Ashes of Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page A

must be dreaming, right? This isn’t real. It can’t be …”
     
The words came haltingly, sounding weak, choked in her throat. Despite the intense heat pouring off him, she lifted her hand as if she meant to reach out for him. “I thought you were dead, Andreas. All these three months since the fire destroyed your Darkhaven… I believed that you were dead.”
     
Reichen snarled at the threat of her touch. On a startled gasp, Claire snatched her arm back. She rubbed the fingers that would have incinerated on contact with him, no doubt feeling some measure of that truth on her unprotected skin.
     
Her confusion was clear. As was her horror. “Good lord, what’s happened to you?”
     
Of course she wouldn’t know. He had been different when she knew him. Christ, everything had been different then. The heat that lived in him now had been cold and dormant, lurking deep beneath even his own awareness—until the hellish power of it had been beaten and tortured out of him for the first time some thirty years ago.
     
It had taken all he had and all that he was to snuff theaccursed power and hold it down inside him. It had been so long since the heat had risen in him, he’d actually been fool enough to believe he’d driven the heat back for good. But it was still there, banked but smoldering. Waiting for the slightest chance to ignite while he strove to deny its very existence.
     
He had lived a lie for the past three decades, only to have it erupt in his face.
     
Now he would never be the same. Now Wilhelm Roth’s treachery had reawakened that monstrous side of him. Now grief and anger had invited the terrible ability back into his life, and the fires were always burning inside him.
     
They were beginning to rule him.
     
To destroy him.
     
And because of the ruthless actions of her mate, Claire was seeing that hideous truth with her own eyes.
     
No, he would never be the same again.
     
And he would not rest until he had his vengeance.
     
Through the flames, Claire’s eyes searched his, part in worry, part in pity. “I don’t understand what’s going on, Andre. Why are you like this? Tell me what’s happened to you.”
     
He hated the concern in her voice. He didn’t want to hear it, not from Roth’s mate.
     
“Please, talk to me, Andre.”
     
Andre . Only she had called him that. After her, he’d not permitted anyone to become that familiar—that intimate—with him. After her, there had been many things he’d not dared permit, of himself or others.
     
The sound of his name on her lips now was a pain he hadn’t anticipated. Reichen bared his teeth and fangs in a sneer meant to cower her, but she wouldn’t relent with her demand for answers.
     
“Who, Andre … who has done this to you?” He let the fire of his rage wash over him, his voice as rough as gravel in his throat. “The bastard who sent his death squad into my home to slaughter my kin in cold blood. Wilhelm Roth.”
     
     
“Impossible,” Claire heard herself say, although whether she meant the awful charge against Wilhelm or the fact that Andreas Reichen was very much alive—alive and unfathomably lethal—not even she was certain. “You need help, Andre. Whatever has happened to you to make you like this … no matter what you’ve done tonight… you need help.”
     
He scoffed, dark and dangerous. It was an animalistic sound, matched by the feral look in his eyes. His rage was obvious, a force so immense his body didn’t seem able to contain it. Claire’s gaze swept over him, over the pulsing currents of heat that ringed his limbs and torso and distorted his facial features to something monstrous and inhuman.
     
God in heaven.
     
This hellish heat was his rage.
     
“Oh, Andre,” she whispered, her heart tightening despite the confusion of emotions tumbling through her. “I know how you must be hurting. I hurt for you, too, when I learned what happened at your Darkhaven.”
     
“Fifteen lives,” he snarled. “All dead. Even the children.”
     
Pained to think of