14. A looming porcelain maw.
Chapter fourteen
A looming porcelain maw...
Nick
N ick settled onto the edge of the bed, the mattress soft beneath him after days on thin hospital foam.
His stomach felt uncomfortably full—he’d wolfed down the eggs, unused to proper food after weeks of protein bars and whatever scraps he could scavenge.
Under normal circumstances, the warmth and fullness would have lulled him straight to sleep.
But sleep was never just sleep anymore.
His fingers traced the edge of the notebook Lukaleft beside the pillow.
The vampire’s neat handwriting outlined their plan for when night returned—they would try to reach the neutral hunters in Peoria.
Hide him there until... what? Until the Society stopped hunting him? Until he figured out what came next?
Neutral hunters. Led by someone named Haley and her vampire husband. The idea felt wrong, like betrayal.
His training stirred, sharp and dismissive: Cowards and traitors,secretlybetraying humanity while they pretend to have principles .
Nick rubbed his thumb over the blocky handwriting, trying to push the thought away. Shaw insisted there were more neutral hunters in Illinois than Society operatives. Hunters who only went after“destructive monsters,”whatever that meant.
“The humans are delusional,” Shaw’s voice echoed in his memory. “They think they can coexist with monsters. They don’t understand that every vampire is just waiting for the right moment to turn them all into walking, obedient blood bags.”
Nick’s chest tightened as the familiar rhetoric crashed through his defenses. How many times had he heard variations of that speech? How many times had he believed it without question? Shaw, Henderson, Owen: all three shaped him into their weapon, each playing their part in his reconstruction.
He forced himself to focus on the present—the soft bed, the afternoon light filtering through curtains, the distant sound of Luka moving around somewhere else in the safe house. His arm throbbed with a dull, persistent ache. The antibiotics from Jae helped, but the infection wasn’tcompletelygone.
Nick wanted to ask Luka to take it away again. The vampire’s strange ability had given him the first real peace he’d felt in months. But asking felt like betraying the hunter in him, like admitting weakness to an enemy.
So he stayed silent, gritting his teeth against the pain and trying to find a comfortable position on the bed.
Just rest, he told himself. Don’t think. Don’t plan. Just rest.
But his mind wouldn’t quiet. Every shadow in the room looked like a threat.
Every sound from elsewhere in the house made his muscles tense for flight.
The neutral hunters in Peoria were strangers.
What if they decided he was too dangerous?
What if they turned him over to the Society for some twisted sense of justice?
What if Shaw was right about everything?
Of course Shaw was right . The tactical part of his mind grew louder, more insistent. The Society saved you when you were nothing but a blood bag .
The walls of the bedroom seemed to expand around him, the space too vast, too exposed. His muscles tensed with the instinctive need to make himself smaller, to find a corner, a crevice, anything that would contain him.
Safety meant confinement. Protection meant walls. Freedom meant danger.
You’re vulnerable here. Exposed. Anyone could get to you .
Nick’s gaze darted to the corners of the room, calculating distances, measuring exposure. The bed felt too soft, too open. His breathing quickened as panic clawed up his throat.
No. Not again. I won’t wake up under another bed.
Nick forced himself to his feet, legs shaking with the effort. The bathroom. He needed water, needed to splash his face, needed to ground himself before he lost all control.
He stumbled toward the ensuite, pushing the door open with his shoulder. The small space still held traces of Luka’s presence—cheap soap lingering in the humid air, a damp towel hanging over the rack. Nick lurched toward the sink, turning the cold tap with trembling fingers.
Water splashed against his face, shocking his system back to the present. He gasped, blinking away droplets that clung to his eyelashes. His reflection stared back from the mirror, hollow-eyed, pale, but present.
Nick flexed his fingers, watching the movement in the mirror.
His left arm endedabruptlyat the wrist, but he could still feel the phantom fingers moving, still sense the weight of a hand that nolongerexisted.
The sensation was disorienting butstrangelycomforting—a reminder that parts of him remained even after they’d been taken away.
“It’s okay,”he whispered to his reflection.“You’re safe here.”
The words felt foreign on his tongue, but notentirelyfalse. Despite everything—the training, the conditioning, the years of being taught to fear and hate—Luka showed him nothing but kindness. The vampire protected him, cared for him, and asked for nothing in return.
A small wave of calm washed over him, momentary but real. His breathing steadied as he focused on concrete facts: Luka saved his life. Luka gave him choices. Luka stood between him and danger.
But then he saw it, looming in his peripheral vision. His breath caught.
A clawfoot tub.
The sight hit him like ice water.
The bathmat draped over its edge, still drying from Luka’s bath. The tarnished brass feet curved like talons against the tile floor, neglected over years in this old house.
Music filled his ears—lilting, stuttering notes played beneath a music box.
“Keep playing, kitten.”
Nick gripped the doorjamb, fingers digging into the wood as he fought against the memory. He tried the breathing technique—in through the nose, hold for five seconds, out through the mouth—but holding his breath only intensified the panic, trapping him morefirmlyin the past.
The pain in his arm flared, bright and vicious, as his heart rate spiked.
The infection site throbbed in time with his pulse, each beat sending fresh waves of agony through his body.
He was hyperaware of both hisrapidlydeteriorating mental state and the physical pain he’d been trying so hard to ignore.
“No,”Nick whispered, pressing his forehead against the cool wood.“Not now.”
His muscles screamed in protest as he positioned his hand over the ivory keys.
The stump where his pinky had been ached, but it was his mutilated ring finger—only the nub beneath his second knuckle remaining after his fifth attempt to escape—that throbbed and bled onto the white keys through the bandage.
“I can’t,”Nick whispered, voice cracking.“Please, I’ve been playing for hours.”
Gianmarco’s fingers tightenedon his shoulder.“That sounded like refusal.”His voice remained conversational, almost disappointed.“And we were having such a lovely evening.”
Nick pushed away from the door, stumbling into the hallway. The walls seemed to breathe around him, expanding and contracting like a living thing. He needed somewhere small, somewhere safe. The room was too big, too exposed.
From his pocket, Gianmarco produced a small, ornate music box. Nick’s stomach dropped at the sight, bile rising in his throat.
“No,” he breathed.
Gianmarco wound the music box with deliberate slowness, the metallic clicking echoing through the penthouse. When the tinkling melody of Gymnopédie No. 1 began, he placed it on the piano.
“You have until the song ends,”Gianmarco explained, as if discussing dinner plans.“If you’re still playingperfectlywhen the music stops, we’ll rest for tonight.”
His knees wanted to buckle, to fold him into the submissive position that had been beaten into his muscles. Nick braced his hand against the wall, fighting the urge to kneel. The cool plaster beneath his palm felt real, anchoring him to the present.
“This is real,”he muttered.“The music isn’t real.”
When the music box wound down, Nick missed three notes.
Gianmarco sighed, disappointment coloring his features.“So close, kitten.”
The vampire lifted him from the bench with impossible gentleness, carrying him to the bathroom. Gianmarco’s ornate clawfoot tub waited—a looming porcelain maw that had been filled with ice water, condensation forming on the outside like tears.
“Three minutes this time,”Gianmarco murmured against his ear.“Because you tried so hard.”
He dropped Nick into the bath. The shock of the ice water snapped his mind from compliance.“No!”he gasped, grabbing for the curved sides of the tub. Gianmarco grabbed his injured finger, squeezing it as he shoved Nick down into the water.
“Shh, don’t fight kitten, you know what happens when you fight.”
He forced himself forward, one step at a time. The hallway stretchedendlesslybefore him, the walls rippling like water. His feet moved across something hard and cold. Wood? Marble? The distinction meant nothing.
The icy sensation climbed higher, reaching his chest. Nick gasped, his lungs seizing as if submerged. His vision tunneled, narrowing to a pinpoint of light at the end of the hallway. He staggered toward it, desperate to escape the rising water, the crushing cold.
“Please—”
Gianmarco’s hands pushed him under, the frigid water burning worse than fire. Nick’s head went under in his memory, but his body kept moving through the hallway, driven by blind instinct to find safety, to find somewhere small and dark where the water couldn’t reach him.
Gianmarco pulled him up, cradling him against his chest like something precious.
“Shh, I’ve got you,”he whispered, wrapping Nick in a heated towel.“You were a good boy just then, so good.”
The memory wavered, reality bleeding through in fragments. Nick found himself in the living room, disoriented and shaking. Luka sat on the couch, reading something. The vampire looked up, a smile forming on his lips that dissolved into concern.