelve years old, out in the field that morning calling for a missing cat. She came upon me struggling in the dirt and asked what she could do to help me. Because of the injury to my throat, I had no voice. I couldn’t have warned her away, even if I had any idea of what would happen to her if she got too close to me while my body was still deadly with heat.”

Claire closed her eyes, understanding now. She placed her hand against his cheek, having no words to express the pain she knew he must have felt for what he’d done to the child. Pain it was clear that he felt even now, all this time later.

“I crawled away from the field like an animal, which is what I felt I was. Worse than an animal, to have destroyed someone so innocent and pure. I found shelter in a cave so I could heal. Once I was recovered, I fled. I couldn’t stay… not