Ashes of Midnight by Lara Adrián Page B

her but rightly deserved.
     
“We both moved on, didn’t we, Andre?”
     
“You certainly did.”
     
“What did you expect me to do? You were the one who left, remember?”
     
He thought about the abrupt way he’d left things with her: unfinished, unexplained. He thought about his reasons, ironically none of which mattered anymore. Certainly not after what had happened last night. “I couldn’t stay.”
     
“You couldn’t even tell me why? One day we were together and the next you were gone without a word.”
     
“I had things to work out,” he said.
     
God, he hated that he was still able to feel the punch ofuncontainable fear—of shock and overwhelming self-revulsion—that had forced him to run away from everything and everyone he knew and loved. After what happened to him the last time he saw Claire, he’d had no choice but to leave her. He hadn’t wanted to harm her, and he couldn’t trust himself to be near her, or near anyone, until he’d managed to control the horrific power that had been awakened in him for the first time all those years ago. By that time, he had already lost her to Roth.
     
He gave her a negligent shrug. “I did come back, Claire.”
     
“More than a year later,” she replied curtly “Or so I heard, after friends in the Darkhavens told me you had finally turned up, back in Berlin again.” She shook her head, regret shining in her gaze. “I didn’t think you would ever come back.”
     
“So you didn’t wait.”
     
“Did you give me any reason to?”
     
“No,” he said, letting the word slide slowly off his tongue.
     
There was more he wanted to say, things he probably owed her to say, but it was all pointless talk now. Claire was right. They’d both moved on. They’d both lived very separate lives, and despite the fact that those lives were converging now, in violence and bloodshed, nothing he could say would change a thing about the past or what might have been. He was here for one reason: to avenge the wrong that Wilhelm Roth had delivered on him.
     
Reichen started walking again.
     
Claire trailed him, hanging back now as though she didn’t want to get too close. “What are you doing?”
     
“I told you. Looking for any intel on your mate’s whereabouts.”
     
“And I told you—you won’t find anything of his here. This is my home, not his.”
     
Reichen heard the peculiar comment but he was already moving on. He saw a room filled with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and headed for that open door.
     
“Andreas,” Claire said from behind him. “Please, stop this. The library is my space. It’s private. You won’t find anything important in—”
     
“Then you won’t mind if I have a look,” he said, more intent than ever since she was practically insisting that he stay out.
     
What was she hiding in there? He strode past towering shelf after shelf packed with books, past the small sofa and the end table where a ginger-jar lamp still glowed from the night before. Farther into the room, he saw a dark walnut desk in a mild state of disarray, as if the work had been abandoned in haste.
     
And beyond the desk, spread out on a wide worktable, was some kind of architect’s scale model. Reichen guessed it to be some kind of Darkhaven project—something that would probably result in another photograph of Claire and her perfect smile, posing as the perfect mate next to Roth and a number of his cronies. But as he neared the model, the hairs at the back of his neck began to rise.
     
He knew this piece of land.
     
He knew the shape of it, the look of it… the feel of it.
     
It was his .
     
The lakefront wedge of property on the model was the site of his Darkhaven. Or, rather, it had been, before Roth’s treachery and Reichen’s own despair had left it in ruined rubble.
     
“What the hell is this?”
     
Claire came up beside him, her expression anxious.“Andreas, everyone thought you were dead. There were no heirs alive to claim the property. It was going to be auctioned among the rest of the Berlin