-REMUS-

The house looks exactly the same as the last time I saw it, which has to be at least a year, if not more. It takes me a moment to adjust to the light and to settle the hollowness in my stomach as memories after memories rush back to my mind. This is exactly why I've tried to avoid it, even though it used to be my refuge, my little escape from everything.

The garden is well-tended, as always. It's full of gardenias and hydrangeas of pink and purple. At a corner, under an arch packed full of jasmine is a small table and four cushioned outdoor chairs. They're kept in pristine condition, even though only one person probably sits there these days. It used to be his favorite spot for tea, which also smelled like jasmine just because she likes it. She likes all kinds of white flowers really, even more so now, because it reminds her of his wings - the wings I'd kept in my estate and never told her about. I don't know how to tell her about that part of the story. I don't ever want her to ever have to imagine him without them.

"What did you do this time?"

I turn around to look at Amelia and smile at what I found. She appears in her worn-out jeans and an old tank top, covered by an apron stained thoroughly with everything from paint to coffee. Her bright red curls are gathered into a loose bun that looks like she had one free hand to hold it up, and on her forehead, I can see a stain of white paint exactly at the spot where I usually find it. She smells like turpentine, as always. Amelia is an artist, and I'm happy to see she's still painting.

"Why do you think I've done something?" I scowl at her openly.

She puts her hands on her hips and raises a brow. "When have you ever visited us unless you've done something irreversible?"

Us, she said, as if he might appear any minute from that door behind her to call me inside. I release a sigh. "Remind me to never argue with you." It's true, actually. I tended to call on them only when I'm in trouble, but only because I didn't want to intrude.

She beams her usual, brilliant smile at me as she gives me a big hug. "It's good to see you, Remus. It's been a while."

"I've been busy." It's a lie. I can always make time to come here. I just have been avoiding it.

"Come inside. I just made some tea."

As always, she never gives me a chance to say no, and I never have the heart to stop her mid-sentence. Staring at the doormat, I hold my breath for a moment before I step inside and will myself to look up like nothing in there is going to affect me.

It does though. It always does.

The living room is full of him. The bright vermillion armchair he liked to sit on is still there, along with the white alpaca throw that always smells like him. Amelia now drinks from his favorite mug that I gave him the first time we all spent Christmas together at Amelia's request. It now sits on the coffee table, and on her finger is the emerald ring he used to wear. But all this I have come to live with and get used to every time I visit her. It's what I see on the wall behind the console table that really bothers me.

From across the room, Marcus stares at me with his green eyes, his golden, luxurious curls shining in the light that floods through the window from behind, creating an aura-like yellow glow around his figure. Behind him, a pair of feathery white, majestic wings rise just above his head, curving in a little over his broad shoulders. He looks heartbreakingly beautiful, like an angel, or something else sent from heaven.

The painting has been there for more than a hundred years, and every time I see it, my heart skips a beat. I can understand why Amelia has painted him that way, and Marcus used to tease about me having fallen in love with him every time he saw me staring speechlessly at it. I don't think I'd ever told him the real reason why. I don't think he knew that's what I thought he'd looked like when he'd found me in the stable, hiding from my father. I know for a fact that he didn't know I think of him as my savior, and now that he's gone I'm left hanging by a thin, thin line that keeps me from becoming the monster I've been afraid of.

And seeing him again, in that painting, staring at me with the same expression that had saved me from falling time after time since we'd known each other, always shatter something inside me to pieces.

"Remus." Amelia places a hand on my shoulder, and I realize then that I must be standing there looking like I'm about to cry. "It's time to move on."

"I am moving on," I tell her. I've gotten out of that hell, out of addiction, haven't I? I'm back working like a horse, and even running for Chancellor. My life is normal again, isn't it?

"No." She shakes her head and looks at me as if I'm a lost little boy. "You're moving around dragging his corpse with you, leaving a mess everywhere you go," Amelia says then chuckles softly. "You can't do that, you know? He's too pretty a corpse for you to drag around."

I let myself smile at that. He is too pretty a corpse for me to drag around, that's why I haven't had the heart to expose the manner of his death to the public. I want the memory of him untainted by the rotting ugliness of our world, and here I am soiling his legacy by dragging him with me, not letting go.

I turn to Amelia and marvel at how peaceful she looks. Her expression is so soft and calm, and there's nothing but love in her eyes. She's managed to completely move on without letting go of a single thing that holds the memory of him when all I've been able to do is to run away because I can't bear being reminded of what I've lost.

"How do you do it?" I have to ask.

"How do I do what?"

"Live," I say gesturing to everything in the room, "like this." Like he's still here. Like he isn't gone. Where does she find such strength? Marcus was her husband, her companion, the love of her life. Even if she hadn't known him for nearly as long as I had, there were things between them that didn't exist between Marcus and me. Amelia knows him in ways that I don't. She would have seen the faces of him that would have been foreign to me, would have felt his presence in ways that I can never begin to imagine. How do you love and surrender yourself so completely, so intimately, to someone and still live so calmly when that person is gone?

She smiles gently at me, then turns back to the painting. "I guess there's still a large part of me that's very human," she says, her complexion seems to glow in the mild sunlight that comes through the room. I realize then that she's left the curtains opened on purpose, even though the sun must bother her to a certain degree, being a turned vampire, not an oldblood like us. "We are made to endure a short life and the deaths of our loved ones from the very beginning. We live, always, with an expectation that one day everything will come to an end. I think we're prepared for it, in ways that you never have to."

'They're a lot tougher than you think,' Marcus used to say every time I pointed out how weak humans are, and I'd never been convinced. Now, I look at Amelia's small figure, at how she stands in front of Marcus' painting without a shred of regret and I can feel it. She's a vampire now, but she was human. It must have taken a phenomenal amount of strength to love someone knowing one day you'll lose all of it, even more so, to live every single day counting down towards an inevitable death and still have the will to make the most out of life. It must be like swimming in an ocean without a shore, knowing you'll eventually drown but still never give up. I can't help but feel how ironic it is, that I'm one of the most powerful vampires in the realm, and yet here, standing next to her, I feel so pathetically small.

"That means something else too, doesn't it?" I say, smiling at my own pitiful state. "I may never be able to let go."

"It's not easy," she replies, heading over to pour more tea into Marcus' favorite mug and hands it over to me. "But you don't have to let go of a single thing, Remus," she closes her hands around mine, holding them tight against the heated surface of the mug. "You can hold on to it, and feel only the warmth it gives. You can choose to live with the memory, instead of the loss. You make his life more important than his death. That's how we survive, as humans."

I suppose it makes sense, and I can't help but admire her strength to be able to do it. "He always said you're wise beyond your years," I tell her with a sigh, "and I never believed him."

She smirks at that. "Oh, but you did. That's why you come here whenever you need a pat on the back."

I wince a little at how much she can see through me. "I'm going to need a little more than a pat on the back this time, Amelia."

"Of course, you do." She disappears into the kitchen for a few seconds and returns with another mug in her hand, then she takes a seat on Marcus' armchair and gestures for me to do the same on the couch. I wonder sometimes if she realizes that she's the only woman who can order me around, and I have a feeling the answer is 'yes.'

"You can't rehome thirty humans without my help."

I blink at that. "You knew?"

"Lucian told me," she says, leaning back in her chair as if there's absolutely nothing out of the ordinary with that statement.

"Lucien comes here?" I raise my voice a little. The house is my refuge, my personal space, a place Marcus and I have made sure only a handful of people know about it to keep her safe. It's not that I don't trust Lucien that I haven't told him about it, even though I have an inkling that he'd always known where I went when I disappeared, but for him to have actually paid her a visit feels like he's crossed a line.

"He's been coming here for the past fifty years," she replies with a chuckle. "How do you think Marcus knew in advance every time you messed up something?"

"But he didn't ...." I swallow down the rest of my words when something suddenly occurs to me. "He did, didn't he?" That's why he was always here, waiting for me in that chair with a pot of tea already brewing when I arrived, just like...this.

I bury my face in my palm and squeeze the bridge of my nose. I'm going to have to sit down and have a big talk with Lucien after this.

"Before you give him a hard time, you should know that it was Marcus who'd asked Lucien to give him reports on everything you do. As for Lucien, he knows you trusted Marcus implicitly, and Marcus trusted me, so it's a matter of logical deduction that he comes here to tell me these things. He didn't do anything wrong, unless, of course, if you want to defy the rules of simple mathematics or you're lacking education."

'Don't,' Marcus used to say, 'even think about arguing with Amelia because you're never going to win.' He's right, and I'm not even going to try. I let out a sigh of utter defeat. "How would you like this handled?"

"I assume their memories have been wiped clean?"

"Yes." That's what they do before they ship them to us, to lessen the degree of resistance and escape attempts. People are easier to control when they don't remember a thing or that they have someone to go back to. It also means none of them to know who they are or where they live, which creates a pretty big problem in terms of releasing them back into society. Amelia finds out what she can about them discreetly, makes a match with the missing people profile she has on hand and send them home with some made up stories. It's a highly delicate work that my people don't do very well, especially not with that kind of number.

"If you don't mind, you can send them to your training facility, ask Rae to take care of them for a while and send me their profiles. I'll take care of the rest."

I give her a nod. Amelia and Marcus had their own network that's larger and older than mine to deal with blood smuggling and human trafficking. They'd been working on it long before I did. I'd given him aid whenever he'd asked, but I had never been directly involved, not until he'd been kidnapped and killed. A part of me will never get over the fact that I hadn't been more active in helping him root out these organizations, and Marcus had never expected me to do anything just because he was my friend, not even when I'd owed him a lot of things. Even now that I've offered my network for her to utilize freely, she usually doesn't ask for anything more than information. It's the first time she's asked to use my facility to hold these victims and keep them safe, which makes me wonder if she is having an issue with her own, now that Marcus is gone. "Thank you," I tell her. "Is everything all right?"

She looks at me in the way that tells me she fully understands my question and simply smiles. "Nothing I can't handle," she says, sipping more of her tea. "The real question is, how are you handling your bond with Veronica?"

I choke on the damn tea at the end of that sentence, contemplating inwardly whether I should kill Lucien for slipping that piece of information and giving Amelia the opportunity to smile so smugly at me right now. I did give Marcus a hard time when he'd sired Amelia, and for some reasons, I suddenly feel like that painting of his is grinning smugly at me from across the room. The fact that Amelia knows even her name makes me want to teleport out of that house immediately, but that would just make it worse.

Then I remember that she might be the only one who's been sired by a pureblood, which means that Marcus must have suffered pretty much the same symptoms I have. I've completely forgotten it due to the fact that we've been selling lies about him having found her already a vampire for almost a century for safety purposes, but I suppose Lucien knows the truth too, otherwise he wouldn't have mentioned it to her. It doesn't really matter now since Marcus is no longer around for anyone to use her against him. "How did he handle it?"

"The same way you just did."

"What?" I snort at the image in my head of Marcus losing his cool. "Choked on his tea?"

"Sucked in a breath and emitted enough testosterone to knock out a skunk whenever I walked into the room." She chuckles and adds, "Which you just did at the mention of her name."

I am so going to kill Lucien for this. I swear inwardly at my seneschal and refuse to comment on it, even though, yes, I admit that I tend to grow suddenly hard at the mention of her name. It also doesn't help that she constantly tugs on my bond a few times a day, as if to test my patience, which, to my satisfaction, has yet to fail me so far. I've managed to succeed at keeping my distance for the past three weeks, despite the images she's daringly sent down the bond to lure me into drinking her blood, among other things. It does make me wonder...

"How much did you feel him after the bond was completed?"

Amelia smiles wickedly. "I felt everything, as in there was no more hiding how many times a day he was turned on for just looking at me," she says, and then her expression softens. "But I also felt every emotion he was trying to hide. His sadness, his fears, his every regret was exposed to me. I think that made it impossible for me not to love him. It's almost as if we became an inseparable part of each other. The intimacy of sharing all your feelings with someone can be quite frightening if you don't trust each other." She pauses a little to study my reaction, which must be pretty disturbing for her to check herself.

"But all that happened after he'd sired me," she continues. "Marcus didn't drink a single drop of my blood until I asked him to turn me, and by then we were already in an intimate relationship. I would imagine the effects to be less for just drinking her blood if you ever lose it."

If I ever lose it. I almost shudder at the thought. That's something I can't allow to happen. "Still, I'd better not," I say, more like a promise to myself than to her, really. "Not with the election coming up."

A frown replaces her smile at the mention of the word election, and I suddenly remember how much she stands against it. "You don't have to do this."

"You know I have to."

"This isn't your dream to chase, Remus," she shakes her head at me, even though she knows it never works. "I've already lost him. I don't want to lose you too."

I can see where she's coming from. It had always been an issue they'd argued about - the only issue, as a matter of fact. His dream was too dangerous, too big, too demanding of him that it had frightened her to tears sometimes, and in the end, it did kill him. But I'm not like Marcus. I'm not as kind, or generous, or trusting of people, and I don't have a wife waiting for me to come home to. I had only one thing to lose, and I've already lost it. "Now you're the one holding on," I opt to tease her instead. She wouldn't understand it in any case. No one does.

Amelia closes her eyes and sighs. "Of course, I am, Remus." When she opens them again, all I see is Marcus' worried gaze looking in my direction. "You're the one person he treasured the most, perhaps even more than me."