Aphrodite's Hunt by Jennifer Blackstream Page A

the past. “I stayed at his house with him for three months. Every night I would sit in a chair beside his bed with a shotgun.”
     
    Sorin’s jaw dropped and he stared at her in horror. “A shotgun? And you think my sire is barbaric?”
     
    Gia raised an eyebrow. “The shotgun was his. I told you, he was a farm boy. He was so terrified that he would change in his sleep and go on a rampage killing his family and all their livestock . . . he could only sleep if I sat by his bed with that gun and promised to shoot him if he went after his loved ones.” She shook her head. “Obviously, that never would have been necessary. As lupa, I am more than capable of guiding someone through the change without losing complete control. I had other pack members on the premises in hiding. If he would have lost control that badly, we would have simply herded him into the forest and kept him there until he changed back. We would never have allowed him to hurt anyone.”
     
    “We would never have allowed him to hurt anyone.”
     
    Her words were a sharp contrast to the horrendous images in his head, the gruesome memories of his sire’s “lessons.” His sire had believed in learning from hideous mistakes--not preventing them.
     
    “And then there was Anna,” Gia continued, laughing softly. “She thought being a werewolf meant no more holiday dinners with her family. She said those occasions were too stressful, she’d never be able to keep control. But I could tell the thought of missing them hurt her.”   She rolled her eyes. “I spent a year’s worth of holidays with her Aunt Pestie and seventeen bickering cousins.” She smiled. “It was nice.”
     
    “Wouldn’t it have been safer for Anna to never see her family again?”
     
    The words escaped his mouth before he could stop them. Sorin closed his mouth, but he didn’t try to take the question back. Gia’s approach sounded so different so . . . wonderful. He had to know more.
     
    Gia shook her head. “Being a werewolf doesn’t mean you have to give up your humanity or your life. A true alpha helps her people to balance both lives without letting one take over the other.” She cleared her throat. “You say your sire had the ability to reach into your mind to calm you. It doesn’t sound like he chose to use that ability much.”
     
    Sorin’s mind was still spinning with everything Gia had just said. He responded to her comment without censure. “My sire believed that in order to overcome my sinful behavior I had to fully experience the horror of the consequences, that if he used his ability to calm me it would only help me to excuse the behavior instead of correcting it.”
     
    “If he didn’t use it then, again, how did he help you transition?”
     
    The more he talked about his sire and his methods of teaching, the more Sorin’s emotions roiled inside him. Regret, frustration, and pain stabbed at him from all sides. He’d had the same questions, all those years ago. He’d wondered why his sire didn’t help him, why he chose to torture him instead. Back then he’d had no other choice. If only he’d had a sire like Gia . . .
     
    Suddenly, the pain was too much. Sorin shook himself, calling up a cold anger to freeze away his conflict. It didn’t matter what kind of alpha Gia was, or what kind of sire his master had been. The past was done, he’d chosen his path. And he would not be made to regret it now. It was too late to change it anyway.
     
    “My sire pulled me out of a pack of dogs and reminded me of what it was like to be a man.” As the words flowed from his mouth, he let the ice in his veins leak out with them. Every syllable crystallized into a fine sharp point, all of them aimed for the heat of Gia’s righteous indignation. “When he shared his blood with me, he also gave me the gift of the strigori . I no longer had to rely on death to sustain myself. I could choose life. I could do with a mere thought what others had to do with