Chapter 23
EIRA
Danger. Death. Tezra.
In the living room, which feels too polished for grief, especially after what happened, Valentin loosens his cuffs, gaze on me.
‘I don’t believe in coincidence,’ he says.
‘Good. Neither do I.’
His jaw clenches. Then he crosses to the bar.
Crystal clicks. Amber liquid tips into one glass, something darker into his.
I tell myself I’m watching for cues and clues when he holds the drink out, not because I’m finding it near impossible to take my eyes off him.
I take it. Drink, even though I shouldn’t. It goes down too fast, heat blooming through my chest, and for one second I let it blunt the edges because if I don’t, I might start shaking, and I’m not doing that in front of him.
Valentin sets his own glass down untouched and shrugs off his jacket.
My eyes, traitors to the last, follow the dark fabric sliding from his shoulders, the ripple of muscle beneath his shirt, the elegant economy of a body built for violence and command and, apparently, sublime pussy-eating technique.
Memory flashes hot and utterly inappropriate: his mouth between my thighs, the slow devastating drag of his tongue.
I snap my focus back so hard it’s almost painful, expecting him to say more. Strategy. Threat assessment. Territorial outrage. One of his cool, precise little speeches about enemies, power and the inevitable cost of crossing him.
Instead, he crosses the room in a blur.
One second he’s by the bar, all dark focus and sharpened control.
The next he has me by the waist, my drink somehow removed from my hand and set down somewhere I don’t register, and I’m propped against his desk with my hips pressed to polished wood and his mouth descending on mine like the conversation can wait but this cannot.
What the fuck?
Also… yes, please.
The kiss is hungry and furious in a way the earlier ones were not, fuelled by this maddening chemistry between us and whatever he found in that alley. His discovery cracked something in him, and I’m the nearest outlet.
I moan as his mouth claims mine with a roughness that should feel punishing and somehow doesn’t, because he still holds the line with those infuriating micro-restraints of his. Still gives me enough room to answer, to bite back, to make this a fight as much as a surrender.
So I do.
I kiss him back with all my outrage, grief and confusion.
With the shock of Tezra’s death and the fresh hell of wanting comfort from the wrong creature in the room.
My fingers fist in his shirt, his hand tightens at my waist, and for a full chaotic minute we clash and part and find rhythm again, breath turning ragged, control turning abstract.
When I finally plant my palms on his chest, it’s less because I’ve suddenly become stronger than a centuries-old vampire and more because I’m on the verge of forgetting why we’re standing here.
He moves back.
‘We need to talk about this, Valentin.’
His gaze stays on my mouth for one dark, hungry second before he nods. ‘Agreed.’
I inhale carefully. ‘The only reason to target Tezra is because someone wants to know where he took me. What I’m working on.
For you. But if your PI was murdered too, then…
’ I have to look away because not even the best poker face can hide the horror threatening to drown me.
‘Then someone wanted to stop you from finding Lyra Hannigan a long time ago.’
His eyes go pitch black by the time I’m done. No silver or arousal or readable barometer. Just black, absolute and depthless.
‘I reached that conclusion too, yes.’
My heart lurches at the confirmation I half-hoped he’d bat away. ‘Why? Surely this fated mate thing isn’t…’ I make a helpless, angry gesture because what even is the noun for this? Curse? Cosmic HR assignment? ‘I mean, it’s not some illegal vampire shit, is it?’
One dark brow lifts. ‘Illegal vampire shit?’
Despite the death and danger, there’s a thread of dry amusement in his voice.
‘You do have a way with words, little hunter.’
‘I’m serious. There’s no, like… ritual sacrifice thing involved, is there?’
His expression shifts, some of the bite easing, though not the intensity. ‘No. On the contrary, my mate can look forward to a long and… immortal life.’
I’m glad I’m propped up because the shocks just keep coming, and a girl needs a minute.
‘Immortal?’ My voice sounds thin and strange. ‘She… Your mate will become immortal?’
‘Of course.’
Of course.
The casual certainty almost takes me out.
‘H-how?’ The stutter humiliates me, but he doesn’t comment. He’s watching me too closely, perhaps because for once he understands the question isn’t casual curiosity. The mechanics matter. The cost matters.
Valentin’s black gaze holds mine as his voice drops lower, less clipped.
‘There is a binding,’ he says. ‘Not a marriage in the human sense, though humans have borrowed fragments of the concept and dressed them in vows and jewellery. Ours is blood, breath, marrow, essence. It is consummated through exchange and transformation. My blood given. Her body altered. Her life extended beyond mortality.’
The words settle over my skin like cold silk.
Terrifying. But also beautiful.
I hate that.
‘It is not painless,’ he continues. ‘And it is not without risk. The body resists what it cannot comprehend before it learns to adapt. Fever. Convulsions, sometimes. Hallucinations. Hunger. Euphoria severe enough to resemble death if one is unprepared.’
Euphoria.
The word lands far too close to the memory of his mouth between my thighs, and I loathe my brain for making the connection.
‘So she might die,’ I say, dragging this back to hard edges.
‘A possibility.’ He says it with maddening calm, then adds, ‘But I do not believe the mate meant for me will be a weakling.’
Oh, the arrogance. The cold predator certainty that somehow offends and steadies me at once.
I blink at him. ‘You called her inconvenient yesterday.’
For the first time since I’ve known him, he looks almost… chagrined.
It flashes and is gone, replaced by vexation. At himself, maybe. At me for remembering and throwing it back.
Interesting.
I file that away for later, assuming I survive the next forty-eight hours and this conversation doesn’t end with me glamoured, kidnapped, tortured into confessing my darkest secret and accidentally agreeing to immortal vampire marriage before lunch.
‘You didn’t answer my question,’ I press, and my voice shakes a little on the last word. I hope he attributes it to Tezra. Grief. Anger. Anything but the screaming private terror beneath it. ‘Why is someone killing people so you don’t find your mate?’
His expression shutters.
One second I have a man on the edge of candour. The next I have Don Moretti, Vampire King and ruler of this city, all polished reserve and strategic omission.
He turns away. ‘There are always those who believe power should be disrupted when it consolidates. Those who covet what they cannot command and mistake interference for leverage.’
I stare at his back.
That’s an answer.
It is also not the answer.
‘Amazing,’ I mutter. ‘You managed to say so many words and still dodge the point.’
His head turns slightly. ‘The point is that this is now active opposition within my territory.’
‘The point,’ I shoot back, hopping off the desk because I can’t sit still while he does that smooth evasion thing, ‘is that people connected even remotely to your Lyra hunt are turning up dead. That’s not random disruption. That’s strategic pruning.’
The word hangs there.
Grim.
Accurate.
His eyes sharpen.
‘And if they’re pruning the edges,’ I continue, because logic has to take over before terror wins, ‘what happens when they get closer to the centre? Is she in danger?’
What happens to the bounty hunter she reinvented herself to be?
The growl that leaves him is low enough to raise every hair on my arms.
‘No.’
Not glacial.
Titanium.
‘She is not,’ he says, stepping towards me with predatory quiet. ‘I will not allow anything to happen to her.’
A chill slips down my spine.
Not because I doubt him.
Because I don’t.
If Lyra Hannigan is what he says she is, I believe he would turn New York inside out and set it on fire before he let anyone touch her.
And because I am Lyra Hannigan, standing right here while he says it, the contradiction almost knocks the breath from me.
I look away first, pretending to consider the room, the desk, the city beyond the glass. Anything but the fact that his promise has hit somewhere deep and ancient in me.
‘And I will not let harm come to you either,’ he says into the thick silence.
The possessiveness in the words, directed at me now, violent and absolute, robs me of breath.
‘I can take care of myself,’ I manage, hating the shameful breathlessness in my voice.
Black swims beneath his eyes. ‘You do not know the forces we are dealing with, little hunter.’
‘Then enlighten me. I know there’s a hell of a lot more you’re not telling me. I can defend myself if I need to—’
‘You will not need to.’ He cuts in instantly. ‘I will keep you safe.’
I almost laugh, except nothing about this is funny and my throat is too tight.
The warmth expanding through my middle is alarming at best and foolishly unsafe at worst, because somewhere deep in me is a girl whose world was ripped apart the night this very vampire decided she was his to claim.
A girl whose father tossed her away on his debts.
A girl who has been alone for six years, with only an abrasive New Orleans witch offering the questionable comfort of expensive regard.
That girl is in grave danger of mistaking this false warmth for something real.
‘I’ll keep myself safe, thank you.’ My tone is brisk enough to make Selphine proud. ‘But I’d like to be armed with the knowledge.’
He says nothing as his face closes tight and he stares at me for an age, then pivots away.
I might think I’ve offended him if I didn’t know better. The silence isn’t empty. It’s full of calculation, old instincts and newer impulses crossing wires behind that impassive face.
He moves from the bar to the windows and back again, jacket discarded, shirt stretched over a body my eyes absolutely do not keep tracking and yet somehow continue to track, because grief and danger have apparently not cured me of noticing him.
As he turns, my gaze catches on his chest.
On the memory beneath the fabric.
The dream. That throbbing something. The thing he refused to answer when I asked.
It slides back into my mind with sudden, sharp relevance.
A hidden mark on the chest of one of the most powerful vampires in New York.
My pulse picks up for an entirely different reason. ‘Why are the people involved on the fringes of the Lyra Hannigan hunt being killed, Valentin?’ I ask again, slower this time. ‘Is it because finding her changes something bigger than just… you getting a mate?’
He stiffens ten feet from me. ‘You are circling things you do not understand.’
‘Then help me understand. You owe me answers.’
He keeps pacing. So I do what I always do when a wall won’t move. I look for cracks.
‘Is this territorial? Political? Bloodline succession? Some vampire high-table nonsense where everyone smiles and pretends not to be at war while they poison each other at galas?’
A flicker in his eyes at ‘poison’.
Tiny.
Gone instantly.
But I note it anyway.
‘Do not trivialise what you do not yet comprehend,’ he says, no heat now, only warning.
‘Then stop treating me like I’m too fragile for context. I think you know me well enough to know I’ll go digging with or without your shovel.’
His head snaps towards me. ‘This has nothing to do with fragility.’
‘Really? Because from where I’m standing, men are dead, I’m a target by association, and every answer I get comes wrapped in a riddle and a threat.’
His nostrils flare once.
Hit.
The silver flickers back into his eyes, that lovely dangerous tell he probably hates me for learning.
At last, he stops pacing. ‘Stay in my suite,’ he says.
I blink. ‘What?’
‘You heard me. I have calls to make. Measures to put in place. We will discuss next steps when I return.’
I laugh. ‘You think I’m going to sit here while you vanish into vampire war-room mode and come back with a plan I’m expected to follow without input?’
‘Yes.’
The sheer audacity of him. ‘Valentin—’
‘Eira.’
My name in his mouth is quieter than the interruption should be. More effective too.
‘Stay.’
It is not a request.
That should be enough for me to refuse on principle, except the strategic part of me knows he’s not wrong about the danger.
If Tezra was baited because of me, if a PI was murdered and disguised as a natural death, if something ancient left a scent in that alley and made Valentin freeze, then walking out of this penthouse alone would be stupid.
I hate when he’s right almost as much as I hate wanting him to be.
He turns to leave.
The question comes out before I can stop it, sharp as a blade and twice as inevitable.
‘Answer me this before you go. Does any of this have anything to do with the mark on your chest?’