“Maybe,” I said. “Tenoch believed it when it came to me, though. I—I thought he’d stopped fearing me because we’d been through so much. Then he died, and Vlad began manifesting powers he couldn’t have on his own.” I tried to laugh, but it came out as a strangled sob. “Tenoch must’ve thought Mencheres wouldn’t be enough to take me down. Mencheres had sunk into a depression after his first wife left him and began plotting against him. So, Tenoch dumped the last of his legacy powers into Vlad, then killed himself with a horde of ghouls two weeks later.”

Leaving me reeling with grief, guilt and a resounding sense of culpability, once I’d put it all together.

“No wonder you refer to your other abilities as a separate person.” Ian’s voice was very soft. “It’s how you compartmentalized the pain when it was too much to bear.”

Once, I would’ve argued. Now, I closed my eyes. “Perhaps.”

“Tenoch was still a bloody fool.”

My eyes snapped open in time to see my vision flash with black. Ian didn’t flinch from the rage he had to see as well as scent.

“He might have been well-intentioned, but like millions of parents who reject their children over things they don’t understand, Tenoch was wrong. You are exactly as you should be, and it’s Tenoch’s loss that he never realized that.”

Anguish tightened my muscles until it felt like I was being beaten from the inside. “You didn’t see what I did—”

“As a new vampire dealing with incredibly heightened senses and emotions that doubtless activated the abilities in your other nature?” Ian made a contemptuous noise. “I don’t have to see it to know a slip of supernatural control doesn’t make you a monster that needs to be exterminated. Yes, your power can be dangerous, but the same can be said for your vampire side. Or your human one, when that applied.”

“Tenoch would never have gone to such extremes unless he knew it was the only way!”

I’d repeated that to myself countless times over the centuries. Otherwise, the knowledge that Tenoch had still considered me a threat to be eliminated when he died would break me.

“Fear can make people do terrible things, even to the ones they love,” Ian replied in a softer tone. “You know that. You just can’t bring yourself to admit it when it comes to Tenoch. Makes you feel disloyal, and that’s just the beginning. When you realize it was Tenoch who was wrong, not you, you have to confront the fact that you stuffed half of yourself into a cage merely to appease the fears of a man who should have loved you unconditionally because that is a parent’s bloody job.”

“He did love me! He just knew the other half of me could never be trusted—”

“Bollocks,” Ian said crisply. “He never bothered to find out. He saw your father, shat himself in terror, then made up his mind that something that powerful had to be evil. That’s why he shat himself again when he saw those same powers in you, but whatever you did was no more innately evil than a new vampire losing control from blood cravings. Are all of them evil, too?”

“No, but . . .” Dammit, now he was confusing me!

“No is right. They’re simply untrained. You were, too, and instead of training you to control your power, Tenoch made you fear and suppress it.”

“Because I hurt people with it,” I snapped.

“Did they deserve it?” he countered. “I’ll wager they did, because when your other nature broke free after I died, you didn’t hurt innocents. Instead, you took out the demons who’d tried to kill us, and you forsook eons of vengeance against Dagon in order to pull me back from the grave. When that half of you grabbed the wheel again, you repeatedly protected me, propositioned me—my favorite part—and saved dozens of humans from drowning beneath a toppled house. Show me the evil in any of that.”

Well . . . I couldn’t, if I was looking at it objectively. But if Ian was right, Tenoch had punished me for simply existing, and the man who’d rescued me, protected me, and loved me when no one else had couldn’t have made such a colossal mistake. Could he?

No. Ian hadn’t seen what Tenoch had seen back when vampires from a rival clan had kidnapped me in an attempt to force Tenoch to side with them. What I’d done had made Tenoch fear me for the rest of his life. How could I discount that?

“You’re ignoring the fact that I wanted to do those good deeds.” My voice was flat. “What happens if I want to do something terrible when my other half is in control?”

Ian snorted. “Then the person you do it to will richly deserve it. You wouldn’t even murder your second-worst enemy when you thought she hadn’t remembered her foul deeds. I would’ve cheerfully slaughtered Ereshki, and I don’t have your supposedly malevolent other nature. Don’t blame it on Dagon’s power in me, either. I know what I am capable of without it.”

Each point bashed at walls that housed my long-buried doubts, hurt, and anger. I hadn’t always taken Tenoch at his word about me. It hadn’t seemed right that everyone else could mold their character based on their actions, while I had to accept that I was born defective. But, as Ian predicted, wondering if Tenoch had been wrong made the ground feel like it disappeared beneath me. Believing Tenoch had been the basis for almost everything I’d done. If I ripped that belief away now, how did I put myself back together? In many ways, it was easier to continue to believe Tenoch than confront the possibility that I’d lived my entire life based on a lie that the sire I adored had told me.

“That’s different,” I said to cover my roiling emotions.

He sighed. “It isn’t. You are one of the finest people I’ve met, to my great exasperation. If you were more selfish, you wouldn’t have stayed away from me after I was first brought back from the dead. You also wouldn’t have spared the little bitch we now have to track down, and you wouldn’t have caged half yourself away to the point that you damn near have a split personality. But you are ridiculously unselfish, which is one of the reasons I so enjoy holding you down to pleasure you before allowing you to touch me,” he added almost offhandedly. “You’re so used to putting yourself last that I truly savor making you come before I’m even inside you.”

This must be what emotional whiplash felt like. One moment, I was frustrated over his flattering but incorrect portrayal of me, and in the next, I was looking at his mouth and thinking of all the ways he had used it on me.

“You’re maddening,” I finally said, too jumbled on the inside to come up with anything more articulate.

He laughed. “Back at you. Leila cursed me right and proper when she bade me to fall in love with someone like you.”

“Good thing Leila isn’t a real witch or that curse might’ve stuck,” I muttered without thinking.

He cocked his head. “Whatever do you mean?”

I hadn’t intended to bring this up. With everything else we’d touched upon, the last thing I needed was to confront Ian with what he didn’t feel for me. “Never mind.”

He came closer, that relentless gaze pinning mine. “Don’t put me off. What do you mean?”

Fuck it, why not? I thought despairingly. I’d have to spend years processing all the points he’d brought up about me. Why not give him something to think about, too?