Chapter Sixteen
Madison stepped over the threshold of Roman’s small house in the woods, grateful for the warmth of the coals smoldering in the fireplace. She couldn’t get Simon’s confession out of her head.
She trailed over to the hearth and added more wood to the dying flames. How had his wife and child died? He’d said they were killed; but how and by whom? Dozens of unanswered questions invaded her mind, swirling through her psyche in a whirlwind of chaos.
Simon locked the door and strode through the room to disappear down the hall.
Should she go after him or leave him be? Perhaps he needed time alone after she’d stirred his painful memories to life? Madison decided to follow him. She would simply check on him, and if he desired to be alone, she would give him his space.
“May I come in?” She’d stopped outside the only closed door in the hallway. “Simon?”
Silence. She gripped the knob and slowly turned it. “Simon?”
“I’ll be out in a minute.”
Madison hesitated. Something in his voice sounded off. She eased the door open and poked her head inside the room.
Simon stood with his back to her, his hands resting on the wall on either side of the window he stared out.
He stiffened when she stepped into the room. “That’s far enough.”
“I’m sorry for what I said. If I had known it would bring up unpleasant memories, I—”
“Unpleasant?” He turned to face her, laughing without humor. “They died in a way no human being should ever have to endure.”
Madison swallowed around the sudden lump in her throat, stepping farther into the room. “Tell me what happened to them.”
Simon stared back at her so long, she was beginning to regret her decision to seek him out. And then he spoke, softly at first, his voice growing in strength. “I haven’t thought about that night in years. I’ve always heard that time heals all wounds, and I suppose it does to a certain degree. But two thousand years later, and I can still see my son’s lifeless eyes staring back at me from his crib.”
Horrified by what Simon had revealed, Madison took a seat on the side of an old bed that occupied the room and fought back the emotion threatening to choke her.
Simon ran a hand down his face, lowering his weight next to her on the bed. “It was just after dark when I arrived home from the fields. I knew something was wrong the moment I rounded the stables.”
Madison listened intently, her mind attempting to visualize the scene Simon laid out before her.
“I heard a sound coming from the house,” he continued in a wooden voice. “It reminded me of an injured sheep I’d once rescued from a trap. I began to run. The closer I got to the house, the fainter the sound became. I burst through the door to find my wife’s nude body, pinned to the kitchen table by four men. She’d been assaulted, defiled, and stabbed multiple times. Our son lay in his crib, not six feet away, his eyes open and lifeless.”
A shudder passed through Simon’s tall frame. “I don’t remember much of what happened after that. I awoke a few nights later, lying in a pool of my wife’s blood…and no one to explain to me what I’d become.”
“What you’d become?”
He rubbed his palms up and down his cotton covered thighs, continuing his story as if Madison hadn’t spoken. “That’s when I met Svetlana. She appeared shortly after with a gift.”
“A gift?” Madison quietly interjected.
Simon didn’t answer right away. “Yeah. Dinner, if you will.”
“Oh…”
“I wouldn’t do it. Not right then at any rate. But the longer I resisted, the stronger the thirst grew…until I became powerless to stop it. Once I had a taste of human blood, there was no turning back.”
Madison studied his profile. “When you say there was no turning back, do you mean you had a choice?”
Simon nodded. “I could have walked out into the sunlight and ended it all.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t ready to die. At least not until I found the men who had taken my wife and son from me.”
Madison’s mouth fell open. “But I thought Svetlana was responsible for their deaths.”
“She was, but I didn’t know that at the time. She confessed one night while she fed from me.”
Unable to comprehend the horror of Simon’s story, Madison could only watch him in wide-eyed disbelief.
Simon continued. “Rage, unlike any I’d ever known, came over me. I attacked her, I even injured her, but I couldn’t kill her. She laughed this hideous sound and informed me that one cannot destroy their maker. I still hear that laugh in my dreams.”
Madison couldn’t prevent herself from touching him if she’d wanted to. She rested her palm over the back of his hand. “Svetlana sent those men to your home.” It wasn’t a question.
Simon turned his hand over and interlocked their fingers. “She did.”
“But why? I mean, I know she’s a sadistic bitch, but why go into a home and kill an innocent child?”
“She wanted me,” Simon simply said.
Madison stared at Simon’s handsome profile, attempting to understand what the female vampire saw in him that made her crazy.
He turned to face her just then, and blasted her with those baby blue’s. Yeah, Madison saw it then. Damn me…