Page 17 of Born Wicked
I roll my eyes and shake my head with a smile. “I mean, yeah. I do it all the time. You’re not special, Roman.”
He chuckles and pulls a pan from a cupboard, setting it on the stove before he lights the gas. “Seriously, though. The fact that you can die for people… That’s big, Juliet.”
I let out a long breath. “I mean, I’m pretty damn grateful it all worked out that way.” And I mean it. What if Roman really had died that day Sebastian staked him in a jealous rage? I can’t even imagine it. I’d be so damn lonely right now. For just a second, I imagine it. Roman staying dead on the floor, his skin remaining ashen gray. We would never banter or argue again. And with the thought, something in my gut shifts. I don’t know what it means yet, but I know something feels different when I look back at him. “But how am I supposed to feel about it? My other inability to die is the result of a literal curse, coming from right here.” I grab the necklace hanging from my neck with the glowing red crystal, dangling it between my fingers. “But dying for others? I never took Sigrid that seriously when she said I had a gift. Until this point, I’ve felt very clearly like a vampire. Nothing else. But this…” I shake my head.
“You’re both,” Roman says as he washes his hands, all the bacon now in the pan. “The first that I’ve ever heard of. Vampire and gifted. You’ve got one of the most powerful gifts in this city, as far as I’m concerned. The power over death? That’s not nothing.”
I shake my head and watch as Roman takes some eggs next and starts cracking them into a bowl. “It’s crazy to think about. How everything is tied together. How it all lines up. If it weren’t for my curse, I wouldn’t have this gift.”
Roman looks over his shoulder at me. There’s something serious in his eyes. “You’re the product of love, Juliet. Never forget that. Jon gave you his vampirism. Ingrid gave you a curse, gave you her gifted blood. That curse is a result of love.”
His words strike me right in the heart. I feel this rush of something I can’t quite identify go through my entire body.
I’m loved.
Past and present.
It bites at the backs of my eyes. It tightens my throat.
“Juliet?” Roman asks quietly, caution in his tone.
My eyes well as I look up at him. I feel my entire body trembling with emotion. I shake my head, not entirely sure how to word everything that’s going on inside of me.
“The first person to ever tell me they loved me was Elena,” I say. The words shake and quiver as I say them. “I was twenty-six years old, and no one had ever told me they loved me in my entire life. No parents. No foster placements. No shitty three-week-long boyfriends. It was Elena, and I was twenty-six years old.”
Roman turns off the gas and leans against the counter, facing me. He doesn’t seem uncomfortable with the heavy conversation. He doesn’t look away. He’s not judging me.
“I hoped, my entire life, that my birth dad would suddenly magically appear and take me away from all the horrible stuff I’d lived through,” I say. It’s like, now that I’ve started saying the words, I can’t stop. “I mean, I hated him to some degree because if he were there, I wouldn’t be living with people who left me to starve or people who left me to burn alive in the car wreck. But I also wanted to meet him so bad it was hard to breathe sometimes.”
I fold my arms over my stomach, clinging to myself tightly. “And my mother…” I squeeze my eyes closed, forcing out two tears onto my cheeks. “I always wished that I’d gotten just one day with her. That I even had a picture of her. I used to dream about her all the time, that she miraculously wasn’t actually dead. But there was never a face to the woman. I never knew if I even looked like her.”
I open my eyes and meet Roman’s vividly blue ones. “No one ever told me they loved me until I was twenty-six. My screwed-up past has been my entire identity. It’s shaped my entire sarcastic, bitter personality. It’s the reason my body is covered with scars. But this... I don’t know. I can hardly even comprehend it. But you’re right. I know you are.” I take in a shallow, shaking breath, and my chest swells. “I was loved. By my mother. She died saving me. And my father. He spent twenty-nine years looking for me. You don’t spend that kind of time on someone you never loved.”
“You’re really damn brave, do you know that?” Roman asks as his eyes slide over to meet mine. “I don’t know your full story Juliet, but your body pretty obviously displays some of the highlights. After everything you’ve been through, it’s impressive that you can allow others back into your life, that you can open yourself up enough to feel loved.”
I wipe away the tears that have slipped down my face. “Too bad when I opened it the widest, I got burned so bad.”
Roman shakes his head. “There’s nothing normal about Sebastian’s behavior, about how he handled things. Don’t let that bastard dictate how you feel love ever again.”
“Look at us,” I say sarcastically. “Two of the biggest assholes in the city, and we’re sitting here talking about love over breakfast.”
Roman chuckles. He turns back to the stove and scoops the bacon from the pan. He puts it on a plate and hands it over to me. “Yeah, well,” he says, his voice unexpectedly low and a little bit rough. “Somehow, you’re easy to talk to these days.”
And he isn’t wrong. Roman has been the person I’ve been able to talk to about anything lately. Once upon a time, the only person who held that honor was Elena. But there are things she doesn’t know now. I plan to fix that when she’s awake. I’m tired of secrets. But for now, Roman is it for me. He’s the only person who knows every shady little detail of what’s gone on in the last few months.
“Do you think you’ll stay in Chicago forever?” I ask. I take one of the strips of bacon from the plate and stuff it in my mouth. The second it hits my tongue, I realize how ravenously hungry I am. I down the entire thing in two point three seconds.
Roman watches me eat with amusement, but he doesn’t comment on it. “I think about leaving sometimes,” he admits. “Sometimes I feel like I’m hiding in the shell of existence. Pretending there wasn’t some other life I lived out there. I have no interest in going and looking for it, but I do know that at any moment I could turn the page in the book of my life and start an entirely new chapter.”
It’s an incredible idea when I sit and think about it. The possibility that one could start over from scratch at any moment. You could suddenly decide that you wanted to be a flower seller in Italy, pack up your things, hop on a plane, and go start an entirely new life.
“Routine is also kind of nice,” I say out loud. I look over and meet Roman’s eyes. “Growing up, there wasn’t much regularity in my life. I was always ready to pack up my things, five minutes to get all my stuff together and get in the next caseworker’s car.”
“I can’t imagine what that must’ve felt like to a child,” Roman says with sympathy.
I shrug. “I mean, it’s not like I ever knew any different. Normal is what makes up the patterns in your life. So I guess, when I bled out on that sidewalk in New York City, and Elena and Mason told me I didn’t have any choice but to come with them here to Chicago, it didn’t end my world, like it would for some other people.”
“How many placements did you have as a kid?” Roman asks. And I know it takes some bravery to ask this. When people know that there is difficulty in your past, they usually don’t want to dig into the details. Usually, they’re too scared to know the truth. But Roman has never been one to turn away from a difficult situation.