Tawdry Little Affair {boyxboy}

Chapter Nineteen

"I still think it's a little..." Fionn searched for the aptest word, though Dante could probably hear everyone that flickered through the wolf's mind, "child kidnappy, if you know what I mean," Dante chuckled from the bathroom, putting another handful of shards into the sink. Fionn was perched at the end of the bed, though he had offered multiple times to help Dante, the vampire had refused.

"It was a different time, Fi," the wolf wasn't sure when Dante had started calling him Fi but he liked the sound of it in the vampire's deep voice.

"They burnt down an entire village. That's countless deaths that you don't even seem to care about," Dante cocked an eyebrow as Fionn knelt down next to him, scooping up some of the smaller shards into his palm.

"I refuse to heal you if you get cut," Fionn rolled his eyes playfully.

"Like you could resist my blood."

"My father couldn't leave people alive to speculate about what happened to me, or to try to track me down," Fionn tried to hide his grimace as a tiny shard got embedded in his thumb. Dante regarded him with an expression that screamed 'I told you so'.

"Did you do that when you turned Kastor?" Fionn presented his thumb to Dante, who tugged the shard gingerly from the flesh and caught the drop of blood with his tongue. Fionn shook his head slightly as the vampire stared at him with innocent eyes, basked in lust.

"No, just because I understand why my father did what he did doesn't mean I entirely agree with it myself. Kastor didn't have any family when I turned him," Fionn saw an iota of sadness flitter over Dante's expression and felt his brows slip into that deep frown.

"How come?" Dante was quiet for a moment, releasing his grip on Fionn's hand once the venom had healed the small cut, "you don't have to talk about it if you don't want. Just say so."

"We were travelling through Rome, my sister Yareli and I, we were to be meeting Nikhil and my father in England. There was a village out in the countryside, so small it didn't even have a name. It had been pillaged by Roman soldiers, simply to take what little the villagers had left.

"Yareli wanted to see what was left of the people, she's a little sick like that, and their bodies were still fresh so we could drink from them if we had wanted to. I was waiting for Yareli by one of the houses when I heard something. There was a little boy, no older than 4 or 5, with this awful gaping spear wound through him behind the house.

"He was barely conscious, just crying softly. I pitied him. So I turned him, there and then. I didn't even know if it was enough to save his life but I brought him with Yareli and I. By the next morning he was my child, my Cicero," Dante wore a fond smile, staring down at the glass in his hands.

"So you didn't bother to check if his parents were alive or..." Fionn trailed off when he caught sight of Dante expression, not anger, merely gentle disbelief.

"The village was massacred, Fi, Yareli and I smelt the bloodshed from miles away. There wasn't a very large chance that anyone else survived, Kastor just happened to be a miracle," Fionn almost jumped out of his skin at the sudden sound of the steel door opening so fast it hit the wall with an almighty thud. Dante was instantly in front of the wolf, who took a more human amount of time to rise to his feet.

"You don't have to protect me, y'know, I'm not a child," Fionn murmured sullenly in his mind, watching the open doorway over the vampire's shoulder.

"You die a lot easier than me. If you get shot with a silver bullet, you're incapacitated. If I get shot with a silver bullet, I can walk it off," Fionn tilted his head to the side slightly, Dante had a very valid point.