I shrugged. “Guess I’ve had other things on my mind.”
“I’m so sorry.” He swept me into his arms and held me against his chest for a second, cupping the back of my head with his ultra cold hand. “I’m a terrible friend. I should have—”
“It’s not your fault, Jase.” I patted his chest and stood back. “There was nothing really to tell. My mom died in childbirth, and my dad was killed in Iraq.”
“Amara.” Arthur’s hand came down on my shoulder; I turned around to face him. “I am truly sorry. David and I had agreed to tell you in time, but—”
“David didn’t tell me, Arthur. I called my dad.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you knew?” Jase asked.
I looked back at him. “Because, in the same conversation where I told David I knew about my mom, I also told him about the headaches, and then he approved the lab.”
Jason smiled, leaning on the railing again, and Arthur and I followed suit.
“How’s things going at Elysium?” Arthur asked. “Have they worked their way through most of the prisoners now?”
“Mm-hm.” I sipped my drink as I nodded. “But a few of them have to go to the mental asylum.”
Arthur and Jason exchanged glances.
“Pepper inclusive,” I probed, keeping my gaze on the horizon.
“I’m not surprised,” Arthur said, turning to lean his back on the rail. “I saw her a year or so ago, and requested they move her then.”
“Why didn’t they?”
“Drake denied the motion.”
“Why?”
“David was gone at the time. And . . . I guess Drake saw it as a method of revenge for his defection, perhaps,” Arthur mused.
My lip curled. “That’s so cruel.”
“He can be a cruel man.”
I looked up at Arthur for a second and watched his blue eyes wander in thought. He looked younger when he was absent from his mind, his features so much softer and almost kind of sad looking.
“Don’t you both think that, maybe it’s time for me to know what happened to her—to Pepper?” I waited then, letting the idea sink in for them. “Clearly, I’m not going to dump David if I find out he’s a masochistic torturer.” I held up my ring hand. “If I haven’t left him yet, chances are, I’m not going to.”
Arthur smiled down at me, but when he looked at Jase, he frowned.
“Jase?” I caught the same vibe Arthur had.
Jason bent down with a huge sigh and left his wineglass by his feet, standing back up again slowly. “You’re right, Ara. You should know.”
“Yes,” Arthur said suggestively, his wide eyes arresting Jason’s boyish confidence. “She should really know everything, shouldn’t she?”
“In good time,” Jase said. “We’ll start with Pepper, and see how we go from there.”
Arthur seemed to agree, stepping back and offering the floor to Jase while he went to grab another glass.
“They were in love,” Jase began. “As much any two vampire souls had ever been, but David's desperation to be a council member started to waver from the day he met Pepper. He was missing meetings, failing to complete tasks, and staring in dreamy-eyed gazes when he should have been carrying out punishments. The last straw was when he set a prisoner free without torture.”
“He set someone free?” I asked, nearly leaping over the balcony in disbelief.
“He wasn’t always as a harsh a man as he is now,” Arthur added, standing beside me again.
“So, what did the prisoner do, the one he set free? Was it a horrid crime?”
“He’d unlawfully turned a human,” Arthur said. “And David quite simply said that he understood how love could madden a man and force him to do things he wouldn’t normally do.”
I stared out to sea. “That doesn’t sound like my David.”
“It wasn’t the David any of us knew,” Jason said. “He was even getting along—or trying to—get along with me.”
I smiled, rubbing Jase’s arm, then turned my head to look at Arthur. “So Pepper was a good influence on him?”
“In ways.” Arthur nodded. “Well, enough that David had planned to ask her to marry him—”
“What?”
“He had the ring his grandmother passed down,” Arthur continued. “And he’d set the date and the time he would do it.”
“But. . .” I thought back to the day he told me about the one and only vampire he’d ever wanted to marry.
“Who was it?” Jason asked, coming up off the railing just a little.
“Who was what?” Arthur asked, confused.
“Ara was just thinking that David told her he’d only ever wanted to be with one vampire, and it wasn’t Pepper.”
“Who then?”
“Morg,” I said, my tone rising in question on the end.
Arthur and Jason broke into a gusty fit of laughter.
“That is a big, fat lie, right there,” Jason said, failing to compose himself. “They hated each other.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” Arthur said, sobering a little. “I suspect David told you it was Morgaine so you wouldn’t keep asking.”
I nodded. “Well, it worked.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t keep asking after that, anyway,” Jason said, leaning down again. “He and Morg are incredibly mismatched.”
“I just figured it was in another time, you know, and that people change.”
Jase wiped his mouth. “Not that much.”
“Right. So, what was Pepper like then?”
“She was a sweet thing, very much like you in a lot of ways. Her hair was golden, her features petite, and she always seemed to be smiling, like nothing ever bothered her,” Arthur said fondly. “I know she reminded David a lot of his aunt.”
“And he was gonna ask her to marry him, right? So, why didn’t he?”
“The night before he set off for his biannual leave, Drake called him to preside over one last case.” Arthur’s lips rolled inward, the memory travelling across his face, painting it with emotion. “I saw the look in David’s eye, saw his heart break right there in a room full of people when Pepper was bound and thrown to her knees before him like some petty thief.”
“He didn’t know she’d been arrested?”