2. Chapter 2
Grace
His mouth was on my throat, and the word please had not finished dying between us.
I did not know whether I had offered it to him, to God, to death, or to the part of me that still remembered how to ask instead of endure. It hung in the air above me, thin and useless, another small human thing swallowed by a room too large, too rich, too cold to have any mercy in it.
Then his teeth went in.
Pain should have been simple. I had known pain long enough to recognize its handwriting. Pain was a language with grammar. Pressure first. Split skin. Heat. The body’s stupid surprise. Then the deep, humiliating knowledge that there was nowhere to put yourself where the hurt could not follow.
But this bite was not like the others.
The others had taken. They had chewed pieces from me without chewing.
They had made my body a cup and my fear part of the drink.
They had laughed when I cried, or worse, had not noticed.
They had fed from my wrists when my throat was too torn, from my inner arms when my wrists had swollen, from the soft bend behind my knees when Lucian wanted me unable to walk the next day.
I had learned the difference between hunger and entertainment. Hunger was quicker.
This man—this vampire—bit me with terrible precision.
That frightened me more.
His hand cradled the back of my head. Not kindly.
Not cruelly. Carefully, as if my skull were some breakable thing he had no intention of breaking unless necessary.
His other hand gripped the headboard above me, and somewhere through the haze I heard wood crack.
The sound was sharp as a gunshot, but far away, as if it belonged to another house, another woman, another throat.
Mine had become a door.
He drank.
My body gave a weak, startled jerk beneath him.
I did not have strength left to fight. That almost made me laugh, except I could not breathe well enough for laughter.
Two years of promising myself that if I ever got one chance—one honest chance—I would claw, bite, spit, stab, burn, run, anything.
I would not be docile. I would not make it easy.
I would not die on my back if I could die standing.
In the end, I had run until my legs forgot the argument for movement, and now I was on my back, anyway.
The ceiling above him blurred.
Gold. Shadow. The suggestion of carved stone. Sheets beneath me that felt too soft against skin that had forgotten softness.
A hand at my throat. A mouth at my throat.
Please.
Now his mouth was at my throat, and my heart was slowing beneath it.
There was no drama in dying. That surprised me.
I had expected panic until the end, a wild clawing at the edge, some final refusal built into blood and bone.
Instead, after the terror and pain had spent themselves, there was quiet.
A widening. My body grew heavy, but the heaviness was not cruel. It lay itself over me like a blanket.
Beat. The pull at my throat deepened. Beat.
His fingers tightened behind my head, and I felt, distantly, the tremor that moved through him. Or through me. I could no longer tell where I ended. That seemed all right. Borders had always been violated, anyway.
Beat.
My grandmother’s porch appeared behind my eyes.
Not clearly. Nothing so kind as that. Just the sound of cicadas in the Tennessee heat and the smell of beans simmering with salt pork because we were poor but not unloved.
Her hand on the back of my neck when I cried over scholarship forms. Her voice telling me, Gracelyn, there are people who will take one look at where you came from and decide what you are worth. Let them be wrong.
I had let them be wrong. For a while.
Vanderbilt. Law Review. Order of the Coif.
Courtrooms where men in expensive suits mistook my accent for ignorance and regretted it on cross-examination.
Rows of financial records. Shell companies.
Human trafficking indictments built one transaction at a time.
My life had once been paper and coffee and righteous fury, so clean it almost made me holy.
Then it had been chains.
Beat. Pause. I sank. Something in me opened its hands.
All right, I thought, though I did not know whom I was answering. All right. I’m tired now.
The mouth left my throat. The absence hurt worse than the bite.
Air scraped into me, or tried to. My body jerked around it. There was a sound above me, low and urgent, words I could not understand because my hearing had gone underwater. A shadow moved. Warmth against my mouth. Wetness. The press of flesh to my lips.
Blood.
I knew it before I tasted it. The smell crawled straight down the back of my throat and woke some sick part of me that captivity had trained too well. Blood meant feeding. Blood meant vampires. Blood meant pain, because they always made it pain, even when they smiled.
It slid over my tongue. Metallic. Coppery. Thick.
My stomach clenched. Reflex made me swallow once before disgust caught up with me. I tried to turn my head away. It was hardly a movement. The grand sum of my rebellion was maybe an inch of refusal against a wrist I could not push aside.
No.
I did not know if I had said it. I did not think I had breath enough.
A face lowered into the blur above me. Amber eyes. Dark lashes. A mouth stained red. Fangs.
“Swallow.”
It was not only a word. It entered me.
That was the only way I knew how to understand it. His command moved through my eyes, my throat, the muscles under my jaw. It did not ask permission. It did not persuade. It took the part of me that still belonged to me and stepped over it as if it were nothing but a coat dropped on the floor.
My throat worked. I swallowed.
Horror arrived late, slow as winter. Not because blood was in my mouth. Not because a vampire leaned over me. But because my body had obeyed him while I was still inside it, saying no.
Tears burned, but I had no water left for them.
“Swallow.”
Again. My throat moved again.
Something in me cracked, not bone, not exactly mind, but the small legal fiction I had clung to in the dark: that even if they owned the room, the locks, the feeding schedule, the light, the food, the pain, they did not own the private machinery of my will.
This one did.
I hated him for that before I knew anything else about him.
Then the taste changed.
It did not stop being blood. It became more blood than blood had any right to be.
The copper opened. Beneath it came warmth, not heat, not fever, but something deep and mineral, something older than hunger.
It rolled over my tongue and down my throat, and my body, traitorous starving thing, recognized it as salvation before I did.
Warmth spread outward from the first swallow.
My throat lit. My chest. The hollows under my ribs. My fingertips.
The backs of my knees, where scars I had tried not to think about began to prickle and burn. My wrists pulsed. My teeth ached. My spine arched a fraction off the bed, not from pleasure, not from pain, but from the shock of being inhabited again.
I smelled snow.
That made no sense. There was blood in my mouth, sheets beneath me, a vampire over me, and somehow I smelled mountain air so cold it had never learned mercy.
Clean stone. Dark pine. A winter sky with no city under it.
Beneath that was something else I had no name for, something that made my ruined body strain toward the wrist pressed to my lips.
My hands lifted.
They looked like someone else’s hands. Cracked knuckles. Broken nails. Blue veins under skin too thin. The wrist began to leave me, or I feared it would, and panic sharpened into need so pure it erased shame. I caught him with both hands.
His skin was cool. His blood was not.
I pulled his wrist closer with strength I did not have.
A sound came from above me. Not protest. Not quite. I did not care. I sealed my mouth over the wound and drank.
The world, which had been leaving, came back violently.
Cell by cell. Nerve by nerve.
Not gently. Resurrection was not gentle.
It hurt worse than dying because dying had finally grown quiet, and this was noise made flesh.
My heart gave a hard, ugly knock that shook my chest. Then another.
My lungs seized. My stomach cramped. Bones that had become little more than scaffolding beneath skin remembered their depth.
Hunger yawned open inside me, black and enormous.
I drank harder. The wrist at my mouth became the only true thing in creation.
My body woke with the blind greed of a house fire.
It dragged his blood into itself and demanded more.
More, because my veins were empty. More, because I had been so cold for so long.
More, because if I stopped, the dark might come back, and some primitive thing underneath Gracelyn Marlow, JD, federal prosecutor, survivor, fool, would have burned the world to keep that from happening.
Then it was gone. I made a sound I did not recognize. Small. Raw. Animal.
My eyes snapped open. Everything was too bright.
Not bright like sunlight. Bright like edges.
Every object in the room had become itself with cruel intensity.
The carved headboard behind me, split down one section where wood fibers showed pale and fresh.
The heavy drapes. The shine on the floor.
The faint variations in the sheets beneath me where blood had soaked and dried and smeared.
A lamp burning low across the room might as well have been a blade held to my eye.
And smells. God. The room struck me all at once.