Bound in Blood (Broken Bloodlines Book 3)
Bound in Blood: Chapter 32

Ophelia hands me a wet cloth and flashes me her sweet smile. “Can you wipe down the table, and I’ll load the dishwasher?”

I draw a breath through my nose and let it out with a growl. “There are many other things I would rather be doing with and to you right now, little one.” Renewing our bond last night has only increased my desire for her and her blood.

She rolls her eyes and giggles. “We agreed to do clean-up duty while the guys went to the store. You cannot possibly need any more sex today after last night and this morning. I won’t be able to walk by tonight.”

I slide my arms around her waist. “I think you are forgetting that your powers of healing ensure you have no such problems with walking, or any other more pleasant activities, no matter how many times you indulge in them, Ophelia.”

She tips her head back, a laugh bubbling from her lips before it cuts off abruptly and her eyes widen in horror. Her fingernails dig into the muscles of my forearm.

I sense no danger nearby, but she is clearly feeling something. “Ophelia? What is it?”

“He’s here,” she whispers.

“Who is here?”

“Hello, Father.” The voice answers my question and cuts through me with surgical precision. An ice-cold shadow passes over my soul, and a dozen different emotions run through my body all at once as the moment seems to stretch out into eternity. I push every single one down where they cannot escape and cloud my judgment.

Spinning around, I push Ophelia behind me and face him. The dam breaks. Everything hits me at once. Rage, betrayal, and despair. Loss, guilt, regret. Relief. They barrel into me with the force of a steam train and steal the breath from my lungs. His face … No trace of the sunken black holes infested with maggots where his eyes should be, no mouth full of black rotting teeth—the image I always conjure in my mind’s eye when I think of him. He is just as he was when he left home as a young man. Almost a mirror image of me.

He cocks an eyebrow. “Surprised to see me?” His voice drips with disdain.

From somewhere deep within, I replace the strength to swallow down every feeling he provokes in me, the bad and the good. “Lucian. What do you want?”

“We meet once again, Ophelia.” He glances behind me, where Ophelia peers over my shoulder, and I let out a vicious snarl in warning.

Of all the emotions raging against the walls I have built around them, anger is the one that seeps out and simmers directly beneath my skin now. “If you so much as think about touching her⁠—”

He rolls his eyes. “If I had any intention of causing harm to Ophelia, then I would have done it when we came face-to-face within the mountain cave.” He tilts his head to the side, his hazel eyes narrowed as he scrutinizes us both. He looks so much like his mother and sisters, and all of our faces seem to peer back at me at once, making it impossible for me to look at him. “Or any of the many other times I’ve met her during the past nineteen years.”

Ophelia’s breath catches in her throat.

Both jealousy and confusion slam into me. I keep her pinned behind me and demand, “What other times?”

He glances toward the chair Xavier used when we joined Ophelia for lunch only a short time ago. “May I?”

I growl. “After everything you have done? Everything!” I roar, unable to contain the voracity of my fury for a second longer. “And you ask to sit at my fucking table?”

He wrinkles his nose. “The Brackenwolf family table, if I’m not mistaken. So may I?”

We should hear him out. He might have answers. Ophelia’s sweet voice seeps into my thoughts and soothes a little of the rage inside me.

“If your little elementai is telling you to listen to what I have to say, I think you should probably heed her. You might despise me, Father …” He says the word like it is an insult. And perhaps from his lips, it is. But there was a time when he was my greatest joy in life. My firstborn son. He sucks on his teeth, his eyes boring into mine. “But the feeling is mutual. Besides, I think we both have a few things we need to get off our chests, do we not?”

Get off our chests? That is the understatement of the millennium. I have plenty I need to say to him. So many questions to ask. They race around my head at lightning speed. But I would much rather have this conversation without putting Ophelia in danger by having her spend any further time in his presence.

My curious elementai breaks the ice for us. “When have we met before? Other than the cave, I mean. I don’t remember you.” She takes a cautious step out from behind me, but I keep my arm around her.

Lucian takes the seat he was not offered and runs a hand over his stubbled jaw. “It is far too long and complicated of a story to explain right now.”

“You have been to Montridge.” My words sound like an accusation, which I suppose they are.

“Yes, I have been to Montridge. Once since Ophelia began attending there.”

“On the day the wolf girl was murdered?”

He nods.

“I saw you, but I hoped I was mistaken. In the young vampires’ minds. You controlled them somehow. You forced them to kill that girl.”

He scowls. “Of course you would think that.”

I bang my fist on the table. “I saw you, Lucian.”

“And you of all people know how easily a memory can be manipulated. Yes, I was there, but I”—he jabs a finger into his chest—“did not force them to do anything. The Skotádi have access to dark magic that can turn even angels into demons. They can do anything they want to …” He hisses out a breath, his eyes wild.

“You would know. You were their leader, were you not?”

“I was never their leader,” he scoffs. “Another lie dear old Uncle Giorgios told you.”

I bristle at the mention of my brother’s name. “Giorgios told Ophelia and my sireds you killed me.”

Lucian growls, his teeth bared in warning. “It wouldn’t be the first time my uncle has blamed me for a crime I didn’t commit.”

All I can see when I look at him is the boy he was—the man he was before the Skotádi turned him to the darkness. And then I recall the sight of him in our family home, holding his sisters in his arms and their still-beating hearts in his hands as he sobbed for them. He was the only person in the room. The only person his mother would have allowed to enter the house aside from Giorgios and me, and Giorgios was with me the entire time. Still, there is a part of me that wants to believe he is incapable of such cruelty, just as I did that day. So I ask him again. “Tell me you did not do it. Tell me it was not you, Lucian. Please.”

His hazel eyes, so cold and unfeeling before now, fill with tears. “I wish I could. I wish I did not see their faces every single time I close my eyes. That I did not feel their hearts beating in my hands after I tore them from their chests or smell the blood that soaked through my clothes. I wish I could clean their blood from beneath my fingernails.” He holds up his hands. “But over five hundred years later and I still cannot!” He drops his head.

Anger and bitter sadness fill the room, and I am no longer sure which feelings are his and which are mine. I do not know how he severed our bond, but it is as though seeing him has put it back in place.

“No.” I shake my head. “They were your sisters. And your own mother. You adored them, Lucian. I know you did.” Tears stream down my face, and I am unable and unwilling to stop them.

They were everything to me, but that does not mean I am not a monster.

It takes me a few seconds to realize that he did not say those words aloud.

He looks up at me, his expression full of terrified fury now, and he shrieks like a wounded animal. “Get out! Get out of my head!” As he scrambles backward, the chair hits the ground, and he stumbles over it. “How are you doing that? I blocked you. You’re not supposed to be in there!” He grabs fistfuls of his hair and pulls. “Get out of my fucking head!” he screams.

Get out. Get out. Get out. He chants the words silently over and over again, preventing me from hearing anything else.

He is in clear distress, his thoughts and actions deranged, and it tugs at something paternal that is buried deep inside me. I cannot resist the urge to soothe him. “I am sorry, Lucian. I did not mean to.”

But he carries on like he cannot hear me.

“Lucian.” Ophelia says his name, and he whips his head around to look at her, his chest heaving and eyes wild. “It’s okay. Sit down, please, and we can talk some more.”

“No.” He shakes his head vigorously as he backs away toward the door. “I have to get out of here.” Before he goes, he points a finger in my direction. “You—stay out of my fucking head. I don’t want you there. You have no right. If you couldn’t be there when I needed you … When I really fucking needed you …” Tears are squeezed from the corners of his eyes. “You have no fucking right.”

Frozen to the spot, I can do nothing but watch him leave. I expected to feel anger and betrayal, but the overwhelming feelings that remain now that he is gone are sadness and confusion.

“How did I fail him so badly, Ophelia?”

She does not reply. Instead, she climbs onto my lap and wraps her arms around me. I bury my head against her neck.

And I cry. Not a few tears, but a torrent of them. Every single one that I have held onto for the past five hundred years. I was a terrible father to him. I let them all down so badly. And for the rest of my life, no matter what I do, I will never be able to change that.