Chapter 25
EIRA
Did he just…
No. He didn’t.
The Heartshard Glass behind me is all well and good, weirding me out and mesmerising me at once, seeing him in glass like some impossible fairytale inversion, but what he just said—
I spin to face him. ‘What do you mean, perish?’
Valentin doesn’t move at first. Or rather, he does what he always does when something matters too much. He goes still, body a fortress, emotion permitted only through guarded gates.
When he speaks, his voice is precise enough to cut. ‘Exactly what I said. In the precisest meaning of it.’
‘But… you’re immortal.’
The wave that moves through me this time is stronger. Lower. Private. Humiliating.
Dread.
Fear.
For Valentin Moretti.
I almost laugh at myself, except nothing feels funny and the sensation is too sharp to dismiss.
One week ago, I would’ve tossed a rose into his undead grave and gone back later to dance on it with champagne in one hand and a karaoke mic in the other, singing something petty and off-key in honour of the occasion.
Now?
I want him to live.
Because we’re friends? Fuck no. Yeah, we’ve shared a few kisses and the fated mate thing sounds slightly less murder-y than the dire blood-ritual nightmare I initially imagined.
I shake my head, harder this time, because I’m talking myself out of the implications of my own emotions, and because his dark eyes, rimmed with dangerous silver, are boring into me like he can read every thought that should not be there.
‘But how is that possible?’ I ask, quieter.
He steps closer to the Heartshard Glass, not to me, and the relic throws his image back with eerie clarity.
‘It is possible,’ he says, ‘because immortality is not invincibility.’
Ice cold water dances over my skin.
‘What I am grants longevity. Power. Resilience that mortals mistake for absolutes. But there are laws to my kind, Eira, older than any city I rule, and conditions under which even we may end.’
‘You mean your… bond is one of those conditions.’
‘Yes.’
The syllable lands like stone.
I fold my arms, mostly to stop myself doing something stupid like reaching for him. Gods help me, the urge exists, buried beneath fear and shock and too much information.
‘Then say it plainly. What exactly has to happen?’
His jaw flexes, and for a moment the silver in his eyes dims. Something stark shows there, raw enough that I almost look away out of sheer decency.
‘I must find my fated mate,’ he says, ‘and complete the bond within three years of the mark’s awakening.’
The mark.
My gaze flicks to his open shirt. ‘And if you don’t?’
‘I perish.’
No softening. No euphemism. Just truth, laid flat between us.
I swallow. ‘That’s… insane.’
‘Your standards for sanity are charmingly provincial.’
Normally, I’d snark back harder, but my brain is busy trying to fit this new shape around everything else. Tezra’s death. The alley. Old scents. The mirror. Five non-blood brothers ruling half the world. His mark.
‘So your brothers know.’
His expression shifts by a hair. ‘They believe they know enough.’
Cagey. ‘And they’re all just… waiting? Circling you like immortal vultures?’
A humourless glint passes through his eyes. ‘We are brothers, but also the fiercest of rivals. That we have not gone to war in half a millennium is a miracle in itself.’
Half a millennium.
Five men remade together. Empires built. Rules sharp enough to prevent open war, but apparently not sharp enough to stop quieter predation.
‘And now because of m—’ I stop so fast I nearly bite my tongue, the word ‘me’ leaping up like a suicidal idiot. I pivot hard. ‘—mating, you have a target on your back?’
His gaze locks on mine.
For one horrible second, I’m sure he heard the almost-slip, that he’ll reach right past my face and pull Lyra Hannigan out by the throat.
‘Yes,’ he says calmly. ‘They may not all move directly. Some will wait. Others will test, as we have seen today. One in particular will remove pieces at the edges and watch what shakes loose. If I fail to bond in time, my territory fractures. Assets become vulnerable. Alliances shift and claims may be contested.’
He’s talking in assets and territory, but instinct tells me it goes deeper.
‘So the end game is literally wait you out and strip the carcass.’
His mouth tightens. ‘In the bluntest terms, yes.’
‘I take back what I said about strategic thought,’ I mutter. ‘Not if this is the end game you all aspire to.’ I look up at him. ‘Would you do the same if one of them was in your shoes?’
He doesn’t answer right away.
Something wedges behind the stone in his throat. I see it in the minute shift of his posture, the brief distance in his eyes before they sharpen again.
‘Yes, I would. This is not about good or evil, Eira. This is about survival.’
Curiously, the hollow in my gut is not as wide as I expect.
Maybe because the starkness of his answer is proof enough of the cut-throat cruelty of the world he refuses to pretty up. He doesn’t sell me dark destiny with velvet and candlelight. He tells me what he would do, what they would do, and lets me be appalled by the truth.
I’m almost grateful.
Almost.
Then I remember what started this detour into his inner sanctum and impossible mirror.
‘And what does all this have to do with the tattoo? I mean the mark.’
His nostrils flare for one brief heartbeat.
Then he moves me farther back, one hand at my elbow, positioning me so the chandelier light spills down over him at an angle. The Heartshard Glass catches it, bends it, and suddenly he looks less like a man and more like a painting some doomed aristocrat commissioned before a revolution.
‘Because, little hunter, it is more than a simple mark.’
I drag my gaze down from the hypnotic effect of his eyes and make myself focus on what he’s showing me.
He peels the shirt farther open.
And for a moment, stupidly, embarrassingly, all I can do is stare.
Valentin Moretti’s body is obscene in the old-fashioned sense of the word.
Offensive in its beauty, its exactness, the arrogant way strength and grace coexist in him as if custom-built.
His chest is cut in hard planes, his abdomen ridged and lean, his skin pale in the chandelier light but not fragile, threaded here and there with scars that should not still be visible on a vampire.
Thin silver-white lines at his ribs. A wicked little crescent low on one side. A deeper scar near his shoulder that looks old enough to have its own story and dangerous enough that I know better than to ask about it first.
Then I see the mark properly.
And all my thoughts go quiet.
It sits over the left side of his chest, close enough to his heart to make my own beat harder in response. A dark, intricate sigil that looks less like blood-red ink and more like something grown beneath the skin and pushed to the surface.
Veined lines branch from a central shape like cracked obsidian fused with emberlight, the deepest parts black-red, the edges glimmering faintly as if lit from beneath.
Intensely, decadently beautiful.
The way dangerous things often are.
Mesmerising.
Horrifying.
Because my stomach drops as I realise it’s exactly like what I felt beneath my palm in the dream.
I keep that to myself so fast it almost gives me whiplash.
‘What is it made of?’ I ask, because that’s easier than ‘why does this look familiar from a dream I didn’t tell you about?’
His gaze is on me, not the mark. ‘It is not made. It manifests. Keeps manifesting.’
I circle slowly, needing different angles. Distance and proximity at once. ‘You mean it’s grown since it appeared?’
‘Yes.’
‘How fast?’
‘Not at a uniform rate.’
Beneath the arm hanging at his side, I spot one branch with a sharp edge, as if it’s digging in. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘I’m a vampire, little hunter. Pain has a different meaning.’
‘You know what I mean.’
His eyes narrow, then he inclines his head. ‘Yes. Sometimes.’
‘Right now?’
His mouth flattens. ‘That depends.’
My lips are suddenly dry. No, not dry. Tingling. Hungry. ‘On what?’
‘On whether you continue looking at it like that.’
Heat jumps to my face. My eyes clash with obsidian black before I yank them back down. ‘I’m studying it.’
‘You are studying me. And it is not… ineffectual.’
This is when I should stop. The air is thick with other emotions now, other thoughts that are decidedly filthy. I open my mouth to deny them, then close it because he’d only raise one maddening eyebrow and be right.
I move closer again, curiosity punching clean through caution. I can feel my pulse in my wrists. At my throat. In my pussy. I can feel him watching every shift in my breathing.
And there is an alarmingly distinct lack of resentment in it that shakes me to my toes.
‘Can I touch it?’ I whisper.
The moment the words leave my mouth, I know I shouldn’t have asked. There is no safe version of this.
I should be planning exits. Instead, I’m standing behind him half naked in my own bad judgement, wondering whether touching the vampire I ran from for six years is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done or the first honest thing I’ve allowed myself to want.
The terrifying answer is probably both.
My hand is already lifting before he answers because apparently my self-preservation has gone on holiday.
His head lowers. A grunt rips free from his chest, one lock of jet-black hair falling over his forehead, his gaze darkening impossibly.
For one suspended second, I think he’ll say no.
Instead, his voice is rougher than before when he says, ‘Yes.’
I touch him.
A gasp escapes me when I find him even warmer than before. I have an abstract thought to ask him how that’s possible when he should be cold-blooded. I touch with just the tips of my fingers at first, light over the edge of the sigil.
The mark instantly flares.
There’s no melodrama or fireworks and chanting or the room exploding into prophecy.
Just a sudden live pulse under my fingertips, heat rushing into the lines as if something beneath his skin has turned towards me.
The branching edges sharpen, deepen, and for one impossible heartbeat I swear it reaches back.