"I nearly killed a woman tonight." He confessed it harshly, his dark eyes wounded. "You told me God made us for a purpose, that we were created by him. I am more beast than man, Edgar, and I cannot continue to delude myself. I would seek eternal rest, but even that is denied me. Assassins stalk my people. I have no right to leave them until I know they are protected. Now my woman is in danger, not only from me but from my enemies." Edgar puffed at his pipe calmly. "You said 'my woman.' You love this woman?" Mikhail waved a dismissing hand. "She is mine." It was a statement, a decree. How could he say "love"? It was an insipid word for what he felt. She was purity. Goodness. Compassion. The other half of his soul. Light to his darkness. Everything that he was not. Edgar nodded. "My friend, you're in love with her." Mikhail scowled darkly. "I need. I hunger. I want. That is my life." He said it in torment, as if he could make it true. "Then why do you feel such pain, Mikhail? You wanted her, maybe you needed her. I presume you took her. You hungered, I presume you fed. Why should you feel pain?" "You know it is wrong to take the blood of women for whom we feel other appetites." "You have said you have not felt sexual need in centuries--that you cannot feel at all," Edgar reminded him softly. "I feel for her," Mikhail confessed, his dark eyes alive with pain. "I want her every moment of the day. I need her. God, I have to have her. Not only her body, but also her blood. I am addicted to the taste of her. I crave her, all of her, yet it is forbidden." "But you took her blood and body anyway, knowing it was wrong?" "I almost killed her." Mikhail brushed his hand over his face, as if he could wipe out the things he'd done. "But you didn't kill her. She still lives. She cannot be the first time you fed too deeply. Did the others cause you pain?" Mikhail turned away. "You do not understand. It was the way it happened, what I did afterward. I feared it from the moment I first heard her voice." "If it had never happened before, why did you fear it?" Mikhail hung his head, his fingers curling into fists. "Because I wanted her, I could not bear to give her up. I wanted her to know me, know the worst. See all of me. I wanted to bind her to me so she could never leave my side."