I stared at him in horror. He asked of me the one thing I could never give. He was asking me to live out my greatest fear of being discovered for what I really was. He was asking me to relive the horrors of my childhood and revisit my brokenness. I shook my head. “I can’t do that, Aiden. You’re practically asking for my soul.”

“That’s the price of trust, Cam. Openness. Vulnerability. The ability to risk getting hurt. And don’t think for one second that you can lie to me. I know you well enough to know if you’re just giving me some crap story that you made up. Tell me the truth about who you are. The whole truth. Can you do that?”

“What if I can’t?”

“Then I can’t trust you, can I?”

“Aiden, please…”

“I’ve given my condition, Camilla.”

I shook my head and buried my face in my palms. It felt like defeat. I never felt weaker than I did at that moment.

When I didn’t respond for what felt like an eternity, Aiden nodded and motioned to leave. “Let me know when you’re ready to give in to my condition, Cam.”

Cam… He hasn’t called me that in years… Not since… I held my breath when he turned his back on me. He was about to call for Yuri when I did the most courageous thing I’d done in years. “Wait…”

Slowly, Aiden turned to face me. His brow rose at me in question.

I nodded, letting him know that I was agreeing to his condition. It was perhaps the most painful night I ever had in years and it took hours. It took many tears. I told him everything. He held me. He gave me the comfort that I was deprived of through all those years of abuse at my foster parents’ hands.

I knew that what I was telling him made Claudia’s experience seem like child’s play. My foster parents were violent, merciless people and growing up with them was a living nightmare. They helped me through high school and even got me a scholarship for college, but nothing came for free around them. Everything had a price and I was often the payment they required. Not money, definitely not gratefulness – me, all of me – my body, my dignity, my very soul.

No man had ever stood up for me before. I knew what it was like to feel helpless and abandoned. Even when I got away from their grasp, I was still haunted by what they put me through. Then came Aiden.

Aiden was the man of my life. I never felt like I deserved him. Surely someone as perfect as him didn’t deserve someone as broken as me, but he came into my life and he made me feel like I could be whole again. Still, around him, I was pretending. I knew that I was a broken creature, and my full awareness of that reality couldn’t allow even his love to fix me.

I told Aiden what it was like to be married to him, what I felt like around him – how unworthy I was.

That night, Aiden listened. He barely even said any words of comfort. He just held me and let me cry into his shoulder as I told him horror story after horror story of all the terrible things I went through as a child and how it made me the woman I was.

When I finally finished telling him my story, he kissed me on the forehead and told me that he still loved Camilla and that he always will.

“Your past can never change that,” he assured me.

I gained his trust that night and in doing so, I had to pay the ultimate price. I had to bare my soul to him and let him see all its emptiness – an emptiness that his love and acceptance was able to fill. I knew what that meant. I knew that should I become vulnerable to Aiden – completely vulnerable to him – it would make what I had to do even harder than it already was.

He made love to me – gentle and tender as always – but not lacking in passion. When I woke up next to him, I realized that I was now faced with a new dilemma. Secured by the love Aiden still had for me, I searched myself for any hatred I still harbored toward my daughter and found not a single trace of it left. I no longer wanted to kill Sofia, but I was still forced to.

Chapter 19: Vivienne

I sensed her presence the moment she was brought within the vicinity of the island. Emilia. My heart began to race and my pulse doubled its pace. I dropped my shearing scissors and bolted out of my greenhouse.

“She can’t be back,” I began to mumble. “She can’t be here in The Shade.” Following my instincts, I sped towards The Sanctuary and sure enough, I found Xavier gently laying an unconscious Emilia on the bed inside one of the chambers.

Derek and Sofia stood nearby. Ashley was standing by the bed, holding a packet of blood, which I was certain was meant to heal Emilia. Corrine, on the other hand, was seated on an ottoman by the wall, staring suspiciously at Emilia.

“What’s going on?” I demanded. All eyes turned toward me as I stepped forward. “What is she doing back at the island? At the The Sanctuary of all places?”

“She needs care, Vivienne…” Sofia explained.

“Then she should get it from her own people, not from us. I don’t trust her.”

“Neither do we, Vivienne,” Derek spoke up, “but what are we going to do with her? She washed up on the shore and she’s beaten to a bloody pulp. We can’t just leave her out to die…”

That’s exactly what we should do. I knew that I was being ruthless, perhaps even dark and cold, but every fiber of my being wanted Emilia off the island. I turned my eyes toward the witch for help, but Corrine just gave me a shrug in response. I stared at Emilia’s motionless form. I shook my head. “This doesn’t feel right. It’s too much of a coincidence…”

Derek creased his brows at me. “What’s too much of a coincidence?”

As twins, Derek and I always had a strange connection. It’d been there when we were kids. I had a way of instinctively knowing his dreams or figuring out what was going through his mind at certain points, especially when it was needed.

“You’ve been dreaming about her. You saw her at the exact same spot you found her, did you not? At the shore near the Lighthouse? You thought she was Cora… The fact that it actually happened, you think it’s just coincidence?”

Derek shifted his weight from one foot to another as if he didn’t remember the dream and it just suddenly became clear to him. “I have to admit that it’s strange. But it was just a dream.”

I watched Sofia for a reaction. She looked at Derek in question. “You’ve been dreaming about Cora too?”

Derek shook his head. “No… This one… I remember the dream now. It’s just as Vivienne said. I saw it exactly like this. This was the exact same spot that I found Cora hundreds of years ago. I dreamed about it, I thought it was Cora who was on the beach, but it turned out to be Emilia.”

Sofia nodded, wrinkling her nose in thought. The idea of my brother being able to tell Sofia these things made me feel better about the situation, but I still could not deny the threat I felt just by seeing Emilia there. I knew that she was a source of power that we couldn’t afford to underestimate.

Xavier, one of my closest friends, stared at me inquisitively. He knew me well enough to know that I wouldn’t be objecting this much if I didn’t feel ill at ease around Emilia. “Maybe it’s better we leave her this way…” He frowned.

Sofia objected. “We can take her down if she decides to fight against us once she heals. With all four of you vampires and Corrine here, she won’t stand a chance no matter how powerful she is, but we can’t just leave her like this. It’s inhumane.”

I grimaced at the way Sofia called it “inhumane” as if the creature we were talking about was anything close to being human. “She’s not human, Sofia.”

“Maybe so, but I am, Vivienne, and lest you forget, a part of you is too…”

That silenced me. How could it not? Ever since Sofia became a part of our lives, we seemed to be obsessed with getting our humanity back – humanity that we long ago tried to silence.

Ashley looked from one person to the other, still clutching the bag of human blood in her hand. “Are we going to feed the blood to her or not? It’s not like she’s going to die if we don’t. It will just take her longer to heal, right?”

“I don’t see why we should prolong her agony…” Sofia stood her ground. “It doesn’t seem right.”

I knew her well enough to know what her greatest weakness was her compassion. She seemed to have a never-ending supply of it and although I respected that about her, there were times when we couldn’t afford to let our compassion get us into trouble. That was exactly what that woman was going to bring: trouble.

Still, I was outnumbered and just by the look on Derek’s face, I could tell that he wasn’t going to abandon Emilia. Not knowing what to do, I stormed out of The Sanctuary. I couldn’t have imagined how big a mistake that was.

I’d barely just walked out the large doors that led outside The Sanctuary when, as I expected, Xavier came running after me.

“Vivienne! What’s going on?” He held my arm to make me face him. We were already in the gardens outside of the white temple-like structure. “It’s unlike you to object to helping someone – anyone – no matter what you feel about the person, and it’s not like you to just storm off like that. What’s wrong?”

I wasn’t being myself and I knew it. I was known in The Shade as the calm and collected one, as the seer, but after my return from hunter territory, I couldn’t find that cool that I always managed to be in. I was afraid. Extremely afraid – in a way I never was before, and I had no idea how to handle it. “You saw how the original vampire killed my father, Xavier.”

The memory of my father’s body, drained of all blood, impaled on a pole in the middle of The Vale’s town square was forever etched in my mind. None of us had any idea how the original vampire did it, but he was able to kill my father even while Gregor was locked up in The Shade. He left a message – carved into my father’s flesh: You chose the wrong side.

I loved my father and I knew that he loved me. I knew that he was willing to start anew, to change. I saw it in his eyes the last time I got to spend time with him. The Elder robbed him of that. I was still mourning the death of my father and my brother, Lucas. I wasn’t about to mourn Derek’s. With Emilia being in the island, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my twin was in grave danger.