10. The Beautiful Rival #2
"Both. Politically, a human mate weakens my position, it suggests emotional compromise, vulnerability, a distraction from territorial management.
The Council views human attachments as liabilities.
Personally—" He stopped. Started again. "Lucien collects rare things.
Humans who attract vampire attention at the level Jace attracts mine are extraordinarily uncommon.
Maybe one in a generation. Lucien will want to understand why.
And his method of understanding things is to take them apart. "
Jace, who had been standing in the doorway, spoke. "I'm right here. You can stop talking about me like I'm an artifact in a dispute."
Both men turned. Canyon's expression was a complex structure of guilt and protectiveness. Reed's was appraising.
"I'm not a liability," Jace continued, his voice steady, the steadiness borrowed from a well of resolve he hadn't known he possessed until a week ago, when a vampire knelt before him in a firelit room and showed him what devotion looked like.
"And I'm not a rare specimen. I'm a man who made a choice, and I'm not interested in having that choice analyzed by a political committee of the undead. "
"You're not wrong," Canyon said. "But Lucien won't see it that way.
He'll see you as a variable to be controlled.
And his methods of control are—" He searched for the word.
"—subtle. He won't threaten you. He won't hurt you.
He'll be warm and interesting and attentive, and he'll make you feel like the most fascinating person he's ever met, and the entire time he'll be reading you, your responses, your vulnerabilities, the emotional frequencies that make you tick, and storing the data for later use. "
"Sounds like a therapist," Jace said.
"Therapists don't drink blood," Reed observed dryly.
"Mine might have," Jace muttered. "The bills were certainly draining."
The tension cracked. Reed chuckled. Even Canyon's mouth curved, briefly, before the gravity of the situation pulled it back to neutral.
***
Night fell completely. The mountain went dark.
And somewhere in the cabin where Theo had slept and dreamed of nothing more dangerous than bruised egos and campfire bravado, a creature five centuries old unpacked its leather case, arranged its belongings with the aesthetic precision of a museum curator, and stood at the window looking toward the lodge with eyes that glowed cognac-gold in the moonlight.
The human was an unexpected chapter. Lucien had smelled him at the north ridge and recognized the significance immediately: Canyon's scent, rewritten at the molecular level by proximity to a specific human pheromone signature.
The kind of rewriting that didn't happen casually.
The kind that suggested imprinting, the rare, deep, irreversible alignment of a vampire's biological systems to a single human partner.
It happened perhaps once a century. And when it did, it was either the making of a vampire or the unmaking of one.
Lucien intended to find out which.
He drew the curtain closed. Checked his phone—a device Canyon disdained but that the Council required for its envoys, a slim piece of technology that connected the ancient hierarchy to its modern operations. A message waited:
Assessment received. Human confirmed. Proceed to secondary evaluation. Council reserves right of intervention if territorial stability is compromised. —Collector
Lucien read the name and felt the chemical response that, in a vampire, passed for excitement—a surge of cold alertness, an acceleration of the already-slow heartbeat, a sharpening of the senses that turned the world from a blurred painting into a hyperreal photograph.
The Collector. He hadn't heard that name attached to an active operation in decades.
If the Collector was interested, the stakes had just risen exponentially. This was no longer a territorial assessment. This was an acquisition operation. And the asset was not the mountain.
It was Jace.
***
In the lodge, Jace lay in Canyon's bed, the bed in the quarters behind the main hall, the bed where they'd first come together, where Jace had learned the taste of a vampire's skin and the sound of a three-century-old creature saying please for the first time.
Canyon stood at the window, looking out, his back to Jace, his body a silhouette against the moonlit glass.
"You should sleep," Canyon said.
"I'm not tired."
"Your heartbeat says otherwise. It's slower. Your body is winding down. Sleep."
Jace studied the silhouette. The tension was visible in every line, the squared shoulders, the rigid spine, the hands gripping the windowsill with a force that was leaving impressions in the wood.
"Come to bed," Jace said.
"I don't sleep. I told you that."
"I didn't say sleep. I said come to bed." He waited. "You don't have to stand guard all night. Whatever Lucien is, whatever the Council wants, it doesn't change tonight. Tonight is just us. Come to bed."
Canyon stood at the window for a long time. The moonlight painted him in silver, his skin, his scars, the dark hair that fell across his forehead, and Jace thought of statues in museums, immortal forms captured in stone, beautiful and cold and frozen in positions they could never leave.
Then Canyon turned. Crossed the room. And lay down beside Jace on the narrow bed, his body curling around Jace's with the careful, deliberate protectiveness of something that had identified the most important thing in its world and was physically incapable of putting distance between itself and that thing.
His heartbeat was slow. Jace counted the beats, one, two, three, with seconds between them, each one a seismic event felt through the mattress, through Canyon's chest pressed against Jace's back, through the arm that wrapped around Jace's waist and held him with a tenderness that was the most terrifying thing about a creature that could have held him with force.
"He'll try to charm you tomorrow," Canyon murmured against the back of Jace's neck. "He'll be kind. He'll be interested. He'll ask you questions that make you feel understood. And you'll want to answer, because Lucien is very good at making people want to be known by him."
"I already have someone who knows me."
"Jace."
"Yeah."
"Whatever happens, whatever he says, whatever the Council decides, remember one thing."
"What?"
Canyon's voice was so quiet it was almost subvocal, a frequency felt rather than heard, passing through the bones of Jace's skull into the marrow where the body stores its deepest truths:
"You're not like the others."
The same words. The first words. The words that had started everything, spoken on the first night in the dining hall, when a vampire had looked at a broken man and seen something no one else had bothered to look for.
Jace laced his fingers through Canyon's and held on.
The mountain held its breath. The pines stood sentinel. And in the cabin at the clearing's edge, a golden-haired creature with a smile like a loaded weapon set its plans in motion, patient and warm and absolutely certain that what it wanted, it would get.
The game had begun.
And Jace Warren, human, mortal, chosen, was the piece they were both playing for.
He closed his eyes. Felt the ancient heartbeat against his spine. And made a silent promise to the dark:
I'm not a piece. I'm not a variable. And I'm not going to let either of you decide my ending.
But the mountain heard the promise, and the mountain knew, had always known, that the strongest claims are not the ones we make.
They're the ones that are made on us, in the dark, by forces older than choice.
Sleep came. And with it, the first dream in which Jace stood not as prey between two predators, but as something else entirely, something the mountain recognized, something the wolves had smelled, something that lived in the space between human and immortal and had a name that neither Canyon nor Lucien had spoken yet.
The name was mate.