Page 24 of Born Wicked

Jon nods. “She’d been able to weave curses since she was sixteen, and she was twenty-three when we met.”

“How soon did you tell her what you are?”

Jon chuckles. “She knew there was something off about me the moment we met. She thought I was gifted myself. She’d never met another vampire before me.”

I relax back into my seat, and there’s something… satisfying about hearing this story. My entire life, I wondered about my origins, how I came into this world. And now I know.

“Was it easy?” I ask. “Between the two of you? Falling in love?”

Jon holds my eyes, and I think he understands why I’m asking. He knows what happened between Sebastian and me. He generally knows what conspired between me and Mason.

“Yeah,” he answers. “It really was. The moment I met Ingrid, I knew I wanted to spend forever with her. And she accepted me for who I was and who I’d been. She embraced all of it. The years we had together were better than all the other years of my very long life, combined. I wouldn’t trade them for anything.”

My throat is tight, and my stomach hurts just a little.

It sounds like a fairy tale, except for the part where a madman murdered her and she had to curse the love of her life so he couldn’t find her to protect him.

“You have time, Juliet,” Jon says quietly. He takes my hand, a comforting gesture. “You might have been burned, pretty damn bad, but you’ve got time. Someday, you’re going to find that person you can be every ounce of yourself with. The person you can share every complicated piece with. And they’ll be worth the wait.”

He squeezes my hand, pulling my eyes up to his. “But until then, you’re enough. While you’re waiting, don’t forget that you’re whole on your own.”

Emotions well in my eyes, and I bite my lower lip, trying to hold it all together. I’m too full, too raw. But it’s good.

“Thank you. Dad.”

CHAPTEREIGHT

It’smidnight when we land. The airport is quiet, which is nice. Jon and I take our carry-on luggage and head to the car rental counter.

“So, it’s been, like, ten years since I drove a car very regularly,” I say as we wait for the person ahead of us. “I’m kind of hoping it’s been more recently that you’ve driven?”

Jon chuckles. “Yeah, that’s fine. I can drive.”

There’s a prideful little piece of me that insists I’m a capable, independent woman and I don’t need a man to drive me around. But I do have to think of the safety of the people around me and the health of the car. Having lived in massive cities for the last ten years where it made absolutely no sense to have a car, I’m more than a little out of practice.

And as Jon and I walk out into the garage and up to our car, it’s… nice. Jon has been helping me from the moment we were reunited. But him driving me around, it’s just one of those… normal things. If the world were a more fair place, it would have been this man who taught me how to drive.

We dump our luggage in the trunk and head out into the dark. I pull up the directions on my phone and plug it in. The display of the car lights up with what direction we’re headed. It’s two freaking hours away.

I escaped the middle of nowhere. My stomach is clenching in knots as we aim in that direction.

“Gotta admit,” Jon says as we shoot through the night. “Kansas was never my favorite place to live. I mean, I loved anywhere Ingrid wanted to be, but honestly, I could never figure out what it was exactly that drew her to this state.”

“Can’t say it’s my favorite either,” I say as I look outside.

I guess it’s not really about the state. Parts of it are nice and green. And there’s something kind of beautiful about all the fields of produce. It’s so, so flat here.

It was about the trauma. The abuse. The loneliness I felt. It was about how trapped I felt when I was a child. This place is a reminder of all the anger that shaped me into the person I am.

Neither Jon nor I say much on the drive. I’m sure he’s just as lost in thought as I am. He loved Ingrid. Nothing in me questions it. For twenty-nine years, the man never knew for certain what happened to the love of his life. And now he knows for sure she’s dead.

After twenty-nine years, he’s finally going to get his closure.

I still haven’t found the heart to tell him about the necromancer. Until I am one-hundred percent certain I can bring her back, it does absolutely no good to give him hope.

As we approach the area where I grew up, I could tell Jon about that school I went to kindergarten in. When the teacher said I was never going anywhere in life. I could tell him about the other school we pass, the first place I ever punched someone. Right in the mouth in second grade. The boy told me I smelled like old garbage. I’d been sleeping on a musty mattress in the enclosed porch of a temporary placement.

I could tell him that was the grocery store I liked to go to most because no one paid much attention there, and it was easiest to steal food from.