Chapter 31
Your pulse is a beacon. If you are to survive in our world, Vivek Kapur, you need to learn not to turn yourself into a buffet invitation.
—Lady Katrina to Vivek (Once, After Midnight in the Boudoir)
Vivek smiled over his shoulder when he felt Kat step out onto the Spire floor that was his domain.
He’d sent his people home, was just holding the fort before the next shift came on—because an archangel’s information network could never be offline.
“I know I’m late,” he said. “But in my defense, it’s only six past midnight. ”
His Kat kept night hours, and it turned out that suited a spymaster fine.
Walking over, her gown a dark red velvet this night, and her hair swept back into a sleek knot, she placed a lace-gloved hand on his shoulder.
It felt like a caress through the fine cotton of his dark gray shirt—he’d taken off his suit jacket and perfectly matched tie a while ago, then folded up his sleeves.
It was a ritual with him—one his Kat seemed to enjoy when she caught him in the act. “You do make taking off a suit a most…stimulating show, lover,” she’d said once, before she made him late for two meetings and lunch.
It was one of his favorite memories.
Especially since she, a naked goddess filmed with perspiration in the aftermath, had then helped him put the suit back on. “I like these clothes you wear,” she’d said, stroking her hand down his lapel.
It was a small enough thing, but he was glad of it—because he’d never quite gotten into the fine armor or leathers favored by many of his compatriots. His suits also tended to be old-fashioned in their simplicity. No diagonal cuts or stylish insets, no buttons with jeweled facets.
The simplicity fit him. And continued to be appreciated by his lover.
Today, she ran her finger down his throat. “I brought dinner. I know you want to review everything that built up while you were away from the territory.”
Vivek had learned his craft from watching Jason—he put good people in place and let them do their jobs. But that didn’t mean he liked it; as with the black-winged spymaster who’d become his greatest friend in immortality, Vivek preferred to know everything. “You understand me far too well, my Kat.”
A kiss brushed over his jaw, the scent of her an intoxication. “I should hope so.” Had anyone else heard her, they’d have thought her voice cool, detached, but Vivek had long ago learned to see beyond the face she presented and to all she did for the people who mattered to her.
And Vivek?
He mattered most of all. This he knew to the core of his being. “I’ll—” He began to get up.
But she pressed him back down. “The table and chairs are already out there. You finish your spying, and I will set up dinner.”
He took her hand, kissed it. “I bet you’ve already done some spying-related reviewing of your own.” Katrina’s network went far beyond the gray and into pure obsidian in certain areas.
“We shall discuss that after you’ve wooed me with the excellent red wine you were gifted by the musty old vampire who has a cellar even I envy.” Her skirts made a slight rustling sound as she moved away and out into the starlit night.
Neither of them particularly needed light to see in the dark any longer.
Katrina, older and more powerful when it came to her vampirism, could move as surely as a cat in the black.
Vivek had fully caught up with her on the night vision stakes just last century, and he had to say—it made one hell of a good attribute for a spymaster.
Despite that, however, he knew she’d light a candle or two on the table. She liked the glow of candlelight, and he had no complaints. He loved her in the light, in the dark, and in the soft whisper of candlelight.
Border report.
Scowling at the subject line, he nonetheless quickly skimmed the message. He stayed on top of the Aegaeon-Illium border situation no matter where he was, but it turned out that this had to do with the border Illium shared with Alexander.
After reading it, he raised an eyebrow. Illium? You up? They’d known each other too long to stick to protocol when it came to how Vivek addressed the other man.
Not if it’s about the asshole, came the grumbling answer.
It’s about your border with Alexander.
Shit, what? Has he lost his mind, too? I had a perfectly polite call with him the other day.
Doesn’t look like it. He’s gathering troops at a town about a half hour’s flight from the border—but my people report that there’s no aggression coming off them. More a sense of readiness.
Illium was quiet for a moment. Man was a general once. He’s putting pieces in place for when he has to play the board.
Right now, Vivek said, my read on it is that he’s getting ready to support you should Aegaeon strike. It was somewhat unexpected—because while Zanaya was open in her partiality for Illium, Alexander had always stayed more neutral.
Raphael did once tell me that Alexander doesn’t talk out of both sides of his mouth, Illium replied. If he’s having polite discussions with me, then he’s not about to launch an attack. Still, keep an eye on that situation.
Already done.
Neither one of them said anything else before dropping out of the mental conversation.
Aware of Kat taking a seat at the balcony table, he quickly cleared the rest of the items he’d marked as being important, then pushed back his chair…
and paused. Though he’d long ago become used to walking again, to no longer needing a wheelchair or even a cane, he did continue to have moments like this, when he was hit with the wonder of being able to do something as everyday as push back a chair so he could rise to his feet.
Kat looked up as he appeared on the balcony a minute later, her eyes gleaming. “You are thinking of what once was,” she murmured and held up a hand, the black lace of her glove a delicate filigree. “Good or bad?”
“Good.” After brushing her fingers with his own, he shifted so that he was the one behind her, then wrapped her up in a hug from the back.
Her smile was more innocent and open than the world ever saw, the kiss she dropped on his bare forearm affectionate. “Tell me.”
So he did. “Just gets me now and then, all the things I take for granted when, once, it would’ve been so out of the realm of possibility as to be beyond a fantasy.” She knew of the years he’d spent in a hospital bed, unable to move, reliant on others for care—or a lack of care.
He also knew she preferred not to go back into her own past. She’d once told him that it had been a time of “pain and misery and brokenness” and not anything she wished to recall. However, she’d never stopped Vivek from talking about his memories.
More than that, she understood.
“Only those who have experienced infinite darkness understand the beauty of light, lover mine,” she said tonight. “And only those who have been burned by blistering light understand the calm to be found in the night.”
Rubbing his cheek against hers with an affection he couldn’t have imagined being permitted when they first met, he just held her for several long minutes as the stars sparkled overhead and the candles glowed.
When he released her at long last and moved to the other side of the table, it was only because he knew she needed to eat.
“So,” he said, lifting up a deep-green-hued bottle with a golden label curling at the edges from the time it had been stored.
“Wine first, followed by blood?” Their dinner was a smaller bottle, with a stark black-on-white label that he didn’t recognize.
After inclining her head, Kat said, “The blood is from a new café founded by Ana. She is going for avant-garde flavor combinations.”
Vivek looked up from pouring the wine. “How bad?”
She sighed. “I really wish you would not know me so well—it makes me feel a terrible creature.”
Chuckling, he took his seat. “Your secret is safe with me, sweetheart.”
Kat found it endlessly amusing that he called her his sweetheart. She wasn’t the kind of woman who attracted such soft sobriquets, but her eyes always smiled when he said it, so he made sure to say it often.
Tonight her lips, plump and stained a red to match her gown, twitched. “I am glad she has found a passion, but alas, her fusions are…unusual. Though I was, of course, her first major customer, and so we will be partaking of a bottle a week.”
He took a deep breath. “How bad can it be?”
“Tonight’s flavor,” Kat said after a sip of her wine, “is cabbage and cheese.”
Vivek almost coughed out his wine. “Tell me you’re joking.” When she just looked at him, he threw the bottle a look of unfiltered horror. “At least tell me you brought a second dinner.”
A husky laugh before she picked up a bottle she’d hidden under the table and put it beside the cabbage-cheese-blood monstrosity. “Your favorite.”
“Um,” he said, “have you counseled Ana that murdering her competitors is bad business?” The other vampire wasn’t exactly the most stable of personalities.
“I went further and informed her that I would be most displeased should she attempt to succeed in business by murdering her competitors. As it is, it proved unnecessary—she told me she’s not going for the same ‘lowbrow’ clientele as those who might consider themselves her peers, only the ‘boldest gastronomes.’ ”
“I mean, what do us lowbrow types know?” Vivek shrugged. “Cabbage and cheese might be the next big thing.”
Katrina’s laughter lit up the night.
They talked, tried the cheese-cabbage blood—horrible wasn’t quite the right word for it—then moved on to their actual dinner while discussing their days and the night to come.
At some point, Katrina said, “Do you mind, lover?”
One hand tangled with hers on the table, he said, “What, sweetheart?”
“That you’ll never have a child of your blood, as Raphael and Elena will now have?” An unexpected vulnerability to her tone, a fracture in the cool control she wore like a second skin.
Lifting her hand, he turned it so he could kiss her palm. “Not a single regret,” he said, eyes locked on hers as he raised his head. “I far prefer what we’ve been doing.” Looking for children who were broken and lost as they’d once been broken and lost, and getting them out, setting them up.
The children would never know about Kat or Vivek. They interacted exclusively with foster parents Kat and Vivek had personally vetted to shepherd the children through life. They’d chosen people who were loving and warm, men and women who wanted nothing more than to nurture the young.
“I’m not meant to occupy the traditional father role.
” He’d never felt the desire to sire his own children, not even when he’d known that his window to be able to do that as a vampire was closing.
“But how we’re able to help these babies before they’re destroyed as we were nearly destroyed? It means everything.”
Her throat moved and she looked away, his Kat with her wounds that made it difficult for her to speak words he could say so much easier. But she looked back at him tonight, said, “You speak what I feel, lover.”
Starlight on her lips, a shimmer in her eyes, his forever in the kiss they shared after he walked around to kneel in front of her, his dark queen who had allowed him into her most secret heart.