He’d dreaded her asking the question, but he was proud of her for not shying away from it. Instead, she stared defiantly at him as she lifted her chin. If she were sitting across from anyone else, they wouldn’t know her emotions were bouncing around like a pinball inside her.
He took a moment to memorize her like this—as the woman who looked at him with complete trust and no hint of disgust. He’d probably never see it again.
“When I was a hundred and ten years old, I nearly killed a woman,” he said.
“A human?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s not—”
“It was more than one,” he interrupted before she could start to justify his actions. He refused to let her defend him.
“More than one,” she murmured. “How many?”
“Eight.”
“Eight?” She cleared her throat after the word squeaked out of her. “Eight?”
“Yes. And believe me, they didn’t live because I meant to leave them that way.”
“What happened?”
“Do you really want to know?”
No! “Yes.”
“I was at an upscale place in London that vampires frequently visited for some, ah… companionship.”
Willow’s fingers dug into her thighs as jealousy clawed at her heart. He’d been with other women, of course, he had. She wasn’t a fool, she knew that, but she wanted to kick the crap out of those long-dead women.
You're an idiot. That knowledge didn’t help ease her yearning to clap her hands over her ears so she couldn’t hear anymore. But her childhood days of blocking out things she didn’t want to hear were over.
“A vamp owned the place, and only vampires went there, so it was a haven. It was the kind of place where if something went wrong, it was easily covered up, but if you lost control there, you’d most likely lose your life too.”
“Okay,” she murmured, not sure how to respond.
His gaze was distant before he turned toward the window, and Willow suspected he was still trying to figure it out.
“I’m not sure what happened,” he said. “I’d like to say one of them tried to kill me or attacked me or something. At least I would have some understanding of what caused the snap. But one second I was in the room; I was having fun—”
“With all eight of them?” she blurted.
His eyes were silver shards of ice when they met hers again. Willow gulped; this wasn’t exactly her favorite story to begin with, and she had a feeling she was going to start hating it a lot more.
“It was a slow night,” he said flatly.
Her jaw almost dropped, but she somehow managed to keep it closed. However, her shock had to be written all over her face. The man he was talking about was so different than the one sitting beside her.
Because they are different. That was the Declan of five hundred years ago; this is the Declan of today.
Willow’s disbelief beat against him. He should stop; he should never have started this awful tale. But now that he had started it, he couldn’t stop. It was as if he’d opened the floodgates on his past, and there was no holding back the repulsive waters those gates once housed.
“One second, everything was fine, and the next, I was like a rabid animal as I pounced on one of them and started draining her blood. I remember having the idle thought I could let it all go, and then I was on top of her. It happened so fast, but it felt so fucking right.”
He shouldn’t be telling her this; he couldn’t stop. She was still looking at him as if he was someone who deserved sympathy, and he couldn’t take it. She had to understand he wasn’t a good man; he was a monster.
“The only reason the first woman survived is because the others tried to flee the room. The wild beat of their hearts and their screams lured me away from each victim so I could hunt my next one.”
Their screams. Their beautiful, petrified screams had resonated with the worst part of him, and he’d thrilled in it. Excitement had coursed through him; bloodlust consumed him as one after another, he tore them away from the door and sank his fangs into their throats.
“Ronan was downstairs when it started. When he heard the screams, he broke into the room and pulled me off them, but the damage was done by then. Some weren’t as bad as the others, but a few were barely alive.
“When it happened, we were still the Defenders, but our members were different than what you would consider the original members. Ronan ordered them to clean up the mess and change their memories while the establishment owner gave his blood to the ones who needed it most. That’s the only reason any of them lived.
“I was a raving madman when Ronan and two other Defenders dragged me out of there. I was desperate to finish what I’d started and pissed they stopped me.”
He could still recall the sound of his teeth clacking together as he tried to bite Ronan and the others. The smell of the blood dripping down his chin only served to enflame his compulsion to go back and finish what he started.
He didn’t have to fight against his nature anymore; he was free. And if Ronan wouldn’t let him go to finish what he started, he could at least free him by putting him out of his misery. But Ronan didn’t do either of those things.
This was the source of some of the torment she’d seen in his eyes, she realized.
“I was a monster that night,” he said. “And I still am.”
No matter what he believed about himself, she was sure he was wrong.
“You’ve been defending innocents for centuries; you came to the woods to find us, and you followed me over the cliffs and into a waterfall. That isn’t the behavior of a monster; it’s the behavior of a good, yet imperfect man,” she said.
He sat and stared at her in disbelief. Why wouldn’t she see the truth of who he was? Maybe it was because she didn’t know it all yet.
“It happened seventy years after my father turned Savage,” he said.
“Your father became a Savage?”
“Yes. So, as you can see, it runs in my blood.”
“Declan,” she breathed as sorrow twisted her heart.
“I tried to take him out, and he nearly killed me in the process. If Ronan hadn’t intervened and destroyed him, I would have died.”
“Ronan killed your father?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. That must have been awful.”
Declan shrugged, but he could never forget the heartbreak and torture he experienced at his father’s hands. He would always recall his father’s laughter as he worked to either turn Declan too or kill him.
“It was difficult for Ronan too; they were good friends before it happened,” Declan said.
However, Ronan did what was necessary to destroy the enemy and save his life. Many times over the years, Ronan had saved his life, but that night in London and the night with his father were the turning points in his life.
“Nothing was ever the same after,” he said.
“You doubted yourself more because your father gave in to his Savage nature,” Willow guessed.
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t become a Savage.”
“I came close, too close.”
“But you didn’t become a Savage,” she reiterated. “You are not your father. Did he have a mate?”
“No.”
“And neither did you until now, but you still managed to keep fighting your Savage nature.”
“I gave in.”
“And you were fortunate to have a good friend close by to save you. We all have to rely on others sometimes. There isn’t a single person or vampire in this world who hasn’t needed someone else’s help. We all falter, Declan, what matters is you let your misstep make you stronger instead of allowing it to tear you apart.”
Declan tossed the uneaten lollipop into the trash as he contemplated her words.
“What happened after they took you out of that place?” she asked.
“I was still too far gone to have any control over myself, so Ronan locked me in the dungeon of the castle we lived in at the time. I tore at those bars in such a frenzy that I shredded the skin from my hands and mouth.”
“Your mouth?”
“I tried to chew through them.”
Holy shit. She couldn’t picture this usually calm, mellow man in such a frenzy, but he painted a pretty elaborate picture.
“During one of the times he came down to see if I had calmed down at all, I asked Ronan to kill me. He’d put my father down, and I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t give me the same mercy.”
Willow’s fingers curved around the ends of her chair; she was so grateful Ronan refrained from doing that, but she didn’t understand why. “Why not? I mean, you were unraveling and dangerous; why did he keep you alive?”
Running a hand through his hair, Declan tugged at the ends of it. “After a month in captivity, I finally felt stable enough to ask the same question. He told me he saw something in me worth saving.”
“He was right.”
“It wasn’t the whole truth. He also saved me because he felt guilty about killing my father.” And about what my father did to me. “He thought he owed me something.”
“He told you this?”
He’d prefer not to get into his ability right now and the guilt, anger, and sorrow Ronan experienced after the death of his father. This was a big enough thing to throw on her without adding more.
“No, but I believe it’s true.”
It probably was, Willow allowed, but… “He still wouldn’t have saved you if he didn’t think there was something worth saving.”
“Very true,” Declan agreed.
He didn’t tell her that Ronan also blamed himself for Declan’s fuckup. During his time behind those bars, Ronan once told him he should have found Declan and rescued him from his father sooner.
However, Declan knew the responsibility of what he did to those women lay solely on his shoulders. Ronan could have gotten to his father days earlier, and he still would have slipped.